Page 41 - Studio International - July August 1974

Summer Lake 1973
Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 49½ in.
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York

canvas. In Summer Lake three parallel
coloured bands lie co-directional with the traces
left by the paint roller in the ground. But
although there is this figure/ground link, the
base coat still looks on a plane well behind the
brushed-on colours. In most of the 1973
paintings in the show there was a stronger
interaction between the ground and the top
colour. The ground of Red Shaft has a large
pale zone running down the middle from the
top of the painting which peters out before it
reaches the bottom. A long sliver of red runs
down the right-hand side of this zone, presenting
to it a feathered edge which interlocks with
it like the ragged-edged interpenetrating
shapes in Clyfford Still's work; though in
Bush's case, with much less serration. This
treatment makes the ground join up with the
red, and to some degree even billow out in front
of it. The more tentative brushing on of the
topmost colours throughout a lot of the
paintings discovers natural boundaries in the
ground at which to stop.
It is like the sensation where Kenneth
Noland's stained grounds start changing colour
just before they meet his superimposed stripes,
in paintings he did a couple of years ago. The
stripes look as if they are bleeding. Visually,
the ground starts pushing the stripe back into
the picture. In Bush, because his grounds look
so much less orderly than Noland's, it is a
much more chancy affair. But where, in a
painting called Bluegreen, a mass of blue starts
travelling straight down the broken, magenta-
injected ground, then suddenly veers off to the
right, the consequent diagonal edge of the blue
catches the broken red ground along a line
that looks very probable because an even row of
little rough-edged cusps of dark ground attach
themselves to the perimeter of the blue. This Monets, about the same size as this Bush, travel away from what could be read as their
was probably an accident but it certainly in the Musée Marmotton, that have the same point of origin in the canvas. The colour traces
chimes in with Bush's greater use of the sweep and grandeur. In Purple Drops there is loom out of the bare cotton, almost to the point
eccentricities of the rollered grounds in many no horizontal brushed-on colour tying the two of bursting the membrane of the picture.
of the Zurich pictures. In the opposite, bottom sides together. The colours look almost thrown In their freedom of organization, in the way
left corner of Bluegreen, three small slabs of on, broadcast, and the whole picture takes on a they can spread, bunch, overlap and shade off
green, yellow and red nestle in a cell of ground dynamic upward rush. That is why this painting their colour, Dzubas's and Bush's work is quite
darker than the rest that looks made for them. needs to retain its border of bare canvas : to a step from the rest of the best painting going on
The result is that the ground between these help contain the headlong speed of the brushed today. With the exception of Helen
bottom left colours and the top right blue and rollered paint. Frankenthaler's open, floating placement,
swells out towards you and looks much less The more dramatic use of ground : the way other work in comparison still seems much
neutral than was usual with Bush. Gone is the Bush lets the light and dark base coat have its more evenly inflected, still under the
feeling of colour charging across the ground and head as modelling, right across the format, umbrella of Louis, Olitski and Noland.
pushing it back at an even rate. The placing together with the way he lets the fully Neither Bush nor Dzubas ever sheltered there
begins to look natural and wild, instead of saturated colours sometimes nuzzle into this for long. Without retreat, they are reopening
wilful. ground through their broken edges, or just some of the options that have not been
One of the most exhilarating examples of their sheer placement and size, isn't a far cry exploited by the most vital abstract painting
this is the 78½ x 52½ inch Purple Drops in which from the look of Friedel Dzubas's painting just since the thirties. The achievements of post-
Bush takes to scattering little notes of colour now. Where Bush brushes colour on top of war American painting are embodied in their
that pick up the frequency of those repeating prepared grounds, Dzubas works colour into work. And it still builds on that — enriching the
bleeps he gets from his unevenly loaded paint bare canvas. The latter gets the effect of repertoire of art and pulling off some
roller as he lays in his grounds. Looking at this modelling from the way he increases the masterpieces on the way. x
painting I was reminded of some of those late intensity of his chromatic swathes as they JOHN MCLEAN

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