Marian Spore Bush - Later Life and Work

Later Life and Work

In the late 1920s, having dropped the name Flora, Marian "started a breadline in the Bowery. First with her own money and then with the financial assistance of other benefactors, she personally dispensed such things as meal tickets, clothing, spectacles, false teeth, and wheelchairs." She became known to the press as Lady Bountiful of the Bowery. While engaged in this work she met Irving T. Bush, founder and president of Bush Terminal Company in New York City, and Bush House in London. They were married in Reno on June 9, 1930, an hour after Bush's divorce from his second wife became final. Shortly afterwards, Marian closed her soup kitchen, feeling that other relief agencies could handle the work more efficiently.

Henceforth, Marian Bush split her life between acting the society hostess and being a practicing artist. In "symbolism and mood her paintings seemed to forecast world events and conditions. Early in the 1930s, her art took an entirely new trend. Up to this time her palette had been extraordinarily vivid. Now she seemed impelled to paint huge stark canvases in black and white, all of war or presaging war." One example, entitled "New York City: When?" shows two airplanes and burning buildings amidst the skyscrapers of New York.

Edward Alden Jewell, art critic for the New York Times, said of her 1943 New York exhibition, "I should be inclined to refer to her work in this field as that of a primitive mystic. The large black and white canvases seem at once crude and powerful….All the war paintings are symbolic in nature. Their impact is sharp and disturbing. If accepted as manifestations of psychic phenomena, they are mysterious."

There was one exception to the trend of her later work. In 1942, Marian produced a series of small paintings of scenes from the island of Guam, where she stayed in the early 1920s while visiting her brother. The New York Times' art critic described these canvases as "high in key" and observed they "involve extensive use of impasto." According to an art gallery newsletter, "these Guam paintings are delightful primitives, very colorful and full of the movement of the sea and palm trees."