Man with Black Background 1961/2002 C ATALOGUE NO. 3

12 1960-1966

It is worth taking a moment to set the scene at the time when the first The works in this exhibition were created. The decade of the 1960s was a moment of great questioning and experimentation and nowhere more so than in the visual arts. Artist Iain Baxter, in his poem for the 60s, Figure/ recalls, the moment of ... Telecopier/Polaroid/Conceptual Art/Backlit Transparencies ... JFK-RFK shot/Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction Landscape with Architecture/Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty/Pop Art/Happenings/Jimi Hendrix/To Kill a Mockingbird/Riots/Global Village/Peter Principle/Rachel Carson's Silent Spring ... Ban the Dialectic Bomb ... Cuban Missile Crisis/My Lai Massacre/Secret bombing of Cambodia/Tet Offensive/B-52s bomb DMZ/250,000 march on Washington ... Anti-War movement ...14

This was also the time of the artist's move, at the age of 26, from his family home in Niagara Falls, where he had always lived, to London, Ontario. As artist-in-residence at London's University of Western Ontario and curator of the McIntosh Gallery there, he was deeply involved in the community of professional artists. Exchange of ideas became routine among , Jack Chambers and Urquhart, all of whom were represented by the Isaacs Gallery in . They were part of a closely knit, loosely organized and politicized artists’ community. Chambers and Urquhart, with Kim Ondaatje, would co- found the Canadian Artists Representation and co-author its manifesto. Another member of the community, Rae Davis, a theatre and performance artist engaged with the theatre of the absurd, focussed on FIG. 1 Man with Black Background 1961 Curnoe, Chambers and Urquhart in her 1965 article,“The Oil on poster board mounted on canvas 62 X 100.4 cm Death and Life of London, Ontario.”(Urquhart would design the sets for Collection of the artist

13 several of her productions, including Ionesco's The Chairs.) James What, in the early 1960s, he called his “conception paintings” took Reaney's writing (The Dance of Death at London, Ontario,illustrated by various “invented” forms as Urquhart embarked upon a series of works Chambers) reinforced the idea that “art must have its roots in place.”15 in which he sought his personal voice.16 The artist worked along a In 1968, the National Gallery would focus on the vibrancy of the number of parallel trajectories including the exploration of the use of London scene in Pierre Theberge's exhibition, Heart of London. collaged figurative images and his continuing exploration of landscape The early sixties represents a moment of exploration for Urquhart painting which are the principle focus of this exhibition. as he sought to break out of the mould of his formalist education. Painterly meditations on fake American Confederate bank notes Ambiguity reigned. There were few rules. The very act of painting had (their portrait heads and texts), Fantasy on a Confederate Bank Note been thrown into question and painting itself was said to be in its death (1960) and the Forgotten Man series (Explorer 1961, CAT. 8) differed throes. Pop and Conceptual art appeared to offer a way out of the dramatically from Urquhart's first use of collage in his 1957 Japanese Modernist dilemma. Wrestlers and were probably inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's and Jasper Johns' use of popular images and found materials.17 If collaged portrait heads of Confederate heros provided the starting point for the Forgotten Men, the end results were exquisitely rich and painterly. At the same time that Urquhart was exploring new ways of “painting” through the bank-note collages, he embarked on another strategy that would play with the notion of representation on the two- dimensional plane. This series of works took the landscape, albeit loosely, as its starting point. First in the Landscape on a Tapestry paintings (1959, CAT. 1) and then in Man with Black Background (1961, CAT.3), the landscape image was presented as an object in itself, in an ambiguous space. Employing a frame-within-a-frame device, butting objects up against the frame, bleeding colour into and over the internal frame, Urquhart challenged the idea and the limits of the painted object.18 In Man with Black Background, the painting in/on a painting problematized the nature of the picture plane and the relationship of figure and ground (FIG. 1). A collaged figure was positioned on a chair in front of the internal

Forgotten Man No. 6, Explorer 1961 painting, pushing it back in space. Though outside the box of the C ATALOGUE NO. 8 internal frame, the figure remained inside the box of the external frame.

14 FIG. 2 In Hiding 1961 Oil on canvas 139 X 127.2 cm National Gallery of Canada, purchased 1972

Man with Black Background was a finished work, exhibited in the 1960s. On reconsidering it last fall, for this exhibition, the artist determined to tackle the painting (and the problems it represented for him) once again. In this version, the ambiguity is lessened but the tension remains. A second body of work of this period, the “lump” paintings, was strongly shaped by Urquhart's experience as a student at Buffalo’s Albright Art School in the fifties, particularly by his teacher, Seymour Drumlevitch.19 Though these paintings are not included in the exhibition, it is worth noting that the artist was working on them at the time that he embarked on his figurative meditations. In these works, Urquhart created a series of abstract gestural paintings which speak to a personal and existential angst. The powerful anguished “lump” images of impending doom, such as Brown Allegory (1961), In Hiding (1961, FIG. 2) and Calm (1962) grew directly out of his earlier expressionistic landscapes. Dorothy Cameron, describing In Hiding,wrote that it “seems to strain toward the viewer like some huge white cancerous growth, or a bandaged screaming head held back by its Baconesque placement with an outline of scarlet.”20 A third body of work also began to evolve at this time and is a focus of this exhibition. This includes the elegiac The Oakdales’ Reunion (1961, CAT. 9) and The Great Game (1962, CAT. 10). Already engaged with the theme of nostalgia in the Forgotten Man series, Urquhart began working in another direction, introducing photo-based collaged portraits into was “trying to use more than pictorial space.”22 He had known imaginary landscapes. All of these works were composed of members of intuitively that these figures had to be looking at the spectator and is sports teams or groups taken from old photos. The photographic images clear about the fact that they had to be photo-based. For Urquhart, even – originally the product of light and time themselves – were newspaper direct portraiture in which the sitter is rendered rather than captured reproductions cut out of the Sunday edition of the Buffalo Courier photographically will not achieve the desired presence of the real.23 Express.According to Urquhart, the figures “needed the landscape, to These mournful works speak to mortality in a more melancholic way put them where they would be happy.”21 In each of these paintings, the than the angst-ridden expressionist works that evolved from his figures stare out at the viewer. In retrospect, Urquhart suggests that he painting of the 1950s.

15 FIG. 3 The Jenny Icon 1962 Oil & collage on gessoed board 15.2 X 10.1 cm Private collection

As in the more recent panoramas, the human presence is introduced more personal world: mortal humankind rather than the eternal beauty into these earlier landscapes in an evocatively surreal way. Disrupting of the saints. In Urquhart’s Icons, the shaped forms of the paintings the apparently representational landscapes, the nature/culture assert their “objectness.” Like the altarpieces that inspired them, they dichotomy contributes to the subtle yet disconcerting tension at the have a presence that belies their small size. heart of these works. They are seldom what they first seem. The subject of the Hewitt Reserve Icon (1961, CAT. 11) is linked to an What Urquhart does not allude to in his 1960 analysis of his earlier sports team image, What's Become of the Hewitt Reserves? (1961). “conception paintings” is his growing preoccupation with self and the In this tiny brightly coloured image, which the artist traded with Greg place of the artist in the landscape and in the world. At the same time Curnoe who had admired it, two basketball players float chest deep in that he was invoking nostalgia with the insertion of water. Their ball, the basis for an abstract long-dead sports teams into the landscape, the artist composition evoking heavenly bodies, floats just to began to consider his own place in the worlds he was their right. As is the case in many of these works, a creating. Between 1960 and 1964, he created several rainbow appears – a sign of hope or an excuse to play self-portraits.24 These images ranged from the with colour? Play is, after all, integral to Urquhart’s humourous drawing, Self Portrait with Lots of Hair process. (1964) done in France and portraying the artist in a Describing the creation of The Hallelujah Icon Louis XIV wig, to several versions of the dark and (1963, CAT. 12), he recalls, “I just started, playing with haunting Self Portrait as a Large Bird (1964). the paints and then making something of it.”27 In the early Icons (1962-63), the focus of his 1963 Though Niagara Falls, reminiscent of the artist's one-man show, Urquhart began to use autobiographical childhood, is recognizable in the distance, it is not material in the context of the landscape, although clear what is happening. A female figure appears close only in isolated works. Like the Garden series that to the bottom of the image; behind her “all hell breaks followed, the Icons were heavily influenced by the artist's fascination out.” In this tiny work, there is “a great deal of painting going on.”28 with the Italian primitives' complex treatment of space and with the The first Icons to reference personal experience were created as gifts. development of the plastic image. (As a high school student, Urquhart Centrally placed in the lower part of The Jenny Icon (FIG. 3) is a collaged had created his own small mediaeval manuscript illuminations.25) In photograph of Madeleine Jennings, the artist's first wife for whom the Florence, he analyzed Ghiberti’s Baptistery doors, admiring the artist's icon was made. Granny's Icon (1962, CAT. 13), a gift for his beloved creation of a “complete spatial world” within a small panel.26 Duccio, grandmother, represents the central places (the garden, the barn and the Giotto, Lorenzetti and Fra Angelico were among those painters whose building in which were located the funeral home and the family house – work Urquhart closely studied both during his travels and through where he grew up and above which he had his first studio) and figures reproductions. Though their subject had been the life of Christ, (Tony, his father, his Aunt Esther and his grandmother) in his Urquhart would transpose their approach to space and figuration to a grandmother's life and in Urquhart's childhood. Strangely, in this work,

16 Granny’s Icon 1962 C ATALOGUE NO. 13

17 The Hewitt Reserve Icon 1962 The Hallelujah Icon 1963 CATALOGUE NO. 11 C ATALOGUE NO. 12

18 FIG. 4 Nostalgia Flower: Grandpa’s 1965 Oil & collage on cloth dipped in white resin glue with armature Destroyed the artist built the narrative from anonymous photographs. Photographic stand-ins represent his father, aunt and grandmother and even the young Urquhart (a boy sporting a team sweatshirt as his grandmother would have remembered him).29 Referencing an idealized as well as real space, the work is multivalent. The painting reveals the artist's working method: the layering, the playing with the frame and his sheer pleasure in referencing its Italian precursors. The decorative building on the left “kisses” the frame (as so often happened in the work of Giotto), though as Urquhart, the teacher, points out, this would be unacceptable in a contemporary class in composition. Only in the The Urquhart Icon (1963, CAT. 15)does the collaged image of the artist himself appear. In this case, as in the newspaper illustrations, the tone reversal created by the use of a polaroid negative creates a strange distancing effect and a barrier to precise seeing. The outline of a chair pushes the large and shadowy image forward, half in and half out of the frame and, even as he turns to avoid our gaze, the artist is thrust eerily into our space. The formal sources for Urquhart’s Icons were personal as well as historical. A glance at the family albums that Urquhart's father experiment with a number of ideas he had noted in his European sketch maintained offers a key to Urquhart’s approach to collage. Not content book.32 Influenced by European architecture, and particularly by the with mounting conventional snapshots, his father often cut out French tomb houses and mausoleums that he had explored, and driven individual figures from family photographs, following their silhouettes by a wish to introduce the experience of time into his work by slowing much as Urquhart does with his collaged figures, and mounted them the process of visual understanding, Urquhart began the trajectory that 30 independent of their original context in the album. would lead to the development of the boxes with which he has become During his 1963/64 European trip, Urquhart, in awe of the exquisite identified. Indeed, Urquhart's 1965 spring show at Isaacs was composed landscapes and the complete worlds they had created, would admire the almost entirely of constructions: Nostalgia Toys and Flowers along with work of the Limbourg brothers. Humorously, he wrote to Av Isaacs, on a few Pillar landscapes and Germinating Heads. Though rooted in a postcard of the 1413 Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry:“Some dirty landscape imagery, many of these works referenced the human presence, guy has stolen my Icon idea – Who the hell is this guy Pol de Limbourg?? often obliquely and sometimes directly. 31 You just get on a grand kick and some young punk swipes it!!” These precursors of the boxes were experimental works in which the On his return from Europe in the fall of 1964, Urquhart began to lumps had moved off of the canvas and into three-dimensional space.

19 The armature of Nostalgia Flower: Grandpa's (1965, FIG. 4) was daubed with “earth” (fabric dipped in white resin glue) in which a cave was hollowed out and a collaged photo concealed therein. Like fetish objects, the Nostalgia Toys, suspended in a frame from a wire, appeared to be accretions built up over time.33 Rae Davis described how, as Nostalgia Toy: Grandpa's Cave spun, the “womb-like hole first observed as ‘The Cave’ reveal[ed] an old man inside what seem[ed] to be his tomb.” The work, she wrote, represented the “cycle of creation, life and death ... there is no end, everything moves ... womb and tomb are one.”34 As with the earlier collaged work, the recurring grandfather figure is no single person but a stand-in for age, experience and perhaps wisdom. It may be that, in the recent work, Urquhart has himself become that figure. Unusually, the interior space that “Grandpa” inhabits in one of the first boxes, Grandpa's Nostalgia Cube (1965, CAT. 19)represents not landscape but a domestic setting. Its base, skirted with lace, echos the curtains of this decorated “house.” Another early box, The Urquhart Cube (1965, CAT. 20)explores the artist's continuing interest in self-representation. Against non- continuous vividly coloured backgrounds, representing more or less abstracted landscapes, the sides of this small cube are claimed for collaged images of the artist from polaroid negatives by photographer/friend, Don Vincent. Each small panel evokes a different mood. The painted relief 'T' on the top surface seems designed to mark the artist's claim on this new territory of the box. In the same year, when he had otherwise abandoned painting on a The Urquhart Cube 1965 flat surface, Urquhart embarked upon a new series of paintings: the My C ATALOGUE NO. 20 Garden works (1965). Five of these “self-portraits” are included in the exhibition, including the reworked My Garden with Orange Sky (1965- 196-99, CAT. 24) and My Garden with Jane (1965-1999, CAT. 25).35 Like the early Icons, the Gardens are contained within an arched frame, but the scale is larger and the reference to the Italian primitives

20 more direct. In these, the frame and the matted ground (generally burlap or brightly coloured velvet) are integral to the composition. The unique world of each painting contains a profound sense of mystery and the feeling that these are personalized places, as even the Icons were not. In her 1988 exhibition catalogue, Joan Vastokas suggests that, “For Urquhart, the Garden archetype originates in personal experience. Of all the places he has known, one stands out as the most influential, since it likely instigated the structural, spatial and imaginal framework with which Urquhart came to associate unconsciously the relevant features of all special places and spaces seen afterwards. This was his grandmother's house and garden.”36 The proximity of the family's funeral home to this flourishing garden has most certainly shaped Urquhart's experience of both place and space. In My Garden I (1965, CAT. 21), the artist was originally represented, hands behind his head, on the box in the foreground. When the photograph was ripped from the painting during an exhibition, Urquhart determined he would not replace it but simply outline the shape of the missing image. A sign of the parallel path of sculpture on which he had embarked, the box, like a child's block, is decorated with an “A” for Anthony. In My Garden IV (1965, CAT. 23), a similar photo of the artist appears as if mounted on a pedestal (as his boxes would be), Buddha-like in a desolate garden. A ragged yellow shape penetrates, from the right side of the composition, threatening to disrupt the calm of this contained space. In My Garden III (1965, CAT. 22), the artist turns away from the viewer into the space of the painting, much as he will in later works that refer directly back to this image. The two 1965 compositions that Urquhart reworked in 1999 My Garden III 1965 C ATALOGUE NO. 22 represent an interesting transition. In My Garden with Orange Sky, the strange red shape now on the horizon was the original location of the artist's photo-collaged self-representation. Returning to the work in 1999, Urquhart relocated himself, painting with his tools in the lower right hand

21 My Garden with Jane 1965/1999 My Garden with Orange Sky 1965/1999 C ATALOGUE NO. 25 C ATALOGUE NO. 24

22 FIG. 7 The 20th Century Icon: Soldiers and Trees 1966 Oil & acrylic on resin glue support with found objects 50.8 X 40.6 cm Private Collection Another body of work from the mid-sixties needs to be examined. When Urquhart returned to the icon theme in late 1965, the mood had changed substantially. The nostalgia of the early icons, the melancholy of the collaged landscapes and the sombre and threatening/threatened masses of the lumps, had given way to a more specific reference to the Cold War. The format of The Twentieth Century Icon: Soldiers and Trees (1965, FIG. 7) was larger; its mood entirely different. A bas relief of a bleak mountain scene dominated the upper arched area.37 Below, toy soldiers and the paraphernalia of war were fixed to a red velvet rectangle. Urquhart identifies H. C. Westermann's highly personal, exquisitely crafted constructions and assemblages, which often included toy-like figures in their frequent references to war and nuclear holocaust, as sources for these works. Frightened by the Trees: Orange Version (1961, CAT. 28) also appears to have been strongly influenced by Westermann's satiric surreal landscapes, as well as by a sculpture of terra cotta trees that the artist had sketched at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1963.38 The work also echos the French tomb houses which would engage Urquhart throughout his career. Like those grave boxes, which did not open but held their contents secret, this sculpture was covered by a landscaped corner of the composition. In the other reworked (originally untitled) world of earth and grass. Dorothy Cameron described Frightened by the painting, as in most of the early Gardens, echos of the Italian primitives can Trees as a “baroque spewing-out of weird little phantom trees and a tiny be found in the architectural details, the landscape forms, the confusion terrified figure running toward you, almost at eye-level, and all at once of scale and the compressed space of the work. Returning to the work you feel yourself shrinking.”39 That the “phantom trees” were mushroom over thirty years later, Urquhart heightened the colours and the gestural clouds was generally understood by its viewers in 1966.40 Urquhart recalls drama of the painting and retitled it, My Garden with Jane.Claiming the that Greg Curnoe's eight-foot painting, with a central band bearing the painting for the present, he inserted collaged figures of himself and his rubber stamped message, “They are Going to Kill Us All,” down its wife, Jane, picnicking in the lower right of the composition. centre and nails protruding from it, dates from the same period.41

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