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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 Greg Curnoe, Jack Chambers and Urquhart, all of whom were represented by the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto. 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 Canadian Art 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.

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