Artwork by Gregory Richard Curnoe,  Thermometer #2

Greg Curnoe
Thermometer #2


collage, stamp-pad ink on paper, Plexiglas, screws, cup-washers, screw eye on painted wood

dated “June 30/67” towards lower edge; titled and dated June 30, 1967 on the reverse
34 x 8.25 x 1 ins ( 86.4 x 21 x 2.5 cms ) ( overall )

Auction Estimate: $8,000.00$6,000.00 - $8,000.00

Price Realized $8,850.00
Sale date: May 28th 2019

Provenance:
Isaacs Gallery, Toronto
Thielsen Galleries, London
Private Collection, Toronto
Masters Gallery, Calgary
Private Collection, Calgary
Exhibited:
CUTOUT: Greg Curnoe, Shaped Collages 1965-68, Museum London, January 22 - April 17, 2011
Literature:
Robert Fones et al., CUTOUT: Greg Curnoe, Shaped Collages 1965-68, exhibition catalogue, Museum London, January 22 - April 17, 2011, pages 7-73, reproduced page 72
James King, The Way it Is: The Life of Greg Curnoe, Toronto, 2017, page 186
Sarah Milroy, “Greg Curnoe: Time Machines”, in Greg Curnoe: Life & Stuff, Dennis Reid and Matthew Teitelbaum (eds.), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2001, pages 59-60
In June of 1967, Greg Curnoe created the second of at least three thermometer-shaped collages. To say that the artist’s career had been warming up prior to Canada’s centenary would have been accurate: earlier that year, the National Gallery of Canada informed Curnoe that his work would be included in the Centennial group show “Three Hundred Years of Canadian Art.” With this selection, scholar Sarah Milroy notes, the artist had secured his place in art history. “Curnoe had made it into the Canadian art pantheon.” Robert Fones explains that although Curnoe had been making collages since the early 1960s, his activities shifted and intensified after 1965 with the creation of a series of about 50 collages mounted on painted wooden supports. The body of work to which “Thermometer #2” belongs is significant within Curnoe’s practice for its distillation of his principal interests and ethos; as a means by which the artist could develop techniques that demonstrated his commitment to Regionalism and placed his work in dialogue with a broader avante-garde tradition.

As Fones explains, though Curnoe may have derived the idea of mounting a finished paper collage on a cutout wooden shape from his own assemblages, the objects mark a significant departure from his previous methods. It was while devising the cutouts that Curnoe first experimented with unconventional framing materials, introducing a system constructed from readily available scraps of wood fastened with clinch nails and protected by clear Plexiglas. Suggesting both an economic motivation as much as the self-sufficient Pop sensibility of the age, this innovative means of display would become “a hallmark of all Curnoe’s subsequent framed work.”

Curnoe’s choice of materials was not only responsive to his immediate formal concerns and to his love of popular culture, but to his abiding connection to place. The thermometer’s hardware itself demonstrated the artist’s commitment to Regionalism: Curnoe sourced the eyelets, cup washers, and screws used to hang and fasten the collages from a local hardware store and, as Fones notes, he likely purchased the clear plastic from London Glass and Mirror on York Street. The paper materials affixed to the support-a cigarette carton, beer bottle label, ticket stubs, candy wrapper, and tea bag tag-were manufactured or sold by single- proprieter businesses in the thriving creative community in which Curnoe lived and worked. Though the artist’s collages are frank visual records of his daily experiences and encounters with his immediate material world, as Fones observes, Curnoe’s combinations of text and image are neither arbitrary, nor isolated: “The neo-Dada affinities of artists of 1950s New York and London that led to what we know as Pop art doubtlessly had immediate impact on Curnoe.” Like the other shaped collages of this brief but key period-moustaches, revolvers, ties, noses, and blimps-Curnoe’s thermometers not only demonstrate the irreverent humour he shared with his neo-Dada predecessors and Pop contemporaries, but, Ben Portis notes, reveal how engaged Curnoe was with creative activities and processes that had the potential to transform discarded commercial waste into “shapes that referenced the abstracted, archetypal body and the machine.” Curnoe’s thoughtfully arranged source materials further reveal the extent to which issues of authorship and self-referentiality, too, were at stake for the artist: a silver and green paper fragment within the thermometer bulb contains the text “BY GREG”, literally situating the regional artist within an established international avant-garde tradition of collage.

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Gregory Richard Curnoe
(1936 - 1992)

Born in London, Ontario in 1936, Greg Curnoe was a fervent regionalist visual artist and musician who championed the distinct voice of Canadian locales and London, Ontario, specifically. He attended Beal Technical School (1954-1956) and the Doon School of Art (1956) before attending the Ontario College of Art (1957-1960) then returned to London in 1960.

While still attending Beal Tech he became interested in Dada art and joined the Société Pour L’Etude Du Movement Dada since he himself became dedicated to attacking existing standards of the establishment bound by international styles of art. Taking the opposite pole, Curnoe freed himself from this concern by choosing his subjects immediately around him and rejoicing in a people’s art he encountered in everyday personal experiences.

One can find in his work the elements of constructivism, op art, pop art, dadaism and comic-strip-like marriage of words and pictures, a facet of art which has been his keen interest from his earliest years (his childhood ambition was to be a cartoonist). Curnoe’s work is drawn together by colours ranging from a brilliant carnival-like intensity to softer blends of browns, oranges, pinks, greens, etc.

In an article on Curnoe’s work in Saturday Night, Barry Hale in 1970 gave this description, “Curnoe’s paintings are as immediate in their impact as superlative, blown-up comic books; they are figurative, but not ‘realistic’ - the outlines (in general) are hard edged, there is no modelling, and large, brilliant colour areas collide and vibrate to achieve a hotly overwhelming whole. Like comics, they are printed all over the works, in various manners – words as labels, or self-contained statements like cartoon-balloons; they may surround the picture frame and lead off the right edge (like the narrative print of a cartoon strip), or simply exist in conjunction as a kind of concrete poetry – so , as well as their hot impact, Curnoe’s paintings have a McLuhanesque cool, they must be read, with all the self-involvement that reading implies.”

In addition to his painting, Curnoe was involved in many other fields, including nihilist politics, writing, film making, pop music and non music. In 1961 he began publishing the magazine “Region” with friends, as his commitment to regionalism intensified. They also opened the Region Gallery. He co-founded the Association for the Documentation of Neglected Aspects of Culture in Canada and co-founded the Canadian Artist’s Representation (a national association of Canadian artists growing in stature); the Nihilist Party of London, a good natured group of hecklers of establishment parties (all members with equal say, no leader). His work was first recognized by Ronald Bloore in 1961 when Bloore was a juror of a show and awarded Curnoe a prize.

Curnoe went on to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and had a retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1981, which then travelled across Canada. Though the artist’s work has influences of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and even musicality, Curnoe rooted his practice in the regional visual language of his native London and greater Canada. He is represented in the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Sources: "A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume I: A-F", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1977