You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, Joni’s “Big Yellow Taxi” lamented. In Curnoe’s case, even that proverb hasn’t held.
FD
Today marks 21 years since the extraordinary Canadian artist Greg Curnoe was killed, in a cycling accident near London that was as puzzling as his sculptures, installations and paintings were remarkable. It was a death reminiscent of Tom Thomson’s – both unlikely and yet tightly linked to his ways of living and creating. I still say hello to Greg nearly every time I drive across the Highway 402 / Longwoods Road overpass that overlooks that Delaware hill on which he died. Beyond are 1812 battlefields which he had often visited and referenced in his art; nearby live some of the First Nations men and women who were assisting him with the books and painting series that he would leave unfinished. Despite the 2001 Art Gallery of Ontario Curnoe retrospective Greg Curnoe: Life & Stuff and Dennis Reid and Matthew Teitelbaum’s generous catalogue (right), the Canadian art world does not seem to have yet taken stock of the prodigious figure that he was. There has yet been no Curnoe biography, no catalogue raisonné. In today’s art market Curnoe seems viewed more as an outlier than as the “singularly significant Canadian artist” that the 2001 catalogue proclaimed. Amusingly the Heffel Gallery’s “Top 100 Canadian Artists” and “Top 100 Canadian Painters” lists currently include the likes of Herbert Palmer, Ann Savage, Franz Johnson, Henry Masson and Doris McCarthy – but no Curnoe. One reason for this may be that Curnoe’s work is still too recent for there to be much on the art market; another that his work has little resemblance to the realism and abstractionism that dominate the lists; but a third is surely that his work has received little of the public attention that those of contemporaries such as Milne, Lemieux, Colville or Kurelek have received. Canadian artists have usually found it difficult to be simultaneously regional, national and international. Not Curnoe, with his reworkings of Dadaism, his bicycle motifs that drew on the racing traditions of Europe, his technically daring and intensely local rubber-stamp works and his highly original contributions to the self-portrait genre – as both above and left, on the cover of his book Deeds Nations. (In that genre I suspect he belongs with Rembrandt and Schiele.) In the same year he could paint a Lake Erie beach, an homage to Van Dongen, a Canadian-made racing bicycle, and create a three-dimensional work of super-realism. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, Joni’s “Big Yellow Taxi” lamented. In Curnoe’s case, even that proverb hasn’t held. FD
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