here is all 3753 of the raw text of the WK essay, its due on Tuesday.
William Kurelek was an outsider artist: he had the mental illness, the
geographical isolation, the ethnic worries, the religious
obsessiveness, and the monastic, hermetic strangeness expected of
people reclaimed as art brut after death. William Kurelek was an
insider artist, he was collected by governments, museums, corparate
collections and the industrial elite, his gallerist was among the most
famous in Canada, and he was cunning in matters of personae, cash
flow, and networking. His work is both cloying and visionary, rural
nostalgia and apocalyptic terror, tender and daring. Thinking about
the tensions and delicacies of the negotions, and the ambiguous
effect, 30 years after his death, is to question the very core of
outsider status. Writing about this ambiguity, I am hoping to return
him to his proper status: as one of the most important religious
painter of the 20th century.
Unpeeling the onion is finding where the isolation central to Kurelek
began with, the central beginning fact, and something that he returns
to, is his role as not only a prairie painter but some kind of dumb
hick. He grew up in Whitford, Alberta, and then for high school moved to
Stonewall and then Winnipeg, Manitoba. His father farmed grain in
Alberta, and raised cattle elsewhere. Though he claimed to be part of
a larger community of Ukrainian speakers in Alberta, he also talked
about how much he despised his father, and how isolated he felt from
the mainstream—how that growing up in Whitby had set him apart.
Whitford has returned the favour, Lacombe, a larger town, has absorbed
it and Lacombe has not noted his beginning there. In a diary he wrote
in 1965 when he went back to the farm from Christmas, he talks about
how this farm life centered his continued practice: "I recall how
in…western winter; nothing sheltered a man sufficiently except the
heated farm house and so I compared it to a person in this life trying
to find comfort in all sorts of places and activities."
Moving to Stonewall at the age of 15, when the farm and other
investments his father made crashed because of the Great Depression,
was a continual frustration. In later interviews, he told scholars and
journalists that he got attacked when he went to school, because he
could not speak English well, he didn't wear the right clothes, and
occasionally he smelt like shit. It sounded like the usual tensions
between a farm kid and a city kid in certain schools that were located
in places that accepted both. When he moved onto Winnipeg itself, and
then the University, he still felt like he didn't belong, I think that
part of the isolation was that he always felt like, as he wrote to his
galleriest Av Isaacs in 1964 "like a clumsy farmer", and this was
after he spent time in Mexico, India and London, plus was living in
the biggest city in Canada.
I'm getting ahead of myself. His moving to Winnipeg proper, after high
school was a moving away from a geographic, physical isolation and
moving onto an ethnic one. In high school, though he learned English,
he still very much felt like a Ukrainian in an Anglophone world. His
biographer, Patricia Morley, would write about this time: "Humiliation
came in several forms. The first was language. The Kureleks spoke
Ukrainian at home…Bill and John, began school together in March of
1934, discovered that there was a taboo on any language but English in
the public school…Decades later , Bil remembered the disapproval that
greeted his exclamation of "Mookha! Mookha" (Ukrainian for "fly") and
he credited the incident with inhibiting his enthusiasm for oral
expression." Here he ties his ethnic and his occupational history as
the central place where to begin with his work.
Like many students, Kurelek wandered after high school, spending some
time finishing an art degree at the Ontario College of Art and Design,
in Toronto, and the Instutio Allende, in Mexico. His time at both
would prove fecund. He ended up living in Toronto for most of his
adult life, marrying and having children, finding work, and commercial
success there. He found Jesus in Mexico, wandering the desert, and
hearing prophetic voices coming for mysterious figures. He claimed
that these figures told him that he would do great things, and he
wrote about these great things, and the general feelings of prophecy,
in a 12-page hand-written letter to his roommate, Fairfield, back in
Toronto.
This trip to Mexico would be the beginning of his life as a religious
figure, though his parents did not actively talk about god in the
house, and his father was dismissive of it, there was a bit of
cultural heritage that he inherited. Though the heritage came about in
different places, then the usual catholic orthodoxy. Materials left by
the Jehovah's Witnesses inspired some of his first drawings. Their
lurid demons, monsters, and other consequences of the apocalypse would
both excite and frighten him as a child, resulting in some of the
first drawings he ever did, and drawings he remembered several times
afterwards, including his autobiography, and interviews with Morley.
The messages in the Mexican desert would be the beginning of his role
as a prophet (and it makes sense that it was in the desert, all the
great catholic cranks began in the desert, the biggest religious
changes began with his time spent in London. In his autobiography, he
claimed that he went to London to "complete his art schooling and to
find, through hospitalization, for his chronic depression and
inexplicable eye pains" This statement in many ways, is the crux of
Kurelek, his mental illness and psychosomatic blindness, the half of
his personality as prophet, and stranger in a strange land, the
furthering of his art education being a sophiscated center.
London was the beginning of this split in Kurelek, the one that is the
centre of my arguments, and it might be a good idea to explore each
more carefully. The paintings that h saw in London, at private
galleries and public museums were the best of northern European work.
He worked as a framer at several places, and returned to the work when
he moved back to Toronto. The work that he saw in those galleries in
London was high end, both decorative and more specific, he had an art
training, not only looking at canvases with much care, but also
literally deconstructing them, to make sure they fit in new frames.
The closeness he had to art was continued in his trawling through
public spaces in London, including the Tate Museum. Here he wrote
letters, and spoke highly of work by people one would expect him to
love, including Brughel, Blake, and Bosch, but also such people as
varied as Toulouse-Lautrec, Constable, and Turner. In addition to his
formal, this informal education, suggests an explicit attempt to place
himself in a northern European central tradition. Which makes his
other expreinces in England a little more interesting.
He ended up hospitalized in England for severe depression, first as an
inpatient in the Netherene asylum in Sussex, and later as an
outpatient at Maudsley Institute, in London proper. During this time,
he was under the care of Dr Edmund Adamson, who described his patient
thusly: "When I first saw William, he was extremely withdrawn. His
body was huddled up and he was nursing a small doll which he had made.
He could hardly speak and it soon became obvious that he would not be
able to mix with the other students." Over the next few years, the
usual treatments for depressed patients occurred, including
psychotherapy, and electro-convulsive therapy. Unlike many other
Freudians at that time, the staff there, encouraged Kurelek in his
continued religious training, and the artist assumed that his finding
god, in London, first outside the hospital and later at the hospital
itself, was the reason why earlier attempts at self harm failed, and
why he didn't end up killing himself at all.
Adamson was an innovator in art therapy, and actively encouraged
Kurelek to paint his way out of mental illness. In this set of
circumstances, he painted dozens of work over the years he was at both
hospitals, in addition to drawing and other crafts. Some of these
paintings were the most dangerous of his career, paranoid, exhaustive
canvases of all the worlds evils. They included Behold Man Without
God, and the Maze.
The Maze is the most famous of Kurelek's England era canvases, ending
up on a Van Halen album cover, and in books by Time Life, and being
written extensively about in various medical journals. Looking at the
Maze more closely, it is literally, about the self. A collection of
images, are tightly contained in the skull of the artist. The images
are as grotesque as the Bosch work that he saw at museums and other
galleries. In fact, that the skull is resting in a landscape of dusty
red bareness suggests very much that this is his personal Garden of
Earthly Delights. There is also something incredibly domestic about
the skull, with shelves, floors, walls and window. The combination of
psycho-religious excess and domestic comfort would latter become the
central theme in his work.
Kurelek wrote about the work, in depth, as was required by the talk
therapy milieu of the time. He divided the painting into six sections:
Home, Politics, Sex, Social Relations, Life and Death, the Outside
World. The six sections were further divided, and they were an odd mix
of urban sophistication and rural touchstones. The sex section has him
being ripped apart by a bull racing to copulate with a cow, or the
section of home, where he talks about a fear of starving, literally
kicked into the snow by an uncaring father. But he also talks about
slick highways, steamrollers, test tubes, and the fear of nuclear
annihilation. He ends quoting TS Eliot: "The thorny, stony ground is a
kind of T.S. Eliot Wasteland - spiritual and cultural barrenness: the
pile of excrement with flies on it represents my view of the world and
the people that live on it. The loosened red ribbon [linking the 2
halves of the skull] bound together the head of a T.S. Eliot Hollow
Man, and was untied by psychotherapy" The analysis, paranoia, and
exhaustion, trying to find a place between rural openness and city
suspicion is central to his work, and the second masterpiece he
completed in the hospital, which also works in his new found religious
obsession.
Behold Man Without God is as external a painting as The Maze is an
interior painting. About the end of the world, there are four main
sections, functioning vertically. It has the tower of Babel, an army
of aborted fetuses, an ogre forcing a man to plow the fields, a rat
w3ith a human face, an orchestra, and other acts of spectacled
violence. It has the same kind of iconography, and explanations that
arrived at the same time as other artists at that time, the fury of
Francis Bacon, the viscousness of George Grosz, and the intensity of
Goya, but those all the usual touchstones of radical pacifism. What
the most impressive thing about the work is the amount of information
it manages to find in its small canvas. The strength of these two
paintings, is not their madness, but the power of composition. His
later religious paintings had the effect they did, because of his
training and knowledge, rather then the subject matter.
The two paintings written about here, are central to Kureleks
understanding of the world, but it must be understood that he did not
only paint religious work. Morley writes about a work that he did in
the 1940s, "an amusing work from this period, featur(ing) the fourth
floor baron from whom Bill sublet his room. In this kitchen scene, Mr.
Meyer is shown reading a newspaper, one slipper on and one off"…she
continues details include underwear drying on a line, a hot water
bottle, peeling plaster, loose wallpaper ad a jar of marmalade labeled
"Golden Garbage"…" His eye for detail, and his visual exactness then
was not only limited to torture, but to the banal every day life.
Kurelek left the Netherene hospital in 1955, he would stay for a while
in London, working with The Guild of Catholic Artists, staying in a
boarding house of other Catholics, and taking the catechism. He would
then travel, a bit in Europe: Turkey, Greece, Italy and eventually to
India. Throughout this, he was painting and drawing. A work of his
from India is in the National Gallery of Canada, a emaciated hand
begging for food through the window of a bus.
When he returned to Toronto, he started attending the Catholic
Welcoming Center, on Bloor Street. He meets his wife there. He would
also get a job at the Av Issacs gallery, where he was the only person
in the framing shop who knew how to gild, a skill learned from his
time in Europe. At this point, he started to settle, diving his
practice in two: The Potboilers, or work that was easily sold, mostly
paintings of religious nostalgia, and the Propaganda paintings, often
work that was about his fears of the end of the world. He also made
several large series of paintings: 160 illustrating the crucifixion,
about 60 about the End of Days, a dozen portraits each of Irish,
Ukrainian, Jewish and Polish immigrants, hundreds of landscapes, still
lives of his tools, images of Canadian patriotism, and various
nativities. His profligacy was what might make him an outsider artist.
The fear mostly came from nuclear terror, and his several paintings of
a world that ended with an atom blast, come across as almost cold war
kitsch. He was the first citizen of Toronto to gain a permit to build
a bomb shelter, but he ended up using it as a studio to paint in.
Sometimes the work manages to be genuinely horrifying, depicting the
real fears that permeated the cold war. In his 1965 canvas, This is
the Nemesis, an atom bomb levels the city, with modernist tower
blocks, and industrial detritus melting into lake Ontario, hundred of
people on the ground, with no place to flee. There is also a painting
where he depicts a farmer fleeing the bomb, the painting has the
title, No Time to Fetch His Hat—so they are not all serious.
There are other paintings of the end of the world that do not depict
the end of the world, one of the strongest, and strangest was given to
the Basillian Fathers of St Michael's college at the University of
Toronto. Painted in 1962, and called the Rock, it is among the
masterpieces of religious art, and has no real rivals in the 20th
century. Demons swim through a tumultuous sea of blood, their spears
held upwards, trying to catch souls floating down from the sky. In the
middle, a pure white mountain, emblazoned with the papal seal, and the
words of Christ, regarding Peter as the rock of the church. A black
church rests miles from the sea, protected by the Holy Spirit as a
dove.
Their were other moral concerns, that he held deeply. He was
vehemently anti abortion, and has had several canvases that suggest a
horror of abortion, and these were dnoe after he had his own children.
His love and devotion to the, pushed his fear of not having any
children, to the forefront. One, called Our My Lai or the massacre of
Highland Creek, is a beautiful winter landscape, with perfect bare
trees, and deep green pines. In the midst of the white snow, are
garbage cans; at first one thinks they are pails of apples or other
produce, something pastoral. They are filled with fetuses,
overwhelming he landscape. He writes about the work, acknowledging
that it is offensive to people who did nto agree with him but "I know
that unborn babies are human beings, I believe myself duty bound to
speak for them because they cannot speak out for themselves…"
He also painted the mayor of Toronto David Crombie in a delightful
painting of green grass, blue skies, and general recreation, but in
the dark woods on the far corner of the painting, away from everything
else, Crombie is feeding babies into a wood chipper. Talking to
Crombie about this work, 30 years after it was painted, I asked him
why he displayed it so proudly in his office. Crombie is an old
leftist, for a women's right to choose. He talked warmly of the
artist: "Bill saw what I was doing as mayor and he was quite
laudatory, (but) this was a significant issue we disagreed on. He saw
the mayoralty and the city in its totality", and that totality
featured the good work that Crombie was, preserving the beaches, and
the work that Kurelek thought was morally wrong, including abortions.
There are also works that do not depict the end of the world. The
conservative aspect of his work, is mostly talked about, and sometimes
has an intensity of vision, a sweet and gentle humanness that caused
the New York Times to call him the American Brughel, and caused Tundra
Books to publish two children's books of his work: A Prairie Boys
Winter and a Prairie Boys Summer, which have been made into stage
plays. These works are geninune, almost naïve depections of life on
the farm, and seem much happier then the images made earlier—including
the Maze. All of the usual Canadian past times are depicted, including
playing Fox and Geese, shinny hockey, feeding the cattle, making fence
posts, and skating on bog ditches. Though they have a certain
sentimental edge, the colours are rich and the compositions are
strong. In Crows Leaving Before Winter, the entire left half of the
canvas is empty, but for blue sky, a strong line of black birds leads
the eyes to over the horizon, for example.
These are the kind of paintings that made Kurelek famous, and he was
at the end of his life. He did a Christmas card for a few oil
companies, was in every major collection in Canada, had work given as
a gift to the Queen Mother, and toured throughout Europe, America, and
finally Russia, He eventually sold work to the most famous collector
in Canada, Ken Thomson and his auction at record is now more than a
qouter of a million. People like him. But he is viewed as cute, as
undifficult. I have concentrated on his religious work here, and have
given a short shrift to his non apocalyptic, non religious work…I want
to end this essay by talking about my two favourite works of his, one
about God and one about his ordinary life.
He lived in the Toronto neighborhood, the Beaches, raised his children
and lived a good life there. Though he died at 50, he had an enormous
amount of work behind him. One of the last things he did was an altar
mural for Corpus Christi, the church he attended on Sundays. At the
side, outside the usual view, the work was 10 feet high and 5 feet
wide—it was gigantic. The main piece of the work was an illustration
of the miracle of the loaves of fishes, one of his favorite moments in
the life of Christ, and one that he worked with before. He transposed
the miracle to his time, with four priests distributing communion
while the congregation massed around him. The priests were those that
worked in the church, and the congreation were members of Corpus
Christi. All of them were together, in a radical elgananterinism. But
around them, was colour that Kurelek should be so well known for. The
green that only comes in the prarie about three days a year in may, a
perfect sparkling blue, and a road way, with his communities, and the
scarlet TTC street cars, and other details.
He loved Toronto, he loved that congreation, and you could tell that
the loaves and fishes were such an important miracle for him, because
no one would be hungry when it was still operational. On top of this
mural, was a half circle, divided in three. Here, was Christ
crucifitying, being buried and rising again. These three small works,
high up on the wall, have a loving hope. The sunrise at the rising of
Christ, is so warm and enveloping and the cruficion reminds me of
Blind Willie McTells Dark is the Night, Cold is the Ground. Black as
pitch, with no stars, and just he bare number of people needed to
witness, it had a strong, stark power, away from the luridness of much
Catholic art. It's hidden, and not often written about, but the work
is a masterpiece of narrative economoy, and Christian devotion.
The other work I wanted to mention was a grouping , called the Tool
Paintings, work that I ahd never heard of, until I found a small book
by poet and artist Ramsay Cook, who worked with William in the framing
gallery of Isaac's gallery in Toronto. These works had a plainspoke
intimacy, and had less going on then most of his work. They are
simple, small works, that feature the tools that he used in the
framing shop, a blacking brush, a tape dispenser, a finishing glove.
The colorus are perfect, the slightly sickly yellow of scotch tape,
the peach of a rubber glove, the warmth of pine or elm, and all of
them had one element, no exrtramnous details. They are virtiosu work,
intensely connected to the daily practice, and very much about the
working class permeance that he lived with.
Reading Cook's volume, is the same thing as talking to parishioners of
Corpus Christi, Mayor David Crombie, the priest who taught at St
Michael's, and others. Those who talked to Kurelek, outside of his
Gallerist, alone, talked of someone shy, devoted, and loving. There
was a warmth and devotion not only to the work, but to the people
around him. The work that is sentimental, is becausde William Kurelek
himself was sentimental, and the work that feared God with a prophetic
urgency was because Kurelek wanted to save the world from the wrath of
an angry God. Having both of them working together, is a gnarled root,
c entral to understanding much about these aethstics
images of the sultan of brunei's plane, look at the gold sink
