William Kurelek, (March 3, 1927 – November 3, 1977) was a Canadian artist and writer. His work was influenced by his childhood on the prairies, his Ukrainian-Canadian roots, his struggles with mental illness, and his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Early life William Kurelek was born near Whitford, Alberta in 1927, the oldest of seven children in a Ukrainian immigrant family: Bill, John, Winn, Nancy, Sandy, Paul, and Iris. His father, Dmytro Kurelek, was born in Boriwtsi, Bukovina.Kurelek, William. Someone With Me, An Autobiography, McClelland and Stewart, 1980, page 154. Mary Huculak, his mother, was born in Canada, and received her elementary education in a local rural school. Her family had come with the first wave of Ukrainian immigration to Canada and was also from Boriwtsi. Dmytro and Mary were cousins. Dmytro arrived to work on the Huculak farm early in 1923. The couple married in the summer of 1925, his mother not quite nineteen at the time.Morley, Patricia. Kurelek, A Biography, Macmillan of Canada, 1986, page 13.
His family lost their grain farm during the Great Depression and moved to a six-hundred-acre former dairy farm near Stonewall, Manitoba, around 1933.Ewanchuk, Michael. William Kurelek: The Suffering Genius, Michael Ewanchuk Publishing, 1996, page 9. A cousin let the family off from his wagon at the gate of their new farm in pitch darkness.Kurelek, William. Someone With Me, An Autobiography, McClelland and Stewart, 1980, page 45. The back of their farm bordered on the bog, today Oak Hammock Marsh. Some of his paintings in the books A prairie boy's summer and A prairie boy's winter depict Kurelek and other children in the setting of the bogland. Treelines along the horizon recorded by him in these paintings are still recognizable in the area.
"Victoria School could be seen from our milkhouse a mile away."Kurelek, William. Someone With Me, An Autobiography, McClelland and Stewart, 1980, page 48. It was the one-room schoolhouse that Kurelek and his brother, John, attended. When about to enter high school, their father announced that they would do so in Winnipeg, where he purchased a house on Burrows Ave., seeing this as the economically wiser course than throwing money away on rent. Weekends, food was brought in by their parents from the farm to help offset the cost of living in the city. Eventually, their sister Winnie joined her brothers. They attended Isaac Newton High School a few blocks away. Kurelek was at the top of his class in German, and did well in all the other subjects. Just around the corner from the house was St. Mary the Protectoress Ukrainian Orthodox church where he attended Ukrainian school, and found a very positive father figure in Rev. P. Majewsky.
Kurelek graduated from high school in 1946, and enrolled in the fall of that year in the Arts General Course at the University of Manitoba, graduating with his degree in May 1949.Ewanchuk, Michael. William Kurelek: The Suffering Genius, Michael Ewanchuk Publishing, 1996, page 38. By this time the family farm had been sold and his father had moved the family to Vinemount, Ontario near Hamilton.Morley, Patricia. Kurelek, A Biography, Macmillan of Canada, 1986, page 62. Kurelek had developed an early interest in art, which was not encouraged by his hard-working parents. Despite this, he enrolled at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) in Toronto. His explanation to his father was that there was money to be made in commercial art. In fact, he had no intention of going into commercial art. During this time, he worked at odd jobs to support himself, such as at a carwash on University Ave. At OCA, he found himself to be the only student with a university degree. Here, he studied the great contemporary Mexican artists: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco. His innate appeal and love of murals may have originated in his boyhood, when in his absence his father ventured one day upstairs and into his son's room to discover, much to his horror, the walls covered in unseemly illustrations.
Kurelek's friends at the OCA told him about the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico, which might grant him a scholarship if he produced something worthwhile.Kurelek, William. Someone With Me, An Autobiography, McClelland and Stewart, 1980, page 115. Fired by the thought of studying with one of the great Mexican mural painters, he painted his first self-portrait. Though he studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and at the Instituto Allende in Mexico, he was primarily self-taught from books. Zaporozhian Cossacks, a gift to his father, is the last painting Kurelek did before leaving for Europe for the first time, and shows the influence of the Mexican muralists on his work.
England By his mid-twenties he had moved to England. In 1952, suffering from clinical depression and emotional problems, he admitted himself into the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London. There he was treated for schizophrenia. In hospital he painted, producing The Maze, a dark depiction of his tortured youth. His experience in the hospital was documented in the LIFE Science Library book The Mind, published in 1965.
In this hospital, Kurelek met an occupational therapist who changed the course of his spiritual life. Margaret Smith brought him a book of poems, wrapped in a dust jacket that she had made of a Catholic newspaper. "I was a staunch atheist at the time...," Kurelek recalled, and upon discovering her faith, teased her about it.Kurelek, William. Someone With Me, An Autobiography, McClelland and Stewart, 1980, page 26. Later, he asked her if she was praying for him, and she answered, "Yes, I am." From here, they began to attend church services together.Kurelek, William. Someone With Me, An Autobiography, McClelland and Stewart, 1980, page 141. He took a correspondence course from the church, and met with Father Edward Holloway, a theologian trained at the English College in Rome, who helped him over some final stumbling blocks. In February 1957, Kurelek entered the Roman Catholic Church by a ceremony of conditional baptism. Margaret Smith, and his friend David John, a sculptor who did work for the church, were his godparents.Morley, Patricia. Kurelek, A Biography, Macmillan of Canada, 1986, page 129.
He was transferred from the Maudsley to the Netherne Hospital, where he stayed from November 1953 to January 1955, to work with Edward Adamson (1911–1996), a pioneer of art therapy. At Netherne he produced three masterpieces - Where Am I? Who Am I? Why Am I? (donated to the American Visionary Arts Museum by Adamson at its inauguration in 1995), I Spit On Life, and A Ball of Twine and Other Nonsense. In 1984, when the Art Gallery of Ontario exhibited Selections from the Edward Adamson Collection, Adamson donated to the Ontario Psychiatric Association a large pencil drawing by Kurelek of one of the interiors of Netherne Hospital, showing a group of patients at leisure.
Framer By the end of 1956, Kurelek was working for F.A. Pollak Limited, an elegant framing shop near Buckingham Palace. He worked here for 25 months. Frederick Pollak, an Austrian Jew, who had fled from Germany in the thirties and settled in London in 1938 establishing his shop for the framing and restoration of antiques, had made frames for the Louvre. Framing was an art that dated back to the Renaissance, and a single frame could cost thousands of pounds and require months of work. Pollak's became another school for Kurelek, where he learned the closely guarded secrets of gilding, which eventually found their way into his techniques as a painter. His apprenticeship at Pollak's, building and restoring frames, would serve him in a practical way until a few years before his death. When he returned to Canada in 1959, the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto immediately recognized the skills in framing that he had acquired in Europe. In later years, Avrom Isaacs commented that Kurelek would take more time building a frame than actually painting its canvas. Isaacs became Kurelek's agent for life; it was a business arrangement that remained unwritten.Morley, Patricia. Kurelek, A Biography, Macmillan of Canada, 1986, page 232. Glimmering Tapers round the Day's Dead Sanctities from 1970 is part of his Nature, Poor Stepdame series, and indicates that he was still building frames for his own paintings though quite renowned as an artist by this time.
Canadian artist Kurelek's first exhibition at the Isaac's Gallery was from March 26 to April 7, 1960. The show had 20 paintings. Among them, both his self-portraits (1950, and 1957); 3 Trompe-l'œil, paintings of a kind which had won him a place for three years in succession in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; Remorse from his hospital period; the Brueghel-like Farm Children's Games in Western Canada, a forerunner of his children's paintings to come; Saw-Sharpener, a look at his days as a lumberjack; When I Have Come Back Home; The Modern Tower of Babel; Behold Man Without God, this last reflecting the beginning of a change in attitude to prayer and the church. Though he was working on his The Passion of Christ According to St. Matthew series by this time, none of these religious paintings were included as they would be unsaleable. Canadian poet John Robert Colombo, for whom Kurelek had recently illustrated his first book of poetry, best describes the opening: "There were a lot of strange looking people, not the usual art crowd. Bill looked terribly out of place at his own opening. He had a reddish complexion and looked like a lumberjack; he looked as if he were in the wrong country, the wrong century, the wrong situation. It didn't look as if he had produced this work!"Morley, Patricia. Kurelek, A Biography, Macmillan of Canada, 1986, page 156. The Isaacs' popular opening nights drew city sophisticates, affecting the bohemian dress of their day. This time they contrasted sharply with Kurelek, his parents, and their Ukrainian friends. Nonetheless, it was the largest crowd the gallery had ever drawn, and by the following year the Isaac's Gallery had moved into a larger building.Morley, Patricia. Kurelek, A Biography, Macmillan of Canada, 1986, page 155.
In 1961, the women's committee of the Art Gallery of Ontario invited the prestigious Alfred Barr from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to visit and select a Canadian painting for his museum's collection.Morley, Patricia. Kurelek, A Biography, Macmillan of Canada, 1986, page 157. At that time abstract expressionism was in vogue. Barr arrived and astonished them by choosing a painting by Kurelek: Hailstorm in Alberta. When the ladies committee telephoned Kurelek to come to the AGO to meet with Barr, he did not even know that Av Isaacs had entered one of his paintings into the competition. Living economically at the time, Kurelek offered to take a streetcar, but they talked him into taking a cab which was sent for him.