Shades of Kurelek 1

Last month we wrote that Archives & Museum staff “would love to be flies on the wall at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, on 26 April, to witness a roundtable discussion on creativity, madness and religion, each of which played their part in the biography of William Kurelek (1927-1977)”. Well, we missed the roundtable, but our Archivist did have the opportunity to visit Hamilton to see the retrospective exhibition of Kurelek’s works mentioned in that blogpost shortly before it left to go to the west coast of Canada. William Kurelek: The Messenger, soon to open at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is a rare opportunity to see a cross-section of the artist’s oeuvre. His works are starkly beautiful, accessible yet challenging and (to the Archivist at least) evocative of the work of several contemporary artists whose work is more or less well-known in popular culture. In this post and in two to follow, he highlights the works in which he has found shades of Kurelek.

In a mid-twentieth century article on art and psychiatry, Dr Morris Carstairs, formerly of the Maudsley Hospital, wrote: “Where, I wonder, is the contemporary artist who can turn his innocent eye upon the nightmare realities of this era with its threat of nuclear annihilation? We need a Goya or a Hieronymous Bosch today to quicken our sense of the urgency of the human predicament before it is too late.”¹ The post-hospital career of one of his patients at the Maudsley could be understood in terms of an unconscious response to this call. William Kurelek was perhaps the quintessential artist of the Cold War. Convinced of the imminent likelihood of a nuclear conflagration, Kurelek did not shrink from the representation of the horrors that would be unleashed upon humanity by that outcome, down to the most minute detail. In many ways his work is analogous to the most notorious of the works of Jake and Dinos Chapman, Hell (in both its 2000 and 2008 iterations). The critic Jonathan Jones has called it “a terrific work of imagination, its plenitude of barbarities truly mind-boggling.” “Every time you think you’ve got the measure of it,” he adds, “you notice a new ludicrous yet fearsome, throwaway yet lovingly rendered detail of life in the abyss”.²

Something similar could be said about many of the works included in the exhibition William Kurelek: The Messenger. There was something particularly chilling about seeing his This is the Nemesis (pictured below) on display at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, as it depicts the moment of that city’s annihilation (as well as the destruction of Toronto, on the other side of Lake Ontario) from an elevated viewpoint on the hills to the south. Kurelek does not spare us any of the horror of this scene. Hamilton’s factories, apartment blocks, railways, trees and lakes have all been destroyed or irretrievably blighted. An intense firestorm is raging through the streets of the city, and in its path are the bloodied bodies of its dead and dying citizens. Those not killed outright by the blast are vomiting blood in its parks or racked with pain on makeshift hospital beds. We sense that their time is short. Kurelek brings a meticulous documentary style to this and other portrayals of the apocalypse. Yet there was no gratuitous intent to these representations. Kurelek’s purpose was (to adopt the words of Dr Carstairs) to “quicken our sense of the urgency of the human predicament before it is too late”.

¹ William Kurelek, Someone With Me (Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY, 1973), pages 521-522; (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 1980), pages 174-175.

² Jonathan Jones, ‘The Chapman brothers’ Hell is the best art of our age’, The Guardian, 23 February 2009.

In the Frame for June 2011

For this month’s In the Frame we have chosen William Kurelek’s Out of the Maze, the rarely-seen sequel to one of the best known artworks on exhibition in Bethlem Museum, The Maze. Born and bred within Canada’s Ukrainian community, William Kurelek (1927-1977) spent seven of his most formative years in England. He arrived while in his mid-twenties in 1952 with “two express purposes”, as he later put it. “One was to complete my art schooling – at that point in my life I was already convinced my vocation was to be an artist – the other was to get into a [psychiatric] hospital where I might find a cure for my chronic depression and my inexplicable eye pains”.¹ The day after his arrival, he admitted himself to the Maudsley Hospital in London, having read of its reputation in a Montreal library prior to embarking on his travels.² The Maze was a product of Kurelek’s time at the Maudsley. It depicts the artist lying partially decapitated in a wheat field, his skull flipped forward to reveal a series of compartments containing various memories, fears and obsessions. A white rat lies trapped and senseless in the centre of the picture.

Many years after his recovery from psychiatric illness (which he attributed not to his hospital treatment but to his conversion to Christianity and his reception into the Roman Catholic Church), Kurelek – by then an artist of some repute in his native country – executed a sequel to The Maze and returned to the Maudsley to present it as a gift. Out of the Maze displays a narrative sequence which takes up where The Maze left off. In left foreground, a bisected skull lies abandoned in the Canadian prairie, its unwilling occupant having long since escaped. In the middle distance, a young family has found a picnic spot, and are saying grace together. Kurelek has placed his own family into this idealized scene: himself, his wife Jean, and his four children. He is truly at home now, patently at peace with himself, his family, his native landscape, and with the God to whom he prays.

Nevertheless, the scene is not altogether idyllic. A mushroom cloud at the top right of the picture presages impending disaster. It should be remembered that Kurelek lived all his adult years in the shadow of the Cold War. His belief that the earth would be shortly ravaged by nuclear conflagration, and its beauty destroyed, was at least plausible in its time. His particular sense of vocation as an artist grew out of this conviction, as if  in response to a call issued by Dr Morris Carstairs, formerly his doctor at the Maudsley, in an article on art and psychiatry:

“A few years ago [wrote Carstairs] the writer had occasion to treat a young, self-taught Canadian painter, whose pictures showed certain affinities with those of Bosch, except that where Bosch was obsessed with the imminent destruction of humanity, this patient was for a time preoccupied exclusively with his own tortured ruminations, his own nightmarish fantasies and his sense of being trapped and helpless…Where, I wonder, is the contemporary artist who can turn his innocent eye upon the nightmare realities of this era with its threat of nuclear annihilation? We need a Goya or a Hieronymous Bosch today to quicken our sense of urgency of the human predicament before it is too late.”³

Last month Out of the Maze went on display in the Museum alongside The Maze and Nightmare, where it is likely to stay until at least October 2011. Die-hard Kurelekistas may want to start saving their pennies in order to visit the major Kurelek retrospective exhibition planned to open in Canada in 2012.

[1] Kurelek, Someone With Me (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 1980), page 7.

[2] Kurelek, Someone With Me (Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY, 1973), page 289; (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 1980), page 8.

[3] Kurelek, Someone With Me (Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY, 1973), pages 521-522; (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 1980), pages 174-175.