Kurelek: A Biography

Esther Fisher is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and
a former food critic for The Globe & Mail.

In his autobiographies, William Kurelek depicted himself as a timid, sensitive child demoralized by a stern, dogmatic father and humiliated by schoolmates because of his small size and ethnic origin. Patricia Morley, in her scholarly biography, balances the artist’s self-evaluation with comments by others who knew him, excerpts from Kurelek’s personal papers and letters, and information from clinical records concerning his mental illness. The result is a detailed account of the contradictions and complexities of Kurelek’s character.

Morley relates the life to the art, locating the genesis of many paintings in a blend of Kurelek’s actual experience and fantasy — fantasy that often took the form of violence. She sees a possible source for his lifelong preoccupation with suffering in his own sense of inadequacy which he transmuted into art as a means of retaliation against his oppressors. Kurelek may have painted as a route to self-exploration and a method of vicariously achieving revenge, but it failed as psychotherapy.

Tormented, longing for approval, depressed and anxious, the young Kurelek sought psychiatric help in England. There, he found support and strength in the Roman Catholic faith, and thereafter he credited God for saving his life and guiding him to success. Morley reveals that it was electric shock therapy that improved his outlook; then religion took over as the medication by which he sustained himself.

In a sense, religion became the be-all and end-all of his life. Art was his medium for proselytizing and preaching his message of self-sacrifice and anti-materialism. Religion gave him purpose, but Morley suggests it did not resolve basic conflicts within him. She cites a series of paintings of Ukrainian women in western Canada which includes his own youthful impressions of his farm mother’s role, and adds, “By praising his mother’s virtues, Bill wrote, he had completed his observance of the third commandment and thus given the series a religious dimension” (p. 216). But the text accompanying the paintings is a diatribe against the success achieved by pioneer women in lightening their burdens and work. His ideal seems to have been a patriarchal order in which the woman is the submissive, self-sacrificing nurturer, farm worker, and helpmate to the dominant male.

Motivated by religion, Kurelek was nevertheless often obtuse and cruel in dealing with those close to him. He refused to dedicate A Prairie Boy’s Winter to his wife and children because they did not see the value of endurance and effort, and wanted the book dedicated to “the only suitable party” — God. His is a fascinating and sad story — the man never seemed to be able to enjoy life.

Kurelek: A Biography is rather slow moving, particularly at the beginning, but the pace increases as the book progresses. It is long on factual material, but somewhat short on interpretation and analysis. We learn a great deal about Kurelek’s ancestry, including long genealogies of his parents’ families, but at times obvious relationships are ignored. For example, it is not stretching credibility to point out the parallel between the authoritarianism and discipline of the Roman Catholic Church and of Kurelek’s father, and to suggest that he sought and found the acceptance in the institution denied to him by the parent.

Morley’s biography is a good source book for the artist’s life and work, and for the history of Ukrainian settlement in Canada. It is copiously annotated and well illustrated with 90 black-and-white photographs from Kurelek’s scrapbooks and 8 colour plates of his art.