William Kurelek: Visions of Canada, Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature

For the first time since William Kurelek died in 1977 at the age of 50, a major exhibition of his paintings is now touring across Canada. Entitled Kurelek’s Vision of Canada, it contains 49 of the more than 2,000 canvases Kurelek left as his personal legacy to his country.

Although the title of the exhibition might imply something all-encompassing, its organizer, Joan Murray, curator of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, explains that it is:

a coherent show rather than one which is complete in terms of his total development. This is a first word about Kurelek’s work, and only about a single aspect of it, not the last.

In a preview article for Winnipeg readers who will see the Kurelek paintings this winter, it seems appropriate to discuss the paintings on the basis of their catalogue sequence which begins with three Prairie farm scenes: Hauling Sheaves to the Threshing Machine, Winter North of Winnipeg, and Arrival on the Manitoba Farm. These are accompanied by Kurelek’s personal notes about threshing as the most exciting time of the farm work year; about the isolation of man in the prairie vastness, especially in winter; and about the dark and sombre arrival of his family in Manitoba after their depressing failure in Alberta. (It is noteworthy that the Winnipeg winter painting comes from the Hirshorn Museum at Washington’s Smithsonian Institute. Other paintings in this exhibit have been drawn from art galleries and corporate and private collections from Vancouver to Charlottetown. Ten of the canvases are from the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, which is still the agent for Kurelek’s work.)

The first three paintings could be simply described as prairie landscapes, except that even in his landscapes Kurelek is always endeavouring to illustrate something special. Most often he is depicting the human struggle with the environment.

Joan Murray says that while Kurelek is among our most important landscape painters he, “almost never painted landscape as such”. I agree with her when she explains that Kurelek’s work is unified by his use of the landscape element “as both compositional armature and conveyor of emotional content”. The landscape becomes the framework for an idea and Murray has done an excellent job in presenting Kurelek’s landscape motifs as a central theme in this exhibition.

Kurelek was greatly affected by the problems facing the world and particularly by the danger of a nuclear holocaust. He depicts this vividly in Not going back to Pick up a Cloak, where he predicts “The next bomb falls on Winnipeg”.

Before his untimely death Kurelek did indeed manage to paint the length and breadth of the country, to depict many aspects of Canada’s immense reality and to infuse his views on religion and morality into many of his paintings. Nevertheless, not all of his works are message paintings and he did many canvases simply depicting the joy one can take from looking at a Canadian landscape such as Don Valley on a Grey Day, Indian Summer on the Humber, or B.C. Seen Through Sunglasses.

Kurelek once referred to his non-message paintings as ‘pot-boilers’, works that he produced specially for their sale value to help support his family. He admitted doing as many as three paintings in a 12 to 17 hour working day but he seems to have put as much of himself into these works as into the message paintings that he considered more important. Both types of works are included in the Robert McLaughlin exhibition.

Stooking, one of the non-message paintings in this exhibit, shows Kurelek’s affinity to Bruegel, at the same time that it depicts harvest operations. Moreover, many of his paintings, whether singly or in series, must be considered as an important contribution to the recording of Canadian history through art, as in Flu Epidemic in Alberta, depicting the funerals resulting from the post-World War I influenza outbreak.

There are several canvases in this exhibit from his series on the Polish community in Canada, a couple from his Irish series, and five paintings from his series illustrating W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind. Kurelek also did many paintings on Ukrainian life and customs in Canada. In addition he did paintings in series on the Jews, on the Inuit and on French Canada, all of them unrepresented in this exhibition. The absence of these paintings and of many other of his themes confirms that this exhibit, as worthwhile as it is, is not a true retrospective showing of Kurelek’s output. Such an exhibit would probably take at least a hundred canvases.

One more aspect worth noting in Kurelek’s Vision of Canada is that he sometimes shows a sense of humour as in his painting The Dream of Mayor Crombie.

Though not truly retrospective, this exhibit may be summed up as a Kurelek overview of Canadian geography and history from coast to coast, embellished with examples of his religious and prophetic messages.

All but one of the 49 canvases in this exhibition are available in full-colour reproduction in a book from Hurtig Publishers priced at $ 19.95. The exhibition itself, from which the book borrows its title, will open January 23, 1984 at the Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg. ■

Abe Arnold wrote an historical essay for Jewish Life in Canada: Paintings and Commentaries by William Kurelek, published by Hurtig in 1975.