W ith his series of paintings, Jewish Life in Canada , William Kurelek created one of his most intriguing and paradoxical works. Intriguing because it was painted as a gesture of cross-cultural diplomacy between himself—a devout Roman Catholic convert of Ukrainian immigrant heritage—and his Jewish art dealer, Avrom Isaacs. How could someone of such extreme religious convic- tion, which blinkered him in so many areas, achieve such an empathetic leap? An extremely influential figure on the Toronto cultural scene, Isaacs was born in Winnipeg and moved with his family to Toronto in 1941. He later studied political science and economics at the University of Toronto. Opening his Yonge Street gallery in 1961, he plucked Kurelek from obscurity, discovering his talent by accident while Kurelek was working as his picture framer. (Kurelek had earlier apprenticed as a framer in London, England, following his art training in Toronto.) Ten successful exhibitions ensued at the Isaacs Gallery, as the artist worked through his themes with increasingly manic energy, developing a loyal following in the market. He even caught the eye of the estimable American art historian Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, who acquired Kurelek’s Hailstorm in Alberta , 1961, while on a trip to Toronto. This series was, in a sense, payback. The series is paradoxical, too, because it seems to articulate two visions of the immi- grant experience at once: on the one hand, a sunny story of rejoicing brides, contented dairy farmers, cheerful children at their violin practice; and on the other hand, a darker story of abandoned farms, harassed street merchants, and forlorn new immigrants huddled on train platforms far from their homelands. Was Kurelek celebrating the suc- cess of Jewish settlers in Canada or grieving their struggle to belong? Given his own rough start and his later success, it was likely a bit of both. Kurelek knew immigrant struggle as a first-genera- tion Canadian. Growing up in rural Alberta and then Manitoba, he was often subjected in the schoolyard to random acts of cruelty at the hands of his peers, experiences that inspired later works such as Farm Children’s Games in Western Canada , 1952, and King of the Castle , 1958–59. Always the out- sider’s outsider, Kurelek was mocked for his differences, his language, and his family’s
Yom Kippur, 1975
poverty. He suffered as well at the hands of his father, who belittled his sensitivity, no doubt contributing to his son’s lifelong mental illness. Kurelek was also haunted by the stories of the old country that he heard from his parents, images that rear up in works such as Cross Section of Vinnitsia in the Ukraine, 1939 , 1968, an early work in which the stacked bodies of corpses can be seen rotting below ground while festivities reign above. (The bifurcated scene is set behind bars.) Another work, Zaporozhian Cossacks , 1952, describes a violent rout of Ukrain- ians at the hands of Russian soldiers. The terrors of Europe were so close that he could almost touch them. No doubt it was these experiences that underpinned his sensitivity to immigrant stories. Over the course of his career, Kurelek made many suites of works on immigrant themes, attending also to other groups of Canadians often overlooked in the largely British dominant culture of the day: Polish immigrants, Irish immigrants, Ukrainian pioneer women of the Prairies, lumberjacks, and the rural people of Charle- voix, Quebec.
Jewish Life in Canada , though, has a dis- tinctive back story, one rooted in shame and atonement. As Kurelek’s friend and collab- orator on the project, Abe Arnold, reported in an article in the Winnipeg Free Press in 1976, a year after the completion of the Jewish Life in Canada series and a year before Kurelek’s death, the artist’s family had initially supported Germany’s efforts in the war, so aggrieved had they been by the prejudice and harassment they had faced from those of British heritage in their com- munity. “We learned to our dismay,” Kurelek said, “what a bad mistake we’d made in the placing of our sympathies.” In fact, the earli- est work by the artist that we can find record of is a series of pencil drawings that he made as a teenager, now held in Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, copying the har- rowing photographs of Hitler’s concentration camps—images he was encountering in the popular press. With a jittery hand he traced the brutalized and emaciated bodies, and the menace of their captors, annotating the drawings with descriptions of the atrocities committed. One drawing in this series is a self-portrait, likely the artist’s first, catching
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