All creatures drink of joy At nature’s breasts.
All the Just, all the Evil
- Friedrich Schiller, “Ode to Joy” (1785)
An English translation of the lyrics to Beethoven’s famous Ninth Symphony, etched on a giant stone tablet, forms the centerpiece of William Kurelek’s “Behold Man Without God (#3)”. The text, a modified version of a poem by Friedrich Schiller, was penned during the Enlightenment as a triumphant celebration of shared human experience. The German poet’s paean sits in marked contrast to the devastation that pervades Kurelek’s painting. A dark portrait of human hypocrisy, with a title that nonetheless gestures toward religious redemption, “Behold Man Without God (#3)” signals a harrowing and transformative moment in the artist’s life.
William Kurelek was born into a Ukrainian immigrant family in a small settlement north-east of Edmonton, Alberta in 1927. His family soon moved to Stonewall, Manitoba, north of Winnipeg, where he spent his formative years. After graduating from the University of Manitoba, Kurelek briefly attended the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, where his instructors included Carl Schaefer, Frederick Hagan, and Eric Freifeld. In 1950 he hitchhiked to Mexico, with the hope of studying with David Siqueiros at San Miguel de Allende. The Mexican master had left by the time the young artist arrived, but Kurelek’s creative drive and restlessness persisted. No sooner had he returned to Canada than he boarded a ship for England.
Over the ensuing decade, in England and on visits throughout Continental Europe, Kurelek saw work by, and fell under the influence of, modern visionaries like Stanley Spencer and Old Masters like Hieronymus Bosch. This was also a period of intense personal struggle for the young Canadian. Kurelek, who had suffered social anxiety and mental illness since he was a teenager, sought medical attention in London. Painting was prescribed as a form of therapy, and the artist manifested some of his most idiosyncratic and unflinchingly confessional work during this period—including, in 1955, the first version of “Behold Man Without God”. A committed atheist at the time, Kurelek titled the painting after he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957.
The top-half of “Behold Man Without God” is fantastical, its perspective broad and universal. Two armies—one birthed from a subterranean ant colony, the other from a giant hive—engage in ceaseless war. In the middle ground, a crowd—standing lively and upright on the left but laid low by burdensome sacks on the right—surrounds an orchestra of pigs, conducted by a monkey and ostensibly performing Beethoven’s symphony. Creativity and destruction co-exist; they just simply thrive and succumb like insects, alongside the unjust. The scene is Kurelek’s encapsulation of the state of nature, a world without divine authority.
The lower half of “Behold Man Without God” is equally devastating, but Kurelek drew from his own memory to compose the picture’s foreground. Several scenes include images of the artist’s father, Dmytro, who appears as a sadistic taskmaster. In one instance his tongue is a barbed lash. In another, the character brutishly stamps his boot into the back of a little boy before a tortuous merry-go-round of manacled children. Kurelek also makes multiple appearances himself. He wrestles the libidinal Freudian serpent, and plays a lone, pathetic actor in “The William Kurelek Theatre” at the picture plane’s centre-right. In the darkened foreground, Kurelek manifests as both an abandoned infant and an engorged rat carcass. The rat lies supine beneath a page torn from the second act of Hamlet, in which the main protagonist describes human beings as “this quintessence of dust.”
“Behold Man Without God” is an early and important expression of the foundational ideas that endure and recur throughout Kurelek’s ensuing oeuvre: hubris, cruelty, desire, and self-identity. Indeed, the artist produced at least four numbered versions of this image during his career, each varying slightly in size, treatment, media, and colour. The original, the watercolour completed in England, is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. The fourth version, a more brilliantly coloured mixed media work from 1973, entered the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2012. To date, the provenance and whereabouts of the second version remains unknown. “Behold Man Without God (#3)” —painted a year before the Winnipeg version—has come to auction complete with the artist’s original, hand-built frame, via the first owner, a private collection in the United States.
That Kurelek painted multiple versions of the painting is not unprecedented. He sometimes fashioned new iterations of extant work for patrons, friends, and religious organizations. This practice not only served practical objectives but was consistent with the public image Kurelek projected, as a craftsman rather than a fine artist. It also underlines his valuation of the painted message, over the painting’s significance as a unique commodity. That said, when the artist replicated work, it tended to be the bucolic Prairie landscapes coveted by collectors. He rarely reprised scenes of devastation and violence, or paintings that emphasized his devout Roman Catholic worldview. In this regard, the “Behold Man Without God” series is remarkable.
Kurelek returned to Canada in 1959, resettling as a completely unknown artist in Toronto. Within a year, however, he had received his first solo exhibition at the Isaacs Gallery—which included the original version of “Behold Man Without God”—and began garnering the critical and popular attention that would sustain his career until his death in 1977. Today, “Behold Man Without God” stands as one of Kurelek’s most unflinchingly personal images. It captures a moment of reckoning, of internal conflict and profound soul-searching. But it is also a painting about a departure. “Behold Man Without God” is a broken “Ode to Joy” that announces the beginning of something new.
We extend our thanks to Andrew Kear, Canadian art historian and Head of Collections, Exhibitions and Programs at Museum London for contributing the preceding essay. Andrew is the past Chief Curator and Curator of Canadian art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, a Curator of the 2011/2012 national travelling exhibition “William Kurelek: The Messenger” and author of the Art Canada’s Institute’s “William Kurelek: Life & Work”, available at www.aci-iac.ca.
