Literature
Letter from Harry Street Jr. to Patricia Morley, 3 January 1988
Patricia Morley, “Kurelek: A Biography”, Toronto, 1986, page 135
William Kurelek was equally adept at painting crowded interiors as he was at rendering his best–known subject, the vast, open fields of the Canadian Prairies. This postwar tableau depicts New Amusements, an arcade that, while its name has changed, has been the anchor of the famous Worthing Pier on England’s South Coast since the late 1930s. Dominated by the multicoloured grids and spheres of a bingo game in progress at the scene’s centre, the perimeter teems with a competing range of human activity, expression, and sartorial detail. Kurelek captures a preoccupied motley of families, friends, and strangers—the young and the old—as they swarm a network of coin–operated electro– magnetic games, amid change booths, cigarette dispensaries, and directional signage. Phrases like “Our Motto is Fair Play” and “What Has Life in Store for You?” at once reassure and motivate the arcade’s otherwise distracted clientele.
Kurelek’s attention to observational detail is on full display in “Streets Pier, Worthing”. The painting, which was completed while he was living in London, U.K., is of a piece with several other of the artist’s early (and otherwise radically distinct) expressions of horror vacuii that brim with a similar claustrophobic pressure. These include his “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1950; private collection), “The Maze” (1953; Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Beckenham, U.K.), “Netherene Hospital Workshop” and “The Bachelor” (1954 and 1955 respectively; Art Gallery of Ontario). Born in Alberta in 1927, Kurelek lived and worked in England between 1952 and 1959 where he also spent several years in–and–out of two psychiatric hospitals before returning to Canada and settling in Toronto where he would build a successful career and remain until his death in 1977. Effectively a series of microcosmic details stitched into a single universe, “Streets Pier, Worthing” was completed at a time when Kurelek had been producing small “trompe–l’oeil” panels for display at successive Royal Academy summer exhibitions between 1956 and 1959. Indeed, it was the sale of a trompe–l’oeil featuring a penny and a lark farthing on checked blue cloth at one of these Academy exhibitions that led Kurelek to paint “Streets Pier, Worthing”.
Harry and Rosie Streets established New Amusements in the mid–1950s. The married couple were so charmed by their purchase of Kurelek’s “trompe–l’oeil” still life at the Academy exhibition in the summer of 1957 that they commissioned the young Ukrainian– Canadian artist to portray their arcade. As the Streets’ son Harry Jr., who would assume control of the arcade in the early 1960s, recalled
in a letter to Kurelek’s biographer Patricia Morley in 1988: “I was working on the Pier then and naturally remember Bill Kurelek arriving to collect information for his picture of the Amusement Hall. He took a lot of photographs, many perched on top of a step ladder which my father held safely.” Morely’s book indicates there was mutual admiration between Kurelek and Harry Sr. :
“The two men, patron and artist, had both had domineering fathers and were similar in other ways. As the acquittance grew, and a second purchase followed the first, it occurred to the patron that his two dreams were coming together. Two of the passions in his life were his amusement arcade and his love of art. Now, for the first time, he actually knew an artist. He would have his artist paint his kingdom.”
“Streets Pier, Worthing” remained in the Steets’ private collection until 1981, when Morley purchased the work directly from the family.
While the painting was a commission, it is clear Kurelek found the subject of an arcade intriguing for its own sake. As a composite of human activity, he would have seen a deeper significance to the scene’s quotidian details. In the same way his Norther Renaissance heroes Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch, and Joachim Patinir emphasized the moral and spiritual significance of everyday life Kurelek, who converted to Roman Catholicism the same year “Streets Pier, Worthing” was likely completed, brings an almost parabolic weight to the scene. Not unlike several of Kurelek’s best known paintings, including “Manitoba Party” (1954; National Gallery of Canada) or “Light Trading Day, Toronto Stock Exchange” (1971; Richardson & Sons Ltd.), “Streets Pier, Worthing” resonates with ambiguous feelings of sympathy for human frailty as well as moral judgement against worldly distraction. As he also would in both later works, Kurelek incorporated himself into the arcade scene; he can be seen at top right, casually leaning on the ledge of a booth—the only figure in the painting who looks back at us, unabsorbed by the surrounding spectacle.
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.
