Literature
Patricia Morley, "Kurelek: A Biography", Toronto, 1986, pages 290, 291, 332
William Kurelek pictures himself lying supine along the bottom fifth of this small undated painting. His body has been cropped, made to resemble the thin terrain that stretches across so many of his Prairie landscapes. It is also serves as a stage on which a diminutive, translucent version of himself engages in fisticuffs with a retreating personification of death. A worn, clinical, geometric tile is their battle’s backdrop. At top left, in pencil, the artist has written in Ukrainian Cyrillic, “Death Fears Him Who Resists Her.”
In late September 1977 Kurelek had been admitted to Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. Unable to stand on his own, pale and coughing, the symptoms were dire and had taken him by surprise. As a devout Christian, Kurelek believed death should be faced with joy and courage; and yet as a successful and driven artist with a family, he was also a man who, as his biographer Patricia Morley puts it, “very much wanted to live.” "Death Fears Him Who Resists Her", possibly the last painting completed in the early days of his hospitalization, certainly shows that determination.
The painting’s tone, however, also reveals something less creedal and more idiosyncratic about Kurelek’s feelings toward his own mortality. It is not surprising that, as a Roman Catholic, he would have represented his soul as embodied. The feminization of death is consistent with Kurelek’s Slavic heritage. More disarming is the combination of bathetic humour and tenderness we find in the image. There is a Punch-and-Judy quality to this existential showdown but, of course, it’s Kurelek’s act of literally painting on his deathbed that is the real act of resistance, the last act. He died on November 3, 1977.
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 Institute’s "William Kurelek: Life & Work", available at www.aci-iac.ca.
