Humanizing a Giant by William Davie
If there is no God, no afterlife, and no final justice, then suicide is reasonable, rationalizes William Kurelek nihilistically in his autobiography Someone with Me, before concluding: “Only two things remained to be done: to plan the self-annihilation, and to do it.”
At this point in time, 1954, Kurelek was a patient at Netherne Hospital in Hooley, Surrey, under the supervision of Edward Adamson, a leading proponent in the development of art therapy. Kurelek, who had been suffering from increasingly tortuous bouts of an unknown eye condition, self-described depersonalization, and clinical depression, had moved from his native Canada to London in 1952 at the age of 25 with two express purposes. One was to complete his education as a painter at a British art school, having already tried and failed to find one in Paris that would accept him. The other, more pressing, was to admit himself into Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London, which he had read the name of in a library book listing English institutions while in Montreal, believing that here, as well as being far less expensive, he would receive more compassionate care than in Canada.
But having travelled to England by ship and admitted himself into Maudsley as an outpatient, Kurelek had quickly grown disillusioned with the psychotherapy he was offered. He writes that his primary doctor was unhelpful in his “serenity and aloofness.” Compounding this were fears that he would soon run out of money before a cure could be found. So, in a wily act of desperation, Kurelek superficially cut his arm to show his doctor the following day and, achieving the desired effect, was admitted as an inpatient and put under the care of a different doctor.
It was at this point that Kurelek painted one of several masterpieces from this period, the fascinatingly erudite internal self-portrait The Maze (1953). “I had to impress the hospital staff as being a worthwhile specimen to keep on,” Kurelek recalls of the painting.
William Kurelek, The Maze, 1953
Gouache on board, 91 x 121 cm
Collection of Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Beckenham, Kent. © Estate of William Kurelek, courtesy of the Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto.
It depicts his skull on the ground of an inhospitable terrain opened up like a doll’s house with the aid of a ribbon, symbolizing the work being conducted on him by staff at Maudsley. Inside, his skull is sectioned into various compartments illustrating what he believed to be the root causes of his suffering. From his harsh and often cruel childhood in rural Winnipeg and Manitoba, to his perceived failings at not being able to meet familial and societal expectations. Yet the painting is buoyed by an undercurrent of hope that is projected by the prevailing sand-coloured palette which counteracts the harshness of the illustrations. For Kurelek, the painting was, he writes, a way to say: “I challenge you scientists. . . to put me back together again, a happy, balanced, mature, fulfilled personality.”
But by early 1953 Kurelek’s condition had deteriorated, and he was further admitted to Netherne. Here, leading up to the decision to end his life, he painted another masterpiece, I Spit on Life (c. 1953-1954), which he describes as “a grim going-away gift to society.”
William Kurelek, I Spit on Life, c. 1953–54
Watercolour on board, 63.5 x 94 cm
Adamson Collection, Wellcome Library, University College London, U.K. Courtesy of Wellcome Library. © Estate of William Kurelek, courtesy of the Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto.
Appearing like visions in a subterranean warren, Kurelek again illustrates how he arrived at this juncture in his life with small vignettes that both pay homage to and riff with great ingenuity on the visual devices of his heroes Hieronymus Bosch and the Brueghels. But this time any trace of hope is vanquished. Instead, the work is imbued with vitriol and contempt. There is an acute sense of urgency as our eye quickly scans across the darkness from one vignette to another as the disturbing detail and acidic wit Kurelek employs announces itself like flashing Christmas lights. Added to this, Kurelek also takes aim at the systems and politics that have failed him, imploring us to open our eyes to them too.
But it is in one haunting vignette where Kurelek forecasts his suicide that our darting eyes are stopped in their tracks. Yet notably when he recounts the attempt in Someone with Me, he writes, “I no longer remember how much of my ‘suicide’ was a form of protest and how much real conviction.” He then uses this to point to pivot into a hypothesis that a small part of the corner of I Spit on Life that had been left unfinished points towards the former being true. “As part of the whole montage of memories and social comments contained in the painting there was supposed to be a satire on religion. I never leave a painting unfinished if I can help it, but that little corner is unfinished to this day. I like to think it was an omen of some kind. For it was only religion that was as yet unfinished in my life and only religion that saved me.”
In his words, Kurelek had been a “staunch atheist.” He even went so far as trying to get people to denounce their faith whatever it may be, he recalls in an interview, including a Jewish man who he befriended in Maudsley. But when his occupational therapist Margaret Smith offered him a book of poetry, he noticed that she had wrapped it in a Catholic newspaper, he became curious about her faith. “She joked back to my teasing or simply smiled and said nothing. She made no attempts whatsoever to out-argue or convert me.”
Kurelek sought to learn more about Catholicism. Slowly at first, but as he grew closer to Smith, the “priceless strength” it provided her life became more and more visible, and soon his obsessive search was rivalling painting in the hierarchy of importance in his life. In 1957 he converted to Catholicism and soon after that his afflictions ceased, which he attributed solely to his conversion. From then on, he writes, “I saw life in religious terms, my art in terms of vocation, a calling by God to serve Him in a specific way.”
He returned to Canada and after failing to find a gallery to take his work, eventually it caught the attention of gallerist Av Issacs in Toronto. Issacs championed his work, which by now had split into two distinct tracks. One was picturesque paintings of children playing in the snow in the prairies and other idyllic country scenes, which quickly brought him critical and commercial success. The other was what he considered to be his true work; proselytising religious paintings which were for the most part critical and commercial failures because of their alienating religious standpoint. Inevitably, his success with the former manifested into an interior conflict. He felt that he wasn’t fulfilling his vocation as best he could because his religious paintings were not gaining the same traction as his other works. Therefore, he decided he would leave Isaacs Gallery and find a Christian gallery to deal in his art exclusively. But after not being able to find one, and on the recommendation of Dr Evan Turner, who was then-director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Kurelek was soon dissuaded from the idea. “My advice is to go back to Av Isaacs,” he remembers Turner saying to him. “At least with him you’ll have a chance to preach in the marketplace. What’s the use of preaching to the converted?”
Andy Warhol is not someone who comes to mind when you see Kurelek’s work or read about his life. But when considered it in relation to the illuminating exhibition Andy Warhol: Revelation currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, Kurelek’s work and life present an intriguing foil. This is because Revelation, which has garnered significant critical acclaim for its humanising of a giant by examining the complex role religion and religious iconography played in Warhol’s life and work, is directed by renewed interest in Warhol driven by biographical details, “more person, less persona.” As a result, in Revelation, Catholicism’s role in Warhol’s life is presented in a much more nuanced and impacting way because its true extent had been hidden from public view during his lifetime. It was revealed by John Richardson in his eulogy at Warhol’s funeral, saying, “But exist it did, and it’s key to the artist’s psyche.”
If this same approach were to be taken with Kurelek, it would be clear that to fully understand his religious works, audiences need to fully understand his psychological illness during his time at Maudsley and Netherne in the years leading up to his conversion and recovery, epitomized in paintings like The Maze and I spit on Life. In doing so, they would then see how Catholicism became the bedrock of his life and its successes thereafter. In her forward to Someone with Me, Jean Kurelek, his wife, reiterates this fact, writing that since that period Kurelek tried to spread his message of recovery and hope to anyone that would listen. He even starts his book at that point when he first enters Maudsley, in order to maximise its importance, writing in the final paragraphs of the book, “I believe the story of my comeback to normalcy and success will dispel still further the social stigma that lingers on about mental illness.”
Whatever our views may be on faith, it is obvious that in attributing his recovery to his conversion and faith, Kurelek saw these as a single intertwined entity. Whereas, to most audiences, his religious works were solely about the messages they carry visually, as this period in his life was not well known or publicized. In doing so, he was largely written off. But in knowing about it, and understanding it, the very nature that his religious works even exist become a testament to not only hope, but to recovery and triumph. “Not only is it possible for them to recover,” he continues, “it is possible to take advantage of and put to work the suffering they are going through.”
This broadly echoes the persuasive argument curator Jessica Beck makes in revaluating Warhol’s response to the AIDS epidemic in his Last Supper series in her essay Warhol's Confession: Love, Faith, and AIDs. For the most part, thanks to misleading scholarship by Jonathan Flatley, it had largely been believed, if it were addressed, as often it was simply omitted, that he didn’t respond to it beyond AIDS, Jeep, Bicycle (1986), which uses part of a headline that directly refers to it, and that otherwise Warhol had remained silent. Leading to some detractors to argue that he should have done more given his position and platform within society. But Beck shows that this was not the case, he did address it.
At its most heart-breaking and eye-opening, The Last Supper (The Big C) (1986), a work which belongs to one of two types of work in this series that incorporated commercial logos, headlines, and text into the work. In his diaries, Warhol writes “The Big C” as shorthand for “gay cancer,” or AIDS. It appears first in 1981 but increases in frequency as he begins to detail his growing fears and anxiety about its spread and then when he writes about its debilitating hold on his boyfriend John Gould’s life, who died from complications of AIDS in 1985, within days of Warhol commencing work on the Last Super series.
The phrase “The Big C” appears under Christ’s face in the lower-left centre of the canvas, ripped from a New York Post headline. It is unmistakably clear that this image of Christ was for Warhol connected to the rapid rate at which people around him were dying. Also sequestered into the image of the Last Supper are references to sex and shame. There is the inherent betrayal of Christ, the piercing owl’s eye in the form of the Wise logo, and the numbers 699, appropriated from a price tag reading “$6.99”, which references both the sexual position “69” and the “mark of the beast,” 666, in the Book of Revelations. “The painting speaks of sex and of judgment,” argues Beck. “It is an allegorical triangulation of mourning, punishment, and fear.”
At the same time, in their treatment of religious images and themes, we see just how close Kurelek’s and Warhol’s works are at times. Part of why Revelation has met with critical acclaim is for the way in which the curators have distinguished Warhol and other artists like him who were modern and to varying degrees religious and engaging with religious themes and imagery, but not religious artists proselytizing on behalf of a religion as Kurelek came to do. A distinction that has inhibited Kurelek from undergoing the critical reappraisal he so readily deserves.
The most notable overlap is seen in the significant series both artists obsessively produced based upon the narrative around The Last Supper. For Warhol, it was his last. Commissioned by gallerist Alexandre Iolas in 1984 and produced between 1985 and 1986, the vast series encompasses paintings, works on paper, and the sculpture Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper) (1985–1986), created in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat. While Kurelek, produced his Passion of Christ series of paintings and drawings between 1960 and 1963, having conceived the idea in 1956. Originally, he wanted to illustrate the entire Gospel of St. Matthew line by line but after realizing the enormity of it, reduced it to the Passion narrative.
In Revelation, works from Warhol’s Last Supper series are presented first and foremost in accordance with new scholarship by Jessica Beck. Here, she places the series in the context of the conflict between Warhol’s sexuality and Catholicism’s views on homosexuality at a time when the AIDS epidemic was devastating gay communities around the world and causing widespread fear and paranoia to even greater numbers through the media. But, in relation to Kurelek’s paintings from his Passion of Christ series, what is of particular interest is how both artists were cognizant of the rapidly growing power and influence that television was having on imagery and how they incorporated this into their works.
In Warhol’s Last Supper series there are two distinct methods at work, explains Beck. One, where he stays closer to the original da Vinci fresco by employing an image of an engraving made in 1800 by Raphael Morghen. In the second, where Warhol incorporates commercial logos, headlines, and text, the image of the last supper is from the Cycolpedia of painters and paintings. “Ultimately both versions present commentaries on suffering, one through repetition, the other through signs and symbols.”
In a work like the monumental Sixty Last Suppers (1986), Warhol repeats the image of The Last Supper sixty times in rows and columns so that they are abutting one another, and look like stacks of miniature television screens, writes Beck. Instead of overlapping them as he had done previously in his Death and Disaster series, for example in 1947 White (1963), which used a photograph taken by Robert Wiles of a young woman’s body lying in the crumpled roof of a car moments after she jumped from the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building. Warhol heightens and confuses the trauma of the original event by creating a visual effect that “mirrored the flicker and motion of a filmstrip.” In doing so, the victims take on saintlike qualities as their “suffering becomes beautiful.”
Having worked throughout his career using reproductions as source material, Warhol understood the inevitable loss or change of meaning in the facsimile and understood how a reproduction can exist in suspended time. By contrast, through abutting the images in Sixty Last Suppers, Warhol locks the image in time at the point of its creation, a moment of public suffering for the homosexual body. He transforms the moralistic narrative inherent to The Last Supper into a beguiling mediation on the “shifting nature of death and suffering in the face of modern media.”
Kurelek’s objective for his series differs drastically because he saw it as a didactic tool for dispersing the central message of the Gospels. In 1959 he travelled to Jordan and Israel to gather source imagery and to get a better idea of the area he was about to depict. In haste, he also purchased cards and photographs to use. For the faces of the twelve apostles, for example, Kurelek used press photos of ordinary civilians he got while in Tel Aviv.
At first the works are detail-orientated but they shift to a quicker, more expressive style as the series progresses, because Kurelek was eager to complete the series in the amount of time he allotted himself to do so. But what is most interesting is, that to reach the widest possible audience, Kurelek made sure that each of the 160 works he produced accommodated the dimensions of the standard television screen aspect ratio of 4:3. He did so as he hoped that the series might be used by missionaries and that one day it might be reproduced on film, which did happen after his death in 1977, first in 1981, and again in 2009. It’s interesting to consider what if Kurelek’s story was told fully, and the film played again, how many people might this help, in the same way The Maze is still used to help teach medical students about mental illness throughout the world.
Because of this desire, Kurelek’s images are all sharply attuned to the fundamental arrangements of cinematography. There are panoramic and bird’s eye views, as well as enigmatic views from behind figures and others that employ unusual framing devices, which echoes Warhol’s use of repeated imagery culled from newspapers overlapping one another in order to mirror the “flicker and motion of a filmstrip.”
Warhol’s Death and Disaster series shares an affinity thematically to Kurelek’s so-called “Doomsday paintings.” The “Kurulekian” landscape is always in a state of reciprocal exchange with human nature and culture, shaped by human presence but also shaping the type of community that takes up within it, asserts Andrew Kear, curator of the 2012 touring retrospective William Kurelek: The Messenger.
A prime example of this is This Is the Nemesis (1965). It depicts with the skill and dynamism of his earlier works, a fiery explosion mushrooming into the sky above the city of Hamilton which has been pulverized by an atomic bomb like Nagasaki and Hiroshima before. In the centre, a man climbs a twisted ladder on top of an industrial chimney desperate to escape the radioactive devastation below him, but we can see he won’t be able to and will fall to his death. Here, Kurelek is illustrating “the disaster that will befall our materialistic society, because it is so bent on pursuit of security and prestige, it ignores God,” he writes.
William Kurelek, This Is the Nemesis, 1965
Mixed media on Masonite, 114.8 x 115.6 cm
Collection of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, gift of Mrs. J.A. McCuaig, 1966 (66.75.Q). © Estate of William Kurelek, courtesy of the Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto. Photo credit: Michael Lalich, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Hamilton.
A direct correlation is Warhol’s Atomic Bomb (1965), in which an image of a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb explosion is repeated with varying levels of distortion on top of a red-painted canvas, a possible cue to the colour adopted by the Soviet Union who were in an ideological war with the West that was perpetuated by the threat of it turning into a nuclear war. But their similarities go deeper than shared themes and imagery. By repeating images of car crashes, plane crashes, suicides, that he found in newspapers Warhol can be seen as reflecting a growing ability for the Western world to become desensitized and indifferent to the human cost of these events, a fact that Kurelek is convinced of.
Offering a different perspective, Jonathan Fineberg describes Warhol’s works that featured repeated images of Marilyn Monroe’s headshot in the series he created about her following suicide as an “anesthetizing repetition.” This, Dr. Jonathan Anderson states in his lecture Religion in an Age of Mass Media: Andy Warhol's Catholicism that accompanies Revelation, that this is done to “disrupt that anaesthetic effect,” and that Warhol wants to draw our attention to its effect by confronting us with it. “In colour, or black-and-white, like his repetitious images of Campbells soup cans, Monroe is revealed to be nothing more than a commodity,” he continues. “There was a Norma Gene somewhere behind the photographic curtain but the only Marilyn we know was and is, even in her death, a mass-produced image packaged in various sizes and formats devised for consumption.” Yet Warhol’s ambiguity in casting his opinion on the effect this is having on humanity is what keeps his work pertinent even now. However, if Anderson is to be believed, then it could easily be argued that Warhol’s position was very close to Kurelek’s.
In Superstition: Man's Instinct to Believe and Worship is Irrepressible (1968), Kurelek rallies against the rise in idolising false prophets. Having mastered trompe-l'œil while in London as a way to produce saleable paintings to help get by, he uses the visual device again here to dramatic effect, emphasizing the illusory trickery he sees in these secular devotions which he has reduced to advertisements and posters stuck to a red brick wall. Across one, the headline proclaims “man-made miracle” above a picture of a scientist holding up a test tube. Another states “Heaven in a bottle” above a bottle labelled LSD, while another states “Believers unite!” next to a picture of a UFO. Below these is a picture of a young man, grinning and ogling the pornographic posters in his bedroom while to its right is another image that shows a parade with people holding a placard with an image of chairman Mao.
During the 70s and early 80s as Warhol’s work became a victim of his own success, lacking the critical facets that made his earlier works so powerful, he and his factory churned out series depicting images of Chairman Mao and Lenin, along with the Communist hammer and sickle emblem, as well as other motifs such as skulls and crosses, with a selection of the latter two on view in Revelation. But it is still clear to see in these works that Warhol was both exploring and testing the limits of the “contemporary cosmology of people and objects divinized by fame,” as Paul Elie writes in his review of Revelation for the New Yorker.
But since the start of his artistic career, Warhol is seen projecting the Madonna and her role within history, into the public lives of Hollywood sex symbols. In the highly evocative painting Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962), where only a single brightly coloured headshot of Monroe abrasively exists in the centre of an expansive field of gold paint, it is clear that Warhol is getting as close as he is ever going to in implying what Kurelek was explicitly stating in Superstition: Man's Instinct to Believe and Worship is Irrepressible. The abrasiveness of the two visuals signifiers colliding, amplified by the single headshot of Monroe being drowned out by the sea of gold paint convincingly illustrates that she can never attain the position, the lasting impact of the Madonna.
Similarly, in an abandoned project from 1981 titled Modern Madonnas, Warhol is seen taking a series of photographs, in collaboration with the photographer Christopher Makos, and making drawings of female models breastfeeding their children. However, the curators of Revelation highlight that Warhol believed that these images would not be well received, stating: “I just know this series is going to be a problem. It’s just too strange a thing, mothers and babies and breastfeeding.”
However, the most powerful reference to the Madonna for Warhol is seen in his series that focus on photographs of Jaqueline Kennedy taken at the public funeral for her husband John F. Kennedy. Here, Warhol investigates how she was suddenly transformed into a monument for human tragedy universally, akin to how Mary is seen through iconography. He uses multiple images at time, abutting one another in grids of fours, sixes, twelves, sixteens, locking her into this highly public moment of incredible suffering, mourning, fear, and courage, in a precursor to Sixty Last Suppers. “It didn't bother me that much that he was dead,” Warhol recalled. “What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel sad.”
Perhaps being deliberately misleading and caustic, we nonetheless see a commonality in the way Warhol perceives television and radio “programming everybody to feel sad” and images and sculptures of the Madonna as a tool instilling certain emotions and behaviours. It’s interesting to note here that, as a child, Warhol would spend Sunday mornings at mass at the Old Church Slavonic at the St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh, gazing at the wall of icons that towered all around and obscured the priest as he was incanting, and may also provide the visual genesis for repeated large-scale works of repeated imagery he produced later in his life.
Kurelek was all too aware of the power of an image of the Madonna and in his painting “It Will Go Hard With Women Who Are With Child, or Have Children at the Breast, in Those Days” (Matthew 24:19), from his series The Last Days, uses an image of a woman breastfeeding, because of its universal connotation to the Madonna, to maximize the impact of his message. Here, she is breastfeeding her deformed baby as a mushroom cloud behind her rises over Manitoba. A black cloth fails to cover her face fully, exposing the bleeding sores on her now-hairless head, while her neck is covered in blistering ulcers. It is more commonly known as The Nuclear Age Madonna, but after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Kurelek’s homeland in 1986, the painting’s prophecy all but realized, it came to be known as the Chernobyl Madonna in memory of the victims. She is “ignoring even her own pain and grief with grim and quiet determination,” writes Ilse E. Friesen in Earth, Hell & Heaven in the Art of William Kurelek. This echoes media coverage hounded and fixated on Kennedy in the days and months after her husband’s assassination. “Sorrow and Strength” read a headline in the Chicago Sun-Times above an image of Kennedy at the funeral, veiled, looking as if she was ignoring even her own pain and grief with grim and quiet determination just as much as Kurelek’s Madonna.
In illustrating these similarities, I believe it is possible to begin to view Kurelek’s religious paintings, the thornier and trickier aspect of his oeuvre, in a more sympathetic way as Beck has achieved with her revision of Warhol’s Last Supper series. But too often, as Kurelek well knew and stated, both secular audiences and religious audiences would find fault with what he was doing. But Kurelek remains unimpeachable in his wanting to help people with his art and his story both during his lifetime and after. To which he displays an erudite understanding of the fickleness and shifts within ways of looking inherent to art scholarship, writing in Someone with Me, “I take refuge in the general knowledge that intuition and vision have always been legitimate sources of creativity, even if the vision is manic, as in the works of Goya, Bosch, and others, the world accepts their right to the expression of it, no one is forced to act on it – a picture is democratic.”