FACES AND PLACES: "The Passion" according to Kurelek (03/28/04)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

"The Passion" according to Kurelek

Long before Mel Gibson there was William Kurelek. Like Mr. Gibson, Kurelek experienced a Christian epiphany that moved him to turn his prodigious Ukrainian Canadian artistic talents to illustrating the Bible, specifically "The Passion of Christ According to the Gospel of St. Matthew."

It was a monumental task. Each sentence in Matthew's gospel was deserving of a separate painting. Kurelek began his passion project on New Year's Day, 1960, and continued at an unbelievable pace, one painting per week for three years.

Once completed, there remained the question of where to exhibit the paintings. Mr. Kurelek was hoping for a permanent public exhibition somewhere, anywhere. An impossible dream. Who would risk providing facilities for 160 paintings devoted to "The Passion of Christ" in the 1960s, a time when the atheistic Left in North America was in its ascendancy?

But the Lord works in wondrous ways. "The advice in the Bible, 'Give and it shall be given unto you' - good measure, shaken together and overflowing," wrote William Kurelek in the foreword to his art book, "was quite literally fulfilled in my experience." Gloria Ochitva, art director of St. Vladimir's Institute in Toronto displayed the Passion series in its entirety. Most impressed were Toronto's Ukrainian Art Gallery dealers, Olha and Mykola Kolankiwsky. They offered to purchase the entire collection and to house it in the Art Gallery and Museum they were planning to build in Niagara Falls, Ontario. And that's where Lesia and I saw it many years ago.

William Kurelek was born in Whitford, Alberta, in 1927, the son of a Ukrainian immigrant family. The family later moved to Stonewall, Manitoba, where his father farmed and William attended a one-room school house. He excelled in his school work, especially his art projects and his teacher, a Mrs. Houghton, urged him to consider becoming an artist. Inspired, young William continued to draw and paint and to dream of monumental art projects.

Kurelek completed high school and university in Winnipeg, attending Ukrainian night school at the same time. Father Mayevsky, described by Kurelek in his foreword as "a dedicated Ukrainian nationalist," also had a great influence on his later career. To improve his skills as an artist, Kurelek later attended the Ontario College of Art and the Instituto Allende in Mexico.

It was during a seven-year stay in England, where he was hospitalized for severe depression, that Kurelek experienced his epiphany. At the time, he was not a religious person. "Religion nauseated me for I was a practicing atheist," he wrote. "Yet sorrow sometimes remarries a person to God ... I re-examined Christianity; it took me three long years, so determined was I that no one would pull the wool over my eyes. Finally, about the time I did see the light, it also dawned on me that this was what the prompting to do a monumental series of illustrations had been leading up to! What better story in the wide whole world to illustrate than the Word of God itself?" Returning to the Catholic faith of his parents, Kurelek continued his spiritual quest with the "Passion."

Called the Breughel of the North by art critics, Kurelek's most popular depictions focused on the ethnic life of Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Irish, even Eskimos on the Canadian prairies. His works can be found in some 15 art museums and galleries in North America, including the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. In addition to "The Passion of Christ," some 17 volumes of his plates and illustrations have been published including the prize-winning "A Prairie Boy's Winter" (1973), "Lumberjack" (1974) and "Fox Mykyta" (1978). He died in 1977.

As mentioned earlier, Kurelek's 160 masterpieces are available in book form. Interested readers can order "The Passion of Christ" from the Niagara Falls Art Gallery and Children's Museum, 8058 Oakwood Drive, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada L2E 6S5 for $50 plus $15 shipping and handling.

Myron Kuropas's e-mail address is: [email protected].

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