Janusz
Dukszta’s home is a small one-bedroom, book and art-filled apartment on
Toronto’s Park Road. The floors of the apartment are carpeted with a patchwork
of haphazardly overlapping rugs that form a thickly rumpled surface underfoot. The
many bookcases have been adapted to serve as the support for a complex
installation of framed works of art that are variously hinged or slide mounted
or simply wire-hung on a nail. Despite the sheer number of books and art work,
floor length north facing windows and mirrors in the living room and dining
room make the apartment feel sun-lit and bright and larger than it really is. The
vibrancy of the colours and layering of the texts, both imagistic and literary,
produce a mildly intoxicating effect. One’s eye is constantly tempted to dart
from a colour in a painting to the bloom of a flower, from a patch of fabric on
a cushion to the title on the spine of a book.
His
apartment is a shrine to his life and passions. A psychiatrist by profession, a
politician by vocation, and a connoisseur and a collector by compulsion, the
books and art work that surround him testify to a socially engaged personality
and an adventurous intellect. His art collection features little that is
abstract, impressionistic or conceptual, reflecting instead his interests in
people and places. Of the hundreds of works of art collected by Dukszta over
the years, there are 70 group and solo portraits depicting him by himself or
with family and friends. Beginning with an early conté sketch from 1953 by Olaf von Brinkenhoff, through to Goran
Petkovski’s 2007 photographic documentation of his convalescent physiotherapy
sessions, Dukszta commissioned some 55 portraits of himself. As a group, the
commissioned portraits describe a life, from student to young professional, to
middle-aged politician, to maturity. These solo and group portraits are the
subject of this exhibition.
* * *
The
formal portrait is associated with power and prestige and mostly, it forms our
visual understanding of history’s influential people. The portraits of the men,
women and children of the past are studied in their roles as princes,
politicians, merchants and scholars and engaged as models of manners and self-awareness.
We look to these images of our notable forbearers for evidence of a kinship to
distant relatives with familiar human characteristics and their curious and
exotic fashions. But in the age of democracy and electronic media, a painted
portrait has come to seem something of an anachronism. A portrait painting now,
rather than communicating power and authority, is more often than not
commissioned on the occasion of a retirement or a leaving, to celebrate the
more socially acceptable virtues of sacrifice, service, orderly transition and
institutional continuity.
Photography
played a role in supplanting the official portrait, and also spawned its own
uniquely popular traditions of portraiture. Photography made it possible for
people of average means to have wedding pictures, military portraits and even
death portraits made as tokens of affection and as signifiers of family and
clan relations. Few homes today are absent the requisite confirmation,
graduation and formal athletic portraits that trace family ties and milestones.
The photographic portrait was also the basis for a whole new industry created
in the service of the identification and the tracking of individuals. Photographic
portraits were early on adopted as a tool of political and social control for
use in police records and passports. The methodical cataloguing of “mug shots”
reducing the subject to the sum of racial characteristics and physiognomic
variations, is now a humiliation experienced by everyone who wishes to obtain a
driver’s license, bus pass, health insurance card or a job in a department
store.
While the
painted portrait was gradually ceding its official status to the photographic
portrait, an avant-gardist or anti-academic portraiture began to emerge in its
place. Emphasizing the thematic or formal aspects of an art work over likeness
and character representation, the modern artist depicted colleagues and
contemporaries not as individuals of destiny, but rather as contingent, fragile
and ineffable subjects in time and space. Such portraits often held tenuous
connections with natural appearances, increasingly submerging the subject
beneath dense layers of surface references and abstraction. The inverse of the
portrait produced in the context of a bourgeois class relationship, the
modernist portrait traced a shared subjectivity between the artist and sitter.
Beyond
personal vanity, sentimental attachment, functional identification or formal
abstraction, portraits, whether painted, photographed or sculpted, still hold
out the promise of something more. A portrait can puncture the presence of
pride and appear to touch real human emotion. Portraits have the ability to
reveal the light of consciousness that the viewer shares with the subject and
in so doing probe the shared experience of subjectivity. Countenance and
bearing, the quality of the gaze, skin colour and other marks of youth and
maturity and aging speak to us about the engaged subject and the complex of
passion and intellect, memory and intention, physical vigour and frailty that
characterizes the human experience.
* * *
To a
certain extent, the Dukszta collection visits all of the varieties of modern
portraiture. As a patron, the default position for a commission is the
bourgeois or aristocratic portrait – a dominant/submissive and inherently
unequal relationship where the artist hopes to earn money by pleasing a patron.
If there are layers of conscious and unconscious motivation underlying a
private portrait commission, certainly the pleasure in having someone else
perform such a luxury would be one of them. Yet the commissioned portraits
suggest a more complex ongoing ironic and reflective stance vis-à-vis the
traditional patron/artist relationship.
An early
portrait by Paul Young from 1964 called Thalidomide features Dukszta
dressed in a suit and tie on a solid yellow ground. Dukszta is depicted as if
both of his arms had been amputated at his shoulders. This visual amputation is
underscored by his apparently awkward backward tilt, as if he had been seated
on a couch during the drafting of the image, which had been later removed in
the final painting. The effect of removing the arms and the supporting seat and
backrest makes Dukszta appear floating, handicapped and defenseless. Clearly
this is a portrait that does not flatter the subject by making him feel more
powerful or important, but rather seeks to illustrate the subject’s
vulnerability and fragility.
A second
portrait by Young entitled “Van Dyck” (1965) executed in the following
year features Dukszta this time with all his limbs. In contrast to Young’s
first painting, Dukszta is depicted as svelte, self-confident and
self-conscious – his right hand casually in his pocket, the left leaning on
what appears to be a plinth. The portrait consciously recalls the full-length
dual portrait of John Stuart and his brother, Bernard Stuart by 17th
century portraitist Anthony Van Dyck. In the Van Dyck portrait, the handsome
young princes are clearly masters of their domain, proudly displaying their
silk sleeves and capes with their arms prominently akimbo. The Paul Young
portrait makes reference to this ostentatious display by giving Dukszta’s right
arm a red and green striped sleeve. Additionally, where he rests his left elbow
on the support to his left, there appears a skull, and above the skull, the
head of a dark-skinned, hairless and apparently tormented soul. Above this head
is a third bust – a reiteration of the original portrait drawing of Dukszta. Behind
the standing Dukszta and to his left is a full-length figure in profile – a
spectre of melancholy and old age.
Paul
Young’s full-length portrait of the handsome young man haunted by melancholy
and the awareness of death is in the tradition of the memento mori. Young
had approached Dukszta as an artist in search of a stimulating subject (and
sale). While making reference to the bourgeois or aristocratic portrait, the
painting is the artist’s free interpretation of his subject’s character. Dukszta
attempted to influence the development of the portrait but met the resistance
of an artist with a strong vision. In placing the silhouette of a gun behind
the head of the Dukszta, the artist declared, “Of course you are going to kill
yourself one day. There is no question in my mind.” Indeed, in this portrait a
role reversal is in effect where the analyst has allowed himself to be the
analyzed.
It is
difficult to say when Dukszta got the bug – his subsequent history of
commissions is marked by the close relationships he formed with a select group
of artists who responded to his intellectual curiosity and adventurousness. He
made the persona, and specifically his persona, a problematic subject to be
explored through successive portraits and figurative allegories and he
succeeded in making it the artist’s subject as well. In the early 1970's
Dukszta was introduced to Phil Richards, at that time still a student at the
Ontario College of Art. Dukszta had been introduced to Richards through friends
who had discovered the artist in the annual art exhibition and sale in Nathan
Phillips Square in Toronto. The two discovered that they shared a mutual
admiration for the Italian Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca and formed
a friendship that was the basis for many commissions over the next 30 years.
Richards’s
first portrait of Dukszta was the drawing “Janusz as Byron” (1971). The
portrait shows Dukszta with the long hair, sideburns and handlebar moustache
characteristic of the early seventies. The profile pose recalls the dashing,
over the cape sideways glance, characteristic of the Romantic period and
especially those portraits of Lord Byron. The reference to Byron, the famous
aristocrat, poet, lover and adventurer goes beyond the pose, however. That
Dukszta and Richards would both see Dukszta as a dashing “homme engagé” like Byron, in the year that Dukszta is first elected
to the Ontario Legislature, is not surprising. And like the feminized images of
Byron, Richards gives Dukszta a coiffed and swept hair, long eye lashes and an attenuated
and elongated form to focus the viewer’s attention not only on the dynamism of
the personality but also on the beauty and delicacy of the features.
Richard’s
portraits of the 1970s depict Dukszta in a variety of guises and postures,
painted in a style characteristic of 70s figurative acrylic painting. Absent
the surface blending and scumbling of Paul Young’s oil portraits in the 60s,
the acrylic portraits have harder edges and broader areas of saturated flat
colour. In this respect, Richard’s paintings of the 70s have an illustrational
character that recall the British artist David Hockney or Canadian artist
Charles Pachter. In these paintings Dukszta is variously depicted as lounging
casually in the nude (“Naked One,” 1973), in a jacket and tie standing in front
of a Roman style mosaic (“Ambivalences - Dionysus and Apollo,” 1977), or
sitting cross legged and curiously diminished in an open collar shirt (“Janusz
in his office,” 1977). Relaxed and comfortable in his own skin, Dukszta again
invited the artist to reverse the tables and become the analyst in portraying
him as the romantic adventurer, the laid back hipster, the conflicted bourgeois
and as the vulnerable analyst.
It is
interesting to contrast the Richards’s portraits from the 70's with the silver
gelatin photographic portrait “Janusz in a Thoughtful Mood,” by Jim Vacola
(1997), which employs some of the conventions of modern photographic
portraiture: the causal posture with the back of the right hand distractedly
resting in the chin seems a so much more conservative image – or at least an image
created in the service of acceptable contemporary electoral politics. The
Vacola portrait tells us that the subject is relatively young and modern,
unpretentious, serious and thoughtful man – but little more.
The end
of Dukszta’s political career in 1981 coincided in Toronto with the emergence
of a new generation of artists. Loosely gathered under the international banner
of Neo-Expressionism, it was a generational response to the reductivist,
formalist and academic aesthetics of the post-war generation of artists and
critics. Neo-Expressionism represented a return to portraying the human body
and the recognizable world, influenced in measure by the example of the German
Expressionists of the first decade of the 20th century. This renewed
interest in representation helped to refocus interest on the work of earlier
figurative artists, as well as opening the way for the consideration of
outsider art, non western art and other non academic traditions. In Toronto,
this movement was given form primarily through the group of artists who called
themselves ChromaZone. Formed in 1981 by figurative painters Rae Johnson, H.P.
Marti, Andy Fabo, Oliver Girling, Sybil Goldstein, Tony Wilson and Stephen
Niblock, ChromaZone energized and influenced the Toronto and Canadian art world
for the following decade.
The
sudden proliferation of figurative artists in the early 1980s was an
opportunity for Dukszta to engage not only with a new generation of painters,
but also to work with painters who were prepared to consider the contemporary
possibilities within the genre of the portrait commission. Dukszta commissioned
paintings and portraits by several of the artists associated with ChromaZone
including Steven Andrews, Cathy Daley, Andy Fabo, Oliver Girling, Michael
Merrill, Evan Penny, Rae Johnson and Tony Wilson. Dukszta was introduced to the
members of the group of artists initially through Herb Tookey, co-owner of the
Cameron House hotel and tavern, which became both a home and meeting place for
many of the new generation of artists. There Dukszta met the ChromaZone artist
Rae Johnson whose controversial work at the time was on exhibit on the tavern’s
walls. Dukszta responded to the psychosexual themes being explored by Johnson
and bought a triptych from the show. His support for the young artists was
moral and financial – both buying their work and inviting them to his dinner
salons to dine with his progressive friends and colleagues in politics, media
and the arts.
Dukszta’s
withdrawal from politics and the return of figurative painting may have been a
happy alignment of the stars. Less than 12 years after having arrived as an
immigrant to Canada he had achieved the distinction of being an elected member
of the Ontario Legislature. The end of his political career marked his return
to private life as a psychiatrist and to the possibilities of a less
restrictive personal lifestyle. With the new generation of artists he was able
to explore issues of identity and to share his social, psychological and aesthetic
enthusiasms.
“Portrait
– Janusz” (1984) by Stephen Andrews contains some of these themes. The vinyl
hanging is dominated by a loosely rendered outline drawing of an empty suit and
tie. At the level of the suit’s leg is a smaller rendering of another empty
suit, this time handling (and being observed handling) two nude figures. At the
bottom of the painting is a rough outline drawing of Janusz, naked from the
chest up, holding up his left hand with what appears to be a stigmata. Bisecting
the painting diagonally is a large diamond back rattlesnake. It is hard not to
see this image as one of personal liberation – a release from the straight
jacket of public appearance and social propriety and an open investigation with
the artist examining Dukszta’s sexual, spiritual and social identity.
Andy
Fabo’s painting “Janusz and Laocoon” (1984) depicts Dukszta as an analyst and
as an observer. Alluding to Greek mythology and classical art, the painting is
an illustration of the psychiatrist at work, observing a patient wrestling with
a demon serpent. Oliver Girling also dealt with the theme of inner demons, this
time picturing Dukszta, like Jacob, wrestling with his own angel or demon
doppelganger in the painting “Warring Against Himself” (1985). Another painting
by Girling, “Impostor” (1989), addresses the issue of identity, where Dukszta
is depicted holding a television remote control while looking over his shoulder
at a video shoot featuring a naked reclining male. Dividing the top half of the
painting from the bottom half are large block letters spelling out the word
“IMPOSTOR,” suggesting the inauthenticity of a double life.
Probably
the most significant interpretation of Dukszta’s life after politics is Michael
Merrill’s adaptation of Hogarth’s “The Rake’s Progress,” into a series of three
large canvases in 1984. Clearly, Dukszta was no Thomas Rakewell, (Hogarth’s
protagonist), neither having inherited a fortune nor having squandered one in
such a spectacular fashion. Yet, Dukszta is both fond of recounting his humble
arrival in Canada leading to his ascent to membership in Ontario’s political
class, and reflective about the events leading up to the end of that career. In
this context, having Merrill depict him as a modern day Thomas Rakewell is both
self-deprecating ironic.
Merrill’s
three scenes are “In His Glory,” “The Last Supper” and “Janusz in Bedlam.” “In
His Glory” is modeled on the painting “The Heir,” where Hogarth depicted Thomas
Rakewell being fitted for a new suit of clothes during the reading of his
father’s will. Merrill depicts Dukszta in a well-tailored pinstripe suit in the
process of being painted by his portraitists from the ChromaZone group, Oliver
Girling, Brian Burnett and Rae Johnson. Two additional references in this work
seem to suggest an undercurrent of disquiet. While being immortalized by his
“court painters,” Dukszta thumbs a book by Proust. Dukszta has read Marcel
Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” more than once, identifying with the
novel’s examination of the world of manners and social climbing in late 19th
century Paris. Also in the painting, looking over Janusz’s shoulder is the face
of the existential writer and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, the author of
“Nausea” and “Being and Nothingness.” Sartre’s existential ideas defined human
beings as diminished gods, victims of their own freedom, where instead of a
judgmental god, we instead mete out the most exquisite punishment to each
other, as we probe the memory of our sins, desires, and past hurts.
The
second canvas in the series “The Last Supper,” depicts eleven people, including
Dukszta, around a table. The table in the painting seems to be either ovular or
round, but the figures grouped around it are all facing toward the picture
plane as though arranged on a proscenium stage. The eleven member group and the
horizontal organization are really the only features of the painting which
recall Leonardo’s “Last Supper.” The image portrays a rather happy dinner party
with slightly too much wine, but that too may have been reason enough for
Dukszta to give it religious references. The work seems to have been a loosely
based conflation of two paintings by Hogarth, “The Orgy” and “The Morning
Lévee,” both of which are quoted as hanging pictures in the background right
and left of the painting and both of which comment on hedonistic excess and
indulgence – quite the opposite of imminent mortal sacrifice.
The
“disciples” in this case are the important members of Dukszta’s family and
social life at one of their many dinner parties. Dukszta, in the centre right
of the painting, has one arm around his wife Janet Churnin. To his right are
his brother Andrzej and Maureen Duffy and Basia and Andrzej Jordan Rozwadowski
and Maureen Duffy. To his left are Janusz’s sister-in-law Annette Dukszta and
Frank and Marilyn Vasilkioti. Winston and Mary Jane Young are at opposite ends
of the painting – a compositional solution that was resented by the Youngs and
caused a rupture in the friendship. Mary Jane Young asked that she and Winston
be altered or removed from the painting but neither Janusz nor Michael Merrill
was prepared to change the painting and the friendship was irreparably damaged.
Such was the closeness of the social group orbiting around Janusz Dukszta and
his brother Andrzej that it had the power to generate such a strong emotional
response from a fictitious seating arrangement.
The final
painting in the series, “Janusz in Bedlam,” based on Hogarth’s “Bedlam,” is a
dystopic vision of Dukszta’s last days as mad, naked and despondent, surrounded
by a collage of images of the suffering of Christ. The tragic outcome that this
last painting in the series represents recalls the Van Dyck portrait by Paul
Young ten years earlier, where the artist prophesied a dark future for his
patron. The allusions in the painting to Christ’s crucifixion also recall
Stephen Andrews’s painting of the naked Dukszta displaying the stigmata – a
theme of Christian symbolism that would be revisited in a number of major
commissions by Phil Richards in the 1990s. “Bedlam” remains strangely anomalous
– the first two paintings of the series seeming to far better characterize the
stylish and social Janusz Dukszta that most people encounter. However, “Bedlam”
is critical to understanding Dukszta’s desire to examine, and have others
examine, what he calls his dark side.
Following
the completion of the Rake’s Progress, Dukszta proposed to Merrill to undertake
a series of paintings of scenes from the life of Christ. Merrill’s initial reluctance
to take on the commission eventually gave way to Dukszta’s enthusiasms and
Merrill produced a series of six canvases depicting the Baptism of Christ, the
Sermon on the Mount, the Temptation of Christ, the Agony in the Garden, the
Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Unlike the Rake’s Progress, the person of
Janusz Dukszta is largely absent from the series, Christ being imagined here
instead as a young and physically fit rock star. Dukszta, however, makes a
cameo appearance as the voyeuristic reflection in the pool enjoying the
seduction and temptation of handsome young Jesus.
Religious
allegory and group portraits of family and friends played an important role in
Dukszta’s commissions. Dukszta credits his brother Andrzej as a collaborator
and “enabler” in his art collecting, recalling that is was Andrzej who
suggested the early portrait of the two brothers by Barbara Mercer (1963). Andrzej
Dukszta and Barbara Mercer were friends and the artist had asked Andrzej to sit
for a portrait. Andrzej, however, insisted that it should be a double portrait
of the two brothers. The bond between the brothers was very close and over the
years purchased and commissioned artwork was presented by Janusz both as gifts
for Andrzej and his family, and as a form of repayment for outstanding debts. Janusz
commissioned Rae Johnson to paint a portrait of the two brothers in “Janusz
Sitting on Sofa, Andrzej Behind,” (1982) and Phil Richards painted “Family
Portrait at Andrzej’s” (1985), depicting Andrzej and his children Monika,
Witold and Tala with a porphyry bust of Janusz. “Two Brothers Take a Moonlight
Stroll” (1990), also by Richards, depicts the close relationship shared by the
two men, while sister-in-law Annette gazes out across the city and her son Adam
sits in the lower right hand corner of the canvas.
Motivated
to reprise Michael Merrill’s “Last Supper,” Dukszta began talking to friends
about a “Lamentation,” a reinterpretation of the Botticelli “Lamentation” in
the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. It would be a large religious allegorical
commission featuring the deceased Dukszta lamented by his close family and
friends. Tony Wilson, Dukszta’s companion at the time was to have carried out
the commission, but disagreements over the pace of the development of the
commission led Dukszta to instead ask New York based-artist Yves Tessier to
take over. Tessier worked closely with Dukszta’s friend Susan Teskey to map and
compose the various significant people in the Dukszta orbit, also conscripting
Andrzej’s daughters Monika and Tala to complete the four panel, 17 foot long
mural which was painted in the living room of Dukszta’s apartment.
The
“Lamentation” by Yves Tessier (1990) depicts Dukszta laid out in the middle of
the painting, dramatically foreshortened with his head in the near foreground
and his feet, caressed by Mary Magdalene (Susan Teskey), extending into the
imaginary space of picture, while thirteen other friends and family observe the
scene. Picking up from the religious themes he had developed with Stephen
Andrews, Michael Merrill and Phil Richards, Dukszta had decided he wanted to be
dead in the painting. In subsequent years Dukszta commissioned Tessier to do
two more works representing the Duksza orbit. “Eight Heads” (1998) is a series
of small painted terra cotta busts of varying scale representing Janusz,
Andrzej and Annette Dukszta, Eleanor Beattie, nephew Adam, Janet Churnin and
Jack VanDuyvenbode. A recently completed commission of small al fresco
portraits in plaster by Tessier features the profiles of Janusz, Adam, Annette,
Eleanor, Susan Teskey and Max Streicher (2009).
In the
1980s, Phil Richards’s style had evolved from his Hockneyesque broad flat areas
of saturated colour characteristic of his work of the in the 1970s, into
figures that began to appear more sculpted and spaces that were perpectivally
deeper and more dramatic. His earlier, simplified rendering gave way to a photo
realistic attention to detail and surfaces. These developments in Richard’s
style appealed to Dukszta’s interest in Renaissance and Baroque art history and
his increasing appetite for more, and more elaborate commissions, beginning a
series of commissions quoting art historical styles and allegorical programs. Notable
in this context is the portrait of Dukszta entitled “Janusz Reflection” (1985),
quoting directly Raphael’s “Madonna della Sedia,” executed in the same year as
“Portrait of Andrzej’s Family.” In “Altared States” (1990), Dukszta, the
traveler and art connoisseur and fan of all things carnal is depicted as a 17th
century aristocrat, standing in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria before
Bernini’s famous sculptural and architectural installation, “The Ecstasy of St.
Theresa.” The constructed painting has its own light source and is remarkable
for the rich rendering of the scagliola in the flanking pilasters and
entablature and the rendering of the great folds of the apparently yellow cape,
which is in reality, a raincoat. In “Janusz as Bernini” it appears that Dukszta
has been interrupted from his reading of the guide book to the artwork, to turn
and glance at the viewer, while a red curtain appears to have been pulled aside
to afford him a private viewing of Bernini’s strange and erotic altar piece.
Adaptations
of well-known scenes from Renaissance and Baroque art continued to be an
important part of Richards’s commissions through the 1990s. “Janusz and Jack”
(1995), is a play on Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Theresa,” replacing St. Theresa
with Dukszta and the angel of love with Janusz’s friend Jack VanDuyvenbode. “Roman
Holiday” (1995) references Raphael’s “School of Athens” (including a cameo of
the artist seated with his sketch pad in the lower left corner.) The major work
of this time is a hinged, two-sided, polyptych by Richards entitled “Six Scenes
from the life of the Virgin” (1997) that features scenes of “Mary and St.
Anne,” “The Presentation at the Temple,” “The Annunciation,” “The Marriage at
Cana” and “The Pieta.” Modeling the figures are Janusz’s friends Chloe Griffin
as Mary and her mother Krystyne Griffin as St. Anne. Friends Jack VanDuyvenbode
modeled the naked angel Gabriel and Alex Williams the business-suited Jesus of
Nazareth and the Christ in Pieta respectively, while Janusz and Andrzej model
themselves.
“Scenes
from the Life of the Virgin” is the most elaborate and richly appointed of
Dukszta’s commissions. Each panel is eccentric in its shape – constructed to
accommodate the details of the images within and individually framed and
gilded. Each scene is set in lush contemporary Edenic environments and
interiors filled with white hollyhocks and lilies, scarlet satins, cerulean
blue skies and gilded surfaces. The biblical characters are modeled by young,
physically attractive people, whose contemporary nakedness sexualizes the
otherwise religious Christian narrative. With the side panels fully opened, the
work is dominated by large centre panel “Annunciation.” A blonde and naked
angel Gabriel, seen from behind, reveals himself to the naked Virgin. Startled,
she vainly clutches her breast in an attempt to cover herself. In the right
panel, in a reconfiguration of the Marriage at Cana, Mary, dressed in a
strapless evening gown, empties the last drop from a bottle of Veuve Cliquot
champagne, while being watched by Jesus in the person of a dark haired
gentleman in a suit. The side panel closes to reveal the climactic Pieta. Mary
supports the dead Christ between her legs while the scene is illuminated by
Andrzej, holding a lantern and revealed by Janusz, pulling back a scarlet robe.
The lantern as the single light source intensifies the visual drama, sharply
illuminating the features of Mary, Jesus, the two brothers and the broad
expanse of the dead Christ’s flesh. Everything else falls off sharply into
darkness. Revealed is the flesh of the mother and of the son – the central
figures of the Christian drama, seen as objects of worship and carnal desire.
Around
the turn of the millennium, the portraits of Dukszta begin to change. They
cease representing the dynamic, mercurial, mischievous and feline character
that we have learned to know from portraits past and instead, begin to profile
the aging subject. “Janusz as Father,”(1997) by Phil Richards, “Janusz
Deconstructed,” (2001) by Fabrizio Perozzi and Bryan McBurney’s photograph
“Determination” (2005) are portraits which appear to contrast the drive to live
with the inevitable process of aging. It is hard too, not to see the
photographs of Vincenzo Pietropaolo, “Janusz and His Books,” (2005) and Bryan
McBurney “The Light Shines on Janusz,” (2006) as expressions of saudade,
elegies to the acquisitions and accomplishments of a brighter past.
Dukszta’s
life threatening illness in 2006 and his painfully slow recovery is documented
by Phil Richards in “In the Hospital” (2006), where an apparently impatient and
glum Dukszta reads a newspaper in a hospital bed. On the bedside table is a
vase of flowers, a tomato and an exercise weight. His long illness and
convalescence caused his muscles to atrophy significantly requiring substantial
follow-up exercise and physiotherapy. A session in his home was documented by
Goran Petkovski in a series of 15 black and white photographs in “The
Physiotherapy Session” (2007). Looking at the ravages visited upon both the
body and the will in these photographs, one cannot help but wonder if this is
the same “Bedlam” Dukszta had in mind some 22 years before.
Over five
decades Janusz Dukszta commissioned 70 portraits of himself, his immediate
family and extended family of friends and companions. It is a body of
portraiture that is a very personal record of the man, the friends and family
that surround him, and the ideas and passions that accompanied him through the
stages of his life. The commissions are a primary subject, but are also the
artifacts of Dukszta’s personal, professional and intellectual engagements. They
are a testament to his commitment to aesthetic engagement – an engagement with
the artist and to a life informed and reflected by art. His accumulated
commissions record the succeeding stages of his life’s passage, documenting his
aspirations and fears, his desires and his melancholies, and the significant
people who have played a role in it. With the artists he adored and debated and
entertained, and with his family and friends as willing accomplices, Dukszta
became the co-author of the artistic program that is his life.
Gordon
Hatt, January 2010
Notes
1. Janusz
Dukszta was born in 1932 in Lida, Poland. His father fled Poland for Great
Britain after the Russian annexation in 1939 to be joined by the family in
London after the war in 1946. He studied medicine in Dublin, Ireland. After
finishing his studies he immigrated to Canada in 1959 where he specialized in
psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Dukszta was the NDP member of
provincial parliament in the Ontario Legislature for the west-end Toronto
riding of Parkdale from 1971 to 1981. Following the 1981 election he returned
to work at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre in Toronto.
2. The
best known images of the early abstract genre are Matisse’s portraits and busts
of Jeanette for example, Portrait of Madame Matisse with a Green Stripe,
1905, Statens Museum for Kundst, Copenhagen, and Picasso’s Portrait of
Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, Art Institute of Chicago.
3. Paul
Young was born in Toronto and attended the Ontario College of Art from 1955 to
1958. An earlier portrait of Dukszta by Paul Young, Thalidomide, set the
stage for the Van Dyck portrait.
4. Cf.
Anthony Van Dyck, Lord John Stuart and his Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart,
National Gallery, London, ca. 1638.
5. The
theme of melancholy is underscored here with the ominous silhouette of the gun
behind the head of the spectre. According to Dukszta, Young declared that
Dukszta’s fate would be a death by suicide, and painted this reference into the
portrait.
6. The memento
mori (Latin: "Remember you will die") is a genre of art
featuring symbols of death and transience. Memento mori references in
art trace back to the Middle Ages and become a reoccurring theme in 17th
century painting: cf. Nicholas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego, 1637, Museé
du Louvre, and frequently found in Dutch still life painting such as Pieter
Claesz , Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628, Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
7. Communicated
orally by Janusz Dukszta.
8. “The
gallery's home was in Oliver Girling's studio space at 320 Spadina Avenue. For
the next two years, ChromaZone defiantly enforced their unusual mandate: to
show figurative painting, practice inclusivity, be artist-supported and above
all be spontaneous, alive and fun. Donna Lypchuk, Chromaliving,
unpublished manuscript, 2009.
9. Herb
Tookey was a PhD candidate in psychology and a student of Dukszta’s and later
part of the full time staff at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre.
10. Rae
Johnson’s paintings were based on Polaroids made during a Halloween party at
the Cameron in 1981. The paintings were installed in the back room a month
later. Ursula Pflug wrote an article in the second issue of NOW magazine
entitled "Art and Artsies meet at the Cameron," and the exhibition
was reviewed by Jean Randolph in Vanguard magazine. The series of eight
paintings depicted the band “The Government,” and Tim Jocelyn and Andy Fabo
dancing and a triptych representing Oliver Girling and a female friend posing
nude upstairs in the Cameron. The triptych was purchased Dukszta and installed
in a prominent place in his apartment.
11.
Represented in “Lamentation” are Tala Dukszta, Thade Rachwa≈, Janet Churnin,
Jean Lee, Witold Dukszta, Vince and Julianna Pietropaolo, the artist Yves
Tessier, Susan Teskey, Anthony McFarlane, Eleanor Bettie, Andrzej Dukszta,
Monika Dukszta, Adam Dukszta and Stanis≈awa Dukszta.
12.
Uncharacteristically, when asked why, the analyst is at a complete loss to
explain. Communicated orally by Janusz Dukszta.