A psychiatrist, politician and patron of the arts, Janusz Dukszta was a man of many faces – literally. His two-bedroom apartment, on the edge of Toronto’s exclusive Rosedale neighbourhood, was filled with paintings, many of them portraits of himself, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends and family. They were hung everywhere, higgledy-piggledy, on walls, suspended from the ceiling, or mounted three-deep over packed bookshelves.
Toronto psychiatrist Janusz Dukszta threw parties at his home where guests who might not otherwise meet would gather.Vincenzo Pietropaolo/Supplied
It was not narcissism that prompted Dr. Dukszta to commission such portraits, but rather a desire to support artists who were starting their careers, and a deep-seated curiosity about the process of transformation and transcendence. How would others see him? Serious and natty in one of his many Savile Row-tailored suits, or posing in the nude, it did not matter. As he told this newspaper in 2010, “I am much more interesting than a vase or a mandolin.”
He was.
Bob Rae, the former Ontario premier and member of Parliament, who now serves as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, recalls dinner parties at Dr. Dukszta’s home that were more a provocative invitation to polite debate than anything else. Guests from all political and social backgrounds were gathered together: Conservatives, New Democrats and Liberals, film directors, artists, athletes, professors and firebrands who might never have met otherwise.
“The only requirement was that you had to be a free thinker,” said Mr. Rae, who received advice from Dr. Dukszta, a former New Democrat MPP for the west-end Toronto riding of Parkdale, when Mr. Rae became Ontario’s premier in 1990. “Janusz knew everyone, and everyone knew him. He was totally charming, with a great sense of humour and a twinkle in his eye, but he was also a serious person who was committed to social democracy, and to tolerance and respect for all.”
Fela Grunwald, one of the major Queen Street gallerists at the time, noted that the food and wine were always secondary. “Good conversation was what he served,” she said. He liked to provoke people – in a good way.
Phil Richards, one of the country’s foremost portrait painters, first did a commission for Dr. Dukszta in 1971, while Mr. Richards was still a student at the Ontario College of Art. The artist went on to paint over 20 more portraits of his friend and patron, many of them reflecting the drama of the High Baroque period in the 17th century because Dr. Dukszta felt that time best suited his personality.
“He liked saying controversial things, but he was kind and generous, a lover of life, art, culture and history, who sometimes struggled with depression and existential questions but even near the end of his life, continued to commission from much younger artists,” Mr. Richards said. “He had a tremendous influence over all our lives. He supported me when there was no one else out there doing that.”
Dr. Dukszta died in Toronto on July 31 at the age of 93. After the funeral, Mr. Richards returned home to open up a file folder that contained over 50 renditions of his friend that he had done over the years.
“With his death, it is the end of an era. The fact is, Janusz was the era, because there was no one else out there who supported up and coming artists like he did.”
Dr. Dukszta died in Toronto on July 31 at the age of 93Vincenzo Pietropaolo/Supplied
Janusz Dukszta was born on May 27, 1932, just outside Lida, in what was then the northeast of Poland. He was the first of Stanislaw and Stanislawa Dukszta’s two sons; his father, who came from a noble, destitute Lithuanian family, was a state official with ambitions for political office while his mother was a schoolteacher with leftist leanings who emphasized the importance of books – a lesson both of their sons would carry with them throughout their lives.
Young Janusz grew up playing in the ruins of a 13th-century castle, where he would imagine the battles and celebrations that occurred within its crumbling stone walls. At that time, he also fell in love with dramatic Baroque architecture, art and music, Western civilization’s response to the calm and more emotionally reserved works of the Renaissance.
In the late 1930s, war upended the family. With the German army advancing, his father managed to escape to London, where he served, first in the Polish army, then in the country’s ministry of education. Left behind, Stanislawa, Janusz and his younger brother, Andrzej, had to fend for themselves in the midst of what would become known as the “bloodlands.” In this infamous European region, 14 million people would be gassed, shot or starved to death over the course of 12 years by either the Nazis or Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
In 1941, a tipoff from a Jewish neighbour saved them from being deported to Russia. (Over three years, more than one million Poles were sent to remote parts of the country in an effort to repress them and turn them into proper Soviet citizens.) Then, the Germans arrived to spread their own kind of terror.
The family heard gunfire and screams as Jews who lived in a nearby ghetto were killed. Young Janusz helped dig graves for the human victims and bloated carcasses of animals that were discarded. There were lessons in both cruelty and compassion – ones the young boy would remember for the rest of his life.
After the war, the mother and two sons reunited in 1946 with Stanislaw in London. Stanislawa taught in Polish resettlement camps while she continued to foster the boys’ cultural education, taking them to museums, classical music concerts and the opera.
In 1948, the mother died from cancer. The boys, bereft, got scholarships awarded to families of Poles who had served in the Allied armies, and landed at Christ’s College, Blackheath, southwest of London.
At one point, encouraged by his father, the older son left England to study medicine in Dublin, eventually ending up in New York State to do his residency. And in 1960, he finally moved to Toronto, where he decided that psychiatry would be his specialty.
In 1965, Dr. Dukszta began his first job at what was then known as the Queen Street Hospital for the Mentally Ill, now one of the main sites for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). There, he thought he could make a difference, helping those who were cast off from society, and he spent much of the rest of the decade campaigning to deinstitutionalize patients and give them some say over their own treatment.
At the same time, he knew that once the patients were released, they often had no homes, work or family to turn to. So, he decided a complete overhaul of the system was needed. To that end, he turned to provincial politics, where change could be made.
In 1969, he lost in his first attempt to become the New Democrat MPP for Parkdale, the riding in which the Queen Street hospital was located. Two years later, he ran again, this time successfully, but the transition from physician to politician was not as easy as he expected. Although a good listener, he had to learn how to speak confidently in public, and to knock on strangers’ doors in order to sell himself as a candidate.
In his 10 years of representing Parkdale, Dr. Dukszta fought for a systemic overhaul of the healthcare system, and he pushed for proactive, prevention-oriented services in the community. As a socialist, he believed class was the most important factor in society, that the have-nots were always at risk of being left behind and that worker health and safety had to be prioritized. He also advocated for government-funded dental care, and more support for children’s mental health services.
Justice Mary Hogan, who recently retired from the Ontario Court of Justice, first met Dr. Dukszta when she was working as a lawyer at the new Parkdale Community Legal Services Clinic. She said he was always there to support the clinic’s work with the most vulnerable and marginalized in the community, and that his work on legislative initiatives for change made a difference for everyone throughout the province.
Although as a psychiatrist he had advocated for deinstitutionalization, he criticized the government for going about it the wrong way, for there was no real plan to reintegrate those who were released into society or to support them in any way.
In 1981, Dr. Dukszta decided not to run for office again. Instead, he went back to Queen Street to continue the work he had started back in the 1960s, and to fight for the rights of patients to participate in their own treatment and for the local and provincial governments to devote greater resources to community care.
In 2010, the University of Toronto Art Gallery showcased 70 of his commissioned portraits in an exhibition called Portrait of a Patron – The Dukszta Collection. The man of many faces was at once revealed, elusive and embellished – a man who loved life, loved his family and friends and was passionate in his quest to change the world.
He leaves his husband, Max Streicher; sister, Izabella Wilczynski (from his father’s second marriage); one nephew and four nieces.
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