The Maze (painting)
The Maze is a painting that Canadian artist William Kurelek produced while a patient at Maudsley Hospital in London.
Kurelek was born in 1927 into a Ukrainian immigrant community in Alberta, Canada, and suffered through childhood from the oppression of his farmer father.
[3] The rat is wound up and inert, having run through the maze of the skull chewing a piece of each scrap of paper and finding it undigestible.
[4] The skull in the painting has been opened up by ribbon, to suggest the work of the doctors at the mental hospital, attempting to make a proper diagnosis.
He writes, in his autobiography, "Now clean me out, I challenge you scientists, and put me back together again – a happy, balanced, mature, fulfilled personality.
"[5] After being disenchanted with several art schools in Canada and Mexico, Kurelek took a cargo ship from Montreal to London.
Those were to finish his art schooling and to be admitted into a psychiatric hospital, where he may find a cure for his depression and his chronic eye pains.
[7] In his autobiography, Kurelek writes that, leading up to the painting of The Maze, he was growing disillusioned with psychotherapy and was desperate for a cure.
Kurelek writes, "Just as the protest marchers of today despair of attracting attention by peaceful means, and sometimes set themselves alight with gasoline or do physical damage to property, I decided violence against myself was the only recourse I now had."
One evening Kurelek cut his arm, and when he revealed this to Cormier the next day, the doctor inquired into the circumstances but didn't panic.
Kurelek felt very strongly that he had to justify his being there for the doctors, so he commenced painting The Maze, "depicting all [his] psychic problems in a neat package.
"[9] The following interpretations of The Maze were provided by Kurelek himself, in his autobiography Someone with Me and his accounts for the Bethlem Royal Hospital, which houses the painting today.
Kurelek writes, "this refers to my belief that my problems stemmed in a large part from my father taking out on me his raging impotence in the face of farming failures.
Kurelek compares this to that which he and other children would leave in the fields, and for him it has Swiftian and Shakespearean implications: "the world is a dung heap and the human race is a cloud of flies crawling over it to suck a living out.
The woman, representing Ukraine itself, is about to be raped by Russia, and her plight is a depiction of Kurelek's one-time attachment to Ukrainian nationalism.
He writes, "The ones who yell the loudest for liberty are the biggest oppressors when they succeed in overthrowing the current conservative system.
"[17] Kurelek also called this panel a visualization of "[his] father's philosophy, the survival of the craftiest, pointed out by the plight of the foolish fish.
Kurelek also claims it represents "the cruelty of the mid-European parent who figures he owns his children because he gave them life.
Kurelek calls them rag dolls with smiles sewn on their faces, unable to actually feel pleasure in the experience on account of depersonalization.
The subject passes several rays of light breaking through the hedge, in his struggle to move alongside the crowd.
Kurelek believed that science could provide a cure-all for all troubles, but at the same time found the doctors' constant watch over him to be sometimes unpleasant.
He writes, "The doctors who dress in hospital whites are represented in their true color - black, just like birds of prey."
He represented them as not actually caring if the subject is cured or not, though later he claimed this was a false idea, and attributed it to his father's phobia of hospitals.
Many have cited Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder as influences for Kurelek's work in general, The Maze specifically.
[27] In his account of the painting in his autobiography Someone with Me, Kurelek cites Jonathan Swift as a major influence on the work, as well as Shakespeare.
In the end, the painting was "severely cropped and modified, ostensibly to highlight the most striking images inherent in the work.
