ART AND IMAGES IN PSYCHIATRY SECTION EDITOR: JAMES C. HARRIS, MD The Maze The inverted [burr] is I as a child, trapped painfully between two aspects of my father, the one I hated and the one I worshipped.1(p4) ILLIAM KURELEK (1927-1977) WAS THE SON OF Ukrainian immigrants to Canada and was W raised on rural farms in Alberta and Manitoba. Unsuited to farm work, he bore the brunt of his father’s frustration in the difficult years of the Great Depression and felt contempt from his father about his lack of man- liness. These experiences affected him deeply and led him to withdraw into himself.2 Chronically depressed, Kurelek went to London, En- gland, in 1953 to pursue his art education and to seek psy- chiatric treatment at the Maudsley Hospital. Frustrated by his slow progress in psychotherapy, he completed an au- tobiographical painting, The Maze, to draw attention to his suffering and to show his physicians that he was an inter- esting specimen.3 Likening it toT. S. Eliot’s poem The Hol- low Men (“Paralyzed force, gesture without motion”(4p60)), Figure. Kurelek, Out of the Maze, 1971. he drew “a kind of pictorial package of all my emotional from The Maze, its compartments now empty, lies dis- problems in a single painting.... Itwasmyfirm belief that carded in a luxuriant green meadow. Kurelek and his wife my problems stemmed from my father’s farm failures, his and children, their hands drawn together in prayer, enjoy habit of taking out his frustrations on me.... Myhelp- a picnic. Although all seems calm, storm clouds arise to less dependence on the doctors was represented symboli- the right. Kurelek had apocalyptic fears at this time in his cally by a white rat knotted up in the middle of the life and was preoccupied with a nuclear holocaust2,5;he maze.”2(p89) Several psychiatrists, among them G. Morris shared these concerns with his former psychiatrist, Dr Carstairs, MD, and Sir Aubrey Lewis, are shown observ- Carstairs, then a professor of psychiatry at the University ing him in a test tube.2(p90) An adjacent panel shows Kurelek of Edinburgh in Scotland. Carstairs had called for a con- with a knife in his right hand looking at a skeletal left arm temporary artist, like Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) had cut to the bone; this may relate to the self-cutting episode, been in his time, “who can turn his innocent eye upon the provoked by a sense of unreality and his desire to feel that nightmare realities of this era with its threat of nuclear an- he was a real human being with a real skeleton and made nihilation.”3(p175) Kurelek sought that role in his life2 and of flesh and bones, that resulted in his hospital admission. in works such as Nuclear Age Madonna (1971).6 The Maze depicts Kurelek’s desperation. A man’s skull Influenced by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569) and is shown in cross section, split open and lying on a barren Bosch, Kurelek painted innocent scenes of children at play plain facing a wheat field. The “thoughts made in his and religious themes; by the time of his death, he was one head”1(p1) are compartmentalized in scenes from his past of the most successful Canadian artists of his generation. and his present life in a maze with no exit. Five groups of His paintings of immigrant communities and illustrated unhappy thoughts are shown: childhood rejection, fear of books for children have become Canadian classics. war, fear of sexual urges, social anxiety, and the museum of hopelessness. The rest of his body is shown on the right. The hands and feet are viewed through the eye sockets, nose, James C. Harris, MD and mouth, tapering off into the distance and the outside world. This world is represented by an ominous yellow sky REFERENCES with a horde of locusts hovering over the wheat, appar- ently representing insect plagues that tormented the Kurelek 1. Kurelek W. The Maze. Beckenham, England: Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and family in the 1930s. Museum; 1998. Diagnosed as having personality disorder2(p92) and de- 2. Morley P. Kurelek, a Biography. Toronto, Ontario: Macmillan of Canada; 1986. 3. Kurelek W. Someone With Me: The Autobiography of William Kurelek. Niagara Falls, pression, Kurelek was discharged following treatment and Ontario: Niagara Falls Art Gallery, Kurelek Collection; 1988. returned to Canada, where he became a widely renowned 4. Eliot TS. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam, Inc; artist. He attributed his recovery primarily to his religious 1998. 5. Howard R. Psychiatry in pictures. Br J Psychiatry. 2001;179:A18. conversion to Catholicism while in England. Nearly 20 years 6. Friesen I. Earth, Hell and Heaven in the Art of William Kurelek. Oakville, Ontario: later, he painted Out of the Maze (Figure). The split skull Mosaic Press; 1996. (REPRINTED) ARCH GEN PSYCHIATRY/ VOL 61, OCT 2004 WWW.ARCHGENPSYCHIATRY.COM 973 ©2004 American Medical Association. All rights reserved. Downloaded From: https://jamanetwork.com/ on 09/26/2021 ration of steroid hormones for use in radioimmunoassay. Anal Lett. 1972;5: Disorders, Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association; 509-517. 1994. 40. Jiang NS, Ryan RJ. Radioimmunoassay for estrogens: a preliminary 46. Schmidt PJ, Nieman LK, Danaceau MA, Adams LF, Rubinow DR. Differential be- communication. Mayo Clin Proc. 1969;44:461-465. havioral effects of gonadal steroids in women with and in those without premen- 41. Ito T, Horton R. Dihydrotestosterone in human peripheral plasma. J Clin Endo- strual syndrome. N Engl J Med. 1998;338:209-216. crinol Metab. 1970;31:362-368. 47. 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Horm Behav. 1978;11:202-208. function, mood, muscle strength, and body composition parameters in hypo- 45. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental gonadal men. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2000;85:2839-2853. William Kurelek’s Description of The Maze The Maze 1 depicts Kurelek’s spirit, 5 groups of unhappy thoughts, and the out- side world: “Spirit: The white rat curled up in the central cavity represents my spirit (I suppose). He is curled up with frustration from having run the pas- sages so long without hope of escaping this maze of unhappy thoughts. They proceed as follows: 1. Home Upbringing (top and top right): I, as a small boy, rejected by my school mates; my fear of school bullies and the ridicule of school girls; fear of being rejected by my father and losing the companionship, food, shelter, and warmth of a home; my father’s philosophy, the survival of the crafti- est, pointed out by the plight of the foolish fish. 2. Political (top left): My one time attachment to Ukranian nationalism...theUkraine being raped by Rus- sia; my subsequent association with members of the Peace Movement, a Com- munist front organization; the end result of over-zealous political leaning, WAR (my physical fear of it). 3. Sexual (middle left): The merry-go-round of rag dolls and wallflowers represent my lack of feeling and direction for dancing; the bull, dragging along his impediment and galloping towards the cow in heat, repre- sents my fear of the animal side of sex in me. 4. My Social Relations (bottom left): Choice between the hospital, with its ordeal of the panel (I in the test tube), interpreted in two ways, as a benevolent conspiracy, or as a malevolent perse- cution: or the outside world—I continuing to be the outcast, skirting the smooth level highway of life in the ditch behind the hedge, sensitive to being seen in the light. 5. Life and Death (middle and bottom right): (A) Museum of Hope- lessness being life [painting of a mushroom cloud] and (B) the conveyer belt bearing the victim (me) inexorably to be crushed by the roller Death, I being one third there by the clock and (C) the last picture of me trying to convince myself that I am really mortal, using the secondhand information (the draw- ing) rather than examining the skeleton or coffin. Outside World (right-hand side of painting): . spiritual and cultural barrenness....Theloosened red ribbon [linking the 2 halves of the skull] bound together the head of a T. S. Eliot Hollow Man, and was untied by psychotherapy...butsince the outside world is still unappealing, the rat remains inert. Before the head was opened, burrs (bitter experiences) choked the throat and pricked the sensitive under- side of the tongue, and when it was opened the sawdust shavings (tasteless edu- cation) spilled out from the top of the tongue: mixed with the sawdust are sym- bols of (to me) equally tasteless Art, painting, literature, and music. The burrs also represent, in the eye socket, the successive evaluations of my character by any friend during the process of acquaintance, all repellent but hopeful till the last, when the heart is discovered to be a grub.