The British Journal of Psychiatry (2001) 179: 0
© 2001 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Psychiatry in pictures
ROBERT HOWARD
2001: A Mind Odyssey is a celebration of the arts, psychiatry and
the mind.
For further information see http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/campaigns/2001/ or
e-mail: awedderburn@rcpsych.ac.uk
The Maze is an autobiographical picture painted while Kurelek was
a patient in the Maudsley Hospital. His own description
follows:
,
"The subject, seen as a whole, is of a man (representing me) lying on
a barren plain before a wheatfield, with his head split open. The point of
view is from the top of his head. The subject is then roughly divided into the
left hand side of the picture, with the thoughts made in his head represented
as a maze; and the right hand side, the view of the rest of his body. The
hands and feet are seen through the eyes, nose and mouth, tapering off into
the distance and the outside world. The Maze. An exitless one, it occupies and
divides the inside of the cranium into groups of thoughts, the passageways
being calculated to do the grouping. The white rat curled up in the central
cavity represents my Spirit (I suppose). He is curled up with frustration from
having run the passages so long without hope of escaping out of this maze of
unhappy thoughts. Outside World. Grasshoppers and drought (sun before the
clouds) represent the mercilessness of Nature, which bankrupted my father, a
farmer, and brought out of him the cornered beast. The thorny, stony ground is
a kind of T.S. Eliot Wasteland — spiritual and cultural barrenness: the
pile of excrement with flies on it represents my view of the world and the
people that live on it. The loosened red ribbon bound together the head of a
T.S. Eliot Hollow Man, and was united by psychotherapy (Dr Cormier), but since
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 underside of the tongue, and when it was opened the sawdust and
shavings (tasteless education) spilled out from on top the tongue: mixed with
the sawdust are symbols 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 repellant but hopeful till the last, when the heart is discovered to be a
grub. On the tongue and in the throat, the Kurelek family (big burrs produce
little burrs), representing my father as the hard domineering blue burr
opening up the mushy yellow burr, my mother, to release a common lot of burrs,
my brothers and sisters, and one unique orange one — myself. The last
burr, spearing culture, is I at the university. The inverted one is I as a
child, trapped painfully between two aspects of my father, the one I hated and
the one I worshipped."
Out of the Maze was painted after his recovery and return to his
native Canada. The picture shows Kurelek with his wife and children enjoying a
happy family picnic. But all is not as idyllic as a first glance might
suggest. An empty skull in the bottom left hand corner is a reminder of the
psychological prison from which the artist has escaped and the impending storm
on the far right horizon hints at Kurelek's premonition that the world was
heading for a nuclear holocaust. Both pictures are in the collection of the
Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum where The Maze is on
permanent display.
