Лабиринт разума: Картина Уильяма Курелека.

1953 painting by William Kurelek

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. As a young adult he grew mentally ill, and at Maudsley received not only treatment but a room to paint. The Maze can be interpreted as Kurelek's attempt to justify this privilege; as Kurelek writes, "I had to impress the hospital staff as being a worthwhile specimen to keep on." The Maze was painted in gouache colors. Kurelek describes it as "a painting of the inside of my skull." That skull has been split open vertically to reveal various compartments inside. Through the eyes, nose, and mouth we can see the rest of the body lying in a wheat field. Inside the skull itself, each compartment holds a scrap of paper, representing a memory or thought. The center compartment, however, holds only a white rat, which represents Kurelek's spirit. 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. 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. Kurelek depicted the rat spirit as inert, unwilling to leave his prison even though it has been opened up for him. This was Kurelek's way of showing his doctors what their job was. 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. Lift that rat out and unwind him and let him run free!"

After being disenchanted with several art schools in Canada and Mexico, Kurelek took a cargo ship from Montreal to London. He arrived in 1952 with, as he describes, "two express purposes." 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. He read about Maudsley's reputation in a Montreal library, so the day after his arrival in London he admitted himself. 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. Part of the anxiety came from the fear that he would not have enough money to stay much longer, so in his mind, "something [had] to be done." But his main doctor, Dr. Cormier, was unhelpful in his "serenity and aloofness." 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. After the episode Kurelek was invited back as an inpatient to be treated by a different doctor, Dr. Carstairs, who appears in the film William Kurelek's The Maze. Carstairs provided Kurelek with a room that doubled as a studio where he could paint. 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."

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.

The self mutilation panel: In this panel a young man is cutting open his arm and analyzing his bones. He is in a studio with a skeleton and several coffins, but chooses to look at "second hand information," a drawing. The conveyor belt panel: In this panel a man is tied to a conveyor belt headed for death, with a clock tied to his feet. For Kurelek this represented not just himself but all mankind, as the "inevitability of death" is for everyone only a matter of time. Kurelek continued to produce more masterpieces, several of which are still in the Adamson Collection. However, it was not the science of the doctors that led to his eventual recovery. Describing his walks on the Netherne grounds, he writes, "I walked and walked, going round and round in the labyrinth of my mind just as that rat in my painting. If the doctors didn’t seem able or interested in untangling the snarl, then I, at least, should do and try everything in my power before giving up." A year after painting The Maze, Kurelek attempted suicide. 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. Kurelek writes, "the psychological symbols of The Maze gradually shifted to more spiritual ones. They took on the appearance of Swiftian satire."

Images of The Maze have been used in psychology classes, including that of James Maas at Cornell University. Maas was also involved in the making of the original film The Maze: The Story of William Kurelek (1969), which won a Red Ribbon Award for outstanding educational documentary in the 1972 American Film Festival. The film chronicles Kurelek's life through his paintings and on camera revelations, using The Maze painting as the centerpiece. It has recently been expanded and re imagined as a new film, William Kurelek's The Maze (2011). The new version provides higher resolution images of the paintings, adds an original musical score, animates characters within the paintings, and "gives us a far better understanding of at least one figure Kurelek depicted in his famously enigmatic 1953 painting: his father." Some of the panels of the painting were used, without permission, for the cover art in the 1981 Van Halen album Fair Warning. This was the band's fourth album and its darkest yet, so the musicians sought imagery to match that tone. Alex Van Halen discovered The Maze, but did not consider using more than one of the panels. Instead, he initially just wanted to use one image: the "Courage" installation in the Museum of Hopelessness, wherein an individual is hopelessly ramming his head into a brick wall. In the end, the painting was "severely cropped and modified, ostensibly to highlight the most striking images inherent in the work."