ITHELL COLQUHOUN - OCCULTISM AND SURREALISM
The British painter, writer and theorist Ithell Colquhoun is known for her interests in occultism and her brief association with the London Surrealist group in the late 1930s, which gave her a reputation as a surrealist for the rest of her life. She is now recognized as one of the most interesting esoteric thinkers of her time, and even if she was already well-known in the art world, her innovative spirit has been accepted only twenty years after her death.
Ithell Colquhoun, Man Ray, 1932, Centre Pompidou Musee National d’Art Modern
Throughout her life, she engaged with various esoteric movements and individuals, who influenced and supported the development of her view of the world and the purpose which drove most of her projects to become enlightened.
The artist was very productive with everything she did, she published hundreds of poems and wrote several novels, some travel guides, commentaries, many esoteric essays, and radio dramas; however, often critics diminish her projects considering her primarily for her visual art production. Even if not all the work she produced could be closely related to Surrealism, she always linked herself with the movement, connecting the surreal and the fantastic.
Colquhoun was born in Shillong, India in 1906, where her father was working with the Indian Civil Service. At the age of three or four, she returned to England with her mother and her younger brother. She was always very curious about the tradition of secret knowledge, she was enthusiastic to develop her learning on the subject and began to read about Alchemy. In 1927 she was admitted to the Slade School of Art, and while studying at Slade, in 1928, joined G.R.S. Mead's Quest Society, an esoteric private group founded within theosophical principles; and in 1930 she published her first occult article, 'The Prose of Alchemy' in The Quest, the society's journal.
As a student, Colquhoun received the Slade's Summer Composition Prize for her painting Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes (1929), which was displayed at the Royal Academy in 1931.
Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes, Ithell Colquhoun, 1929. Oil on Canvas. University of London College Art Collections, London
The same year she completed her studies and moved and established her studio in Paris, and there, she was introduced to Surrealism. But in 1946 she decided to move back to England and bought a studio in Cornwall, where she found inspiration in nature and decided to settle, moving away from people.
twelve years after her most important exhibition, her retrospective at Newlyn Orion Gallery in Penzance (1976), Ithell Colquhoun died in 1988 in Cornwall, at the age of nearly 82 years. The artist donated her occult work to the Tate, and the other art pieces to the National Trust, which the gallery acquired in 2019.
Colquhoun's initial encounter with Surrealism was in 1931 in Paris, with the booklet 'What is Surrealism' written by Peter Neagoe, in 1936 she visited the International Surrealist Exposition in London, but her real interest in the movement was defined during a lecture hosted by Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí; she was impressed by his paranoiac method.
In 1939 the British artist exhibited with the English Surrealists at The Living Art in England, and together with English Surrealist Roland Penrose at the Mayor Gallery. Colquhoun also published many texts and articles in the London Bulletin magazine between 1938 and 1940. She was expelled from the group in 1940 as she refused to comply with the new decree, made by The Belgian Surrealist Edouard Mesens, who became the head and organizer of the British Surrealist movement and demanded that the members of the movement should not be involved with any other groups, or being part of any opposing political positions. The British artist refused to obey and dissociate from her occult connections and sacrifice her interests and she separated from the British Surrealism movement. Although she continued to work with the surrealist principles until her death.
That summer she visited the French writer André Breton in Paris, where she experienced automatism and a new automatic method called psychomorphology, and began working with these techniques both in her paintings and writings.
During a surrealistic exhibition at the International Art Centre in 1942, she met the organizer the Italian-Russian artist Toni del Renzio; they began a romantic relationship and married one year later. Together the couple challenged Mesens's authority within the English Surrealist group, whose members boycotted Colquhoun and Del Renzio, which cost the two artists humiliation and marginalization.
The marriage of Del Renzio-Colquhoun was quite short, the two artists in fact broke up in 1947, probably as a result of Del Renzio's affair. Colquhoun had other romantic relationships after the divorce but never fully recovered from her marriage.
Even after the dispersal of the London Surrealist group and her divorce from Del Renzio, Roland Penrose refused to accept Colquhoun’s painting Autumnal Equinox for the exhibition 40.000 Years of Modern Art held in the Academy Hall in 1949. Nevertheless, she was not discouraged, and impatient to show her work, she exhibited independently with the London Group and joined the group at the Royal Academy of Arts, the London Museum and other smaller galleries.
Autumnal Equinox, Ithell Colquhoun, 1949. Oil on Canvas.
Colquhoun was linked with Surrealism until her death, however, she always described herself as an independent artist. She experimented with Surrealist methods, such as automatism and the exploration of chance effects. Also reviewed the method in her text The Mantic Stain, which drew parallels between the treasury of mind pictures brought up by surrealist automatic methods and the imaginative interpretations involved in divinatory practices and alchemical transformation and described a new surrealist automatic technique named parsemage (powdering).
In the 1960s she developed an interest in Marcel Duchamp's idea of the readymade, and used enamel paint in a semi-automatic way to invoke, what Breton called a Convulsive Landscape. In the 1970s and early 1980s, she collaborated on British periodicals that aspired to re-launch surrealist activity in England, such as Transformaction and Malmoth.
Marcel Duchamp with his Readyade Bicycle Wheel and Fountain, Washington DC, 1961
THE RELATION WITH THE OCCULT
In the early twentieth century, occultism implied various marginal beliefs and practices, from Alchemy and the Cabala to Astrology, Magic and Divination. Nevertheless, underlying all these currents there was the belief in a hidden reality, beyond the phenomenal world, whose forces could be accessed and manipulated by initiates.
Colquhoun became interested in occultism at the age of seventeen when she read about Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema and Yeats’s prose work. And, perhaps, it was the connection with this world to bring her closer to Surrealism. During her life, her esoteric interests extended to the Inter Alia, Alchemy, Magic, Rosicrucianism, the Cabala, Gnosticism, the Tarot, astrology, Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Christian mysticism and Celtic lore. Her knowledge on the topic is evident in the biography she wrote for MacGregor Mathers (one of the leaders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), Sword of Wisdom, and in her novel Goose of Hermogenes, both from 1961. The artist belonged to many occult societies such as Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis and Kenneth Grant’s New Isis Lodge, as well as Co-Masonry, the British Circle of the Universal Bond and the Golden Society. In the 1960s she participated in rituals held by the Druid Order, in 1965 was made a deaconess of the Ancient Celtic Church, and in 1977 she was consecrated Priestess of Isis by the Irish Fellowship. Furthermore, her essays' notes on esoteric symbolism, divinatory and magical practice, as well as her private collection of books, give significant proof of her occultism culture. She was also an influential member of The Order of the Pyramid and Sphinx, which was founded by Tamara Bourkhoun, a society focused on Enochian magic.
Her occultism studies included developing and taking part in ceremonies and rituals, which were not practices of worship or performed in search of personal or material gain, but acts of discovery and transmutation, undertaken in pursuit of spiritual development. Even if she was not a spiritualist, she had great knowledge of and correspondence with healers in Britain and Ireland and made large use of remote healing services.
Colquhoun believed that Surrealism and the occult provided two related paths to enlightenment, and her search was conducted through an exploration of nature and the origin of gender differences. She examined social and sexual roles in the human world, sexual dimorphism in the natural world, and gender differences among the gods.
Unlike many of her Surrealist peers in Britain, Colquhoun did not believe that Surrealism was part of a wider political or socialist agenda. Although she was clearly convinced that it has revolutionary capacities, visible specifically in her portrayals of sex and gender.
As an occultist and woman artist, she opposed the conventional roles of women and consolidated her sense of social marginality. Moreover, she questioned a patriarchal society that was recognised as genius introverted men but did not recognize and marginalised introverted women. She also criticized surrealism’s masculinism, observing that Breton’s vision of the free and adored woman did not always help women, especially painters and that among the surrealists, a woman as a human being was permitted, not required. Her marginal position in society gave her a critical position in receiving ideas about femininity and creativity, causing a revision of surrealist and esoteric tropes.
Colquhoun’s analysis of a certain hermetic motif is frequently seen in surrealist imagery; it might shed light on the process of revision. The androgyne (or hermaphrodite), is discussed in Plato’s Symposium (c. 385-370) and particularly in the speech of Aristophanes. The Greek comic playwright says that human beings were originally powerful, spherical and of three sexes, male, female and androgynous, which the jealous gods split in half. This separation began the constant search for the other half, hence the heterosexual or homosexual union to achieve the original completion.
Medieval and Renaissance alchemy, the art of transmutation, configured the coincidence of opposites as the wedding of two sexes and depicted it as the marriage and copulation of King and Queen. Moreover, the fulfilment of the opus was marked by the creation of the androgyne, usually portrayed as a double being, half man, half woman.
Historically, nineteenth-century occultism provided a place for women to explore issues of gender, and sexuality, and to permit female public expression. This thought, which emphasized gender differences, is in contrast with the contemporaneous anti-essentialist feminism that tried to address the question of women in a civil rights framework and rational discussion. Colquhoun’s exploration of sexuality and her gender disparity condemnation are raised in many of her paintings exhibited during this period which provide, as British Art Historian Dawn Ades points out, ‘a mocking response to the prevailing imagery of eroticism within surrealism.’
The surrealists were intrigued by the erotic character of Aristophanes’s myth, as well as the sexual imagery employed in Alchemy to symbolize the union of opposites. Colquhoun was ironic about Freudian phallocentric thinking and moved beyond the gender binary to create her own androgyne myth inspired by her experience of esotericism. With this method, she engaged with castration and emphasized its tragic effects, only female genitalia seem to remain intact and unaffected by the tragedy. An example is The Pine Family (1941), which illustrates three truncated tree-like human torsos, one feminine, one hermaphroditic, and the last masculine, lying next to each other.
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| The Pine Family, Ithell Colquhoun, 1940. Oil on canvas, Collection of Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel |
Her esoteric perspective was personal and reflected a growing feminist awareness and feminist thinkers employed it to declare art a practice that does not need to have a gender. Female artists also followed their equal symbolism and perceived it as a solution to the sexual battle that occurred in the fin-de-siècle.
The spiritualisation of experience was essential for Colquhoun’s feminist reworking of hermetic and psychological notions of self-development. While she was not a political feminist, her revision of patriarchal tropes, and synthesis of an alternative myth, personalized her vision as a woman surrealist and occultist. Her approach was visionary, viewing art and the occult as vehicles for women's personal growth.
VISUAL ARTWORK
Visible in her early notebooks, which contain detailed drawings of plants, her early interests were in biology and botany, and her early works included a series of large photos of flora. Nevertheless, every area of her life, including her artistic choices as well as her literary work was led by her spiritual interests. After her flora studies, Colquhoun shifted to another biological subject matter which is often analysing topics such as sex and gender, depicting powerful women taken from Bible stories and myths, such as Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes (1929), and Susanna and the Elders (1930).
Her art and writing flourished outside aesthetic prescription; the occult shaped her artistic production in significant ways but never annulled surrealism’s influence whose methods and subversive energy resonate throughout her work. Colquhoun approved of esoteric symbolism as potentially liberating and provided many hermetic examples of the androgyne motif. For example, between the 1930s and the 1940s, she produced three series of watercolours that examined love, gender and wholeness through hermetic imagery. In Alchemical Figure: Androgyne the mystical fusion of two opposites brings out the androgynous totality.
This union is depicted as the overlapping of two figures in profile within a black egg-shaped space. Colquhoun selects blue and pink to indicate gender contrasts but combines the differently coloured silhouettes to evoke the blurring of identities and their total fusion.
In Diagrams of Love: Christian Marriage II (1940-42), the androgyne is embodied in a hairless, gender-ambiguous human chest. Here the connection is shown by crossed lips and two pairs of eyes, as well as by gender ambiguity. In both examples, androgyny suggests Colquhoun’s aim to eliminate sexual difference, and to move from dualism to a global model.
Diagrams of Love Christian Marriage II, Ithell Colquhoun, 1940-1942. Watercolour
EXHIBITIONS
While in Cornwall, the artist found her habitat, and her artistic endeavours culminated in exhibitions in Great Britain and abroad, notably with the Women’s International Art Club, Aubin Pasque’s Fantasmagie group and the Newlyn Society of Artists. In the 1970s she had some solo exhibitions, the most important of which was her retrospective at Newlyn Orion Gallery in Penzance (1976).
In 2012, the scholar Amy Hale noted that Colquhoun is becoming recognized as one of the most interesting and prolific esoteric thinkers and artists of the twentieth century. Hale also noted that through Colquhoun's work, we can see an interplay of themes and movements which characterize the trajectory of certain British subcultures ranging from Surrealism to the Earth Mysteries movement also gives us a rare insight into the thoughts and processes of a working magician.
The National Trust gifted Tate some of Ithell Colquhoun's artworks, about 5,000 sketches, drawings and other works from the 1930s to 1980s. These works include ink, graphite drawings, some coated with gouache or watercolour wash, architectural sketches, portraits, prints, abstract creations, and surrealist paintings reflecting the magic, myth, and occult interests. The gallery collected all these works together and held them in their archive, and in June 2019 the whole body of work was shown in a remarkable exhibition at Tate.
Among her drawings and sketches, an early sketch for the oil painting Scylla (1938), is displayed at Tate Britain, together with the finished work. Scylla is one piece of a series of seven works series, created during an important period of Colquhoun’s career, throughout her transition from what she termed her magic realism to Surrealism.
Left: Scylla, preparatory sketch. Right: Scylla (painting). Ithell Colquhoun, 1938. Oil on board. Tate, London
The Art Story website argues that the oil painting is her most 'seminal' work. Scylla is a sort of portrait, in fact, the towering cliffs overlooking the sea, explicitly reveal themselves as a pair of legs. The artist herself affirmed that “It was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath. […] It is thus a pictorial pun or double image.”
The exhibition, the largest single-artist collection at Tate, was such a success, that Adrian Glew, the secretary at the gallery’s archive, affirmed that it is incredible and that there is so much in the collection. He noted that the reason for its amazingness might be because Colquhoun’s work was little-known, so this show will be a sort of re-evaluation of her whole career.
Throughout the twentieth century, after centuries of neglection, many female artists began to discuss spirituality in its various aspects and raise their voices about their own identity. These artists found their own way to link spirituality with gender differentiation, and other female issues, representing their own ideas and protests through visual art. In every artistic movement, using many different forms of art and methods, female artists, as well as historians and authors began to talk and teach young female artists about their predecessors, and strongly oppose the patriarchal culture. For instance, in Europe as well as in the United States, many feminist movements started to establish the basis for a real artistic and cultural revolution.
Surely, the gender issue that Ithell Colquhoun was addressing through and within her work, doesn't have anything to do with the modern and often deviated gender ideology.
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A chapter of my dissertation (Y-2020). Synthesized and edited.
READINGS
- A., Hale, The Magical Life of Ithell Colquhoun, in Pathways in Modern Western Magic, Edited by Nevill Drury (Richmond CA: Concrescent LLC 2012). Ithell Colquhoun, Magician Born of Nature, Ithell Colquhoun Website. http://www.ithellcolquhoun.co.uk/the_writer.htm
- M., Remy, Colquhoun, (Margaret) Ithell (1906-1988), painter and poet, Issue: 2009. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/64737
- I., Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn (London: Neville Spearman, 1975).
- V., Ferentinou, Ithell Colquhoun, Surrealism and the Occult, Papers of Surrealism, Issue 9 (2011).
- M., Brown, Tate acquires vast archive of British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun. The Guardian. Issue: 15 July 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jul/15/tate-acquires-vast-archive-of-british-surrealist-ithellcolquhoun
- I., Colquhoun, Surrealism: Paintings, Drawings, Collages 1936-76 (Newlyn: Newlyn Art Gallery, 1979).
- W., Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991).
- M.S., Morrison, Ithell Colquhoun and Occult Surrealism in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain and Ireland, Modern/Modernity, Vol. 21, No 3, September 2014 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
- S., Levy, The Scandalous Eye: The Surrealism of Conroy Maddox (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 2003.
- S., Levy, The Del Renzio Affair: A Leadership Struggle in Wartime Surrealism, Paper of Surrealism Issue 3 (Spring 2005).
- D., Ades, Notes on Two Women Surrealist Painters: Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, Women in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
- V., Ferentinou, Margaret Ithell Colquhoun, World Religions and Spirituality, Issue: August 2017. WRSP Website. https://wrldrels.org/2017/08/11/margaret-ithell-colquhoun/
- R., Galbreath, A Glossary of Spiritual and Related Terms, in The Spiritual in Art, 380-1; Antoine Faivre, ‘Occultism,’ in The Encyclopedia of Religion, eds Mircea Eliade et al., Vol. 11, (Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1987).
- J., Castle, Letter to Ithell Colquhoun, TGA 929/5/36. Tate Gallery Archive (1st June 1971).
- I., Colquhoun, The Living Stones: Cornwall (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1957).
- Plato, Symposium 189e-191d, in Plato’s Symposium, translated with an introduction and notes by Christopher Grill (London: Penguin Books, 1999).
- A., Breton, 42, Rue Fontaine, Vol. 2 (Paris: Calmels & Cohen, 2003).
- T., Garb, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994).
- D., Gaze, Dictionary of Woman Artists, Volume 1 (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997).
- M., Solly, Tate Acquires Archive of Works by Little-Known Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, Issue: 17th July 2019, Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/tate-acquires-archive-works-little-known-surrealist-ithellcolquhoun-180972665/
- Ithell Colquhoun, The Art History Website. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/colquhoun-ithell/
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