This post was originally published on artnews.com
Like all interesting people, Ithell Colquhoun was a mass of contradictions. She was obsessed with sex but uninterested in romantic relationships. She was radical in her art but fundamentally traditional in many aspects of her life. She was an occultist and spiritualist, but she never committed to any one system of belief. She is best remembered for her involvement in British Surrealism, but that period was short-lived. Her life’s work was expansive and deeply mystical. It remains completely bizarre, and completely hypnotic decades down the line.
Margaret Ithell Colquhoun—the subject of a major exhibition at Tate St Ives featuring more than 200 works and archival materials related to her life and career—was born in India in 1906, into a white British family that had lived and worked in the British colonial administration in India for generations. It was a strange start: not especially unusual among a certain category of the British middle classes at the height of Britain’s imperial age, but still strange in that it left her uncertain about where she belonged. Colquhoun grew up in England, mostly away from her parents, but retained a strong affinity for India. She never knew quite where to place her heritage: she felt that she deserved an Indian identity, but she understood that she was not Indian. She never really felt English either. Her understanding of herself was a product of the convoluted power structures of colonial Britain. In her unpublished autobiography Until Twelve, she wrote “Where am I, between east and west? A lost soul indeed.”
That liminality led Colquhoun on a lifelong quest for enlightenment. She wasn’t really concerned with finding a sense of belonging in the mortal realm, however—she wanted to transcend it. Colquhoun was a Perennialist, and as such she believed that all the belief systems on earth were leading to the same ultimate truth, and were based in the same ancient myths and wisdom. Her slightly chaotic pinballing from one magical society to another throughout her life reflects this fundamental principle.
It is possible to trace many of the strands of belief that comprise Colquhoun’s tapestry of a worldview, as Amy Hale did in her excellent 2020 biography Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully. Hale calls the artist a “nexus of all the major occult currents of the twentieth century.” Colquhoun rejected any existing way of seeing the world in search of one that felt truer. As she made her way through a century that became defined by its loss of faith, she grappled with the challenge of how to create meaning without the authority of a governing religious system. Her guiding principles have long stymied viewers of her work, particularly art historians who have turned up their noses at the idea that she might actually have believed all the stuff that she talked about.
Rising interest in occult-minded artists—the “Shamanic turn,” as Hale calls it—has created space for artists, many of them women, who previously did not fit into existing narratives of art history. As figures like Hilma af Klint, Leonora Carrington, and Emma Kunz have emerged from obscurity, the previously hidden relevance of spirituality has been noted in the lives of others, from Piet Mondrian to Agnes Martin. The esoteric will never sit completely comfortably in the mainstream, because that’s the point of it: to be unusual, bizarre, absurd. But it is undeniably a strong current in 19th- and 20th-century art. With the Tate show, which travels from St Ives to Tate Britain in June, Colquhoun is the next artist to finally get her due.
COLQUHOUN FIRST SAW the innovative work of the French Surrealists in 1936, and it had a profoundly rupturing effect on her painting as well as her writing, which included novels, memoirs, nonfiction, and poetry that was Surrealist in nature. Going from the staid post-Impressionism of her artistic education at London’s Slade School of Fine Art to a world of dreams, magic, and the uncanny opened a door. She was a member of the British Surrealist group from the late 1930s to 1940, but quickly left (or was pushed out), due partly to her interest in occultism and partly to the group’s general listlessness and controlling leader, E.L.T. Mesens. But Colquhoun continued to claim the Surrealist mantle throughout her career, even though the movement never took root in Britain the way it had in Paris.
She was briefly married to Toni del Renzio, a fellow Surrealist reject. Their marriage was rocky, and Colquhoun never had a long-term relationship thereafter. Her art, however, demonstrates her powerful interest in the erotic and intimate. She painted sexually disturbed scenes, including some evoking castration, as well as explicit depictions of penetrative sex and more romantic scenes of nude male and female figures entwined.
In Scylla (1938),which is in Tate’s collection and has become one of Colquhoun’s best-known works, two rocky outcroppings rise out of water, a large growth of coral under the water between them, the prow of a boat floating toward it. The rocks are very phallic, with fleshy tones and skin-like wrinkles. But the scene is also easily read as a woman’s view of her own body in the bath, with crinkly knees rising from the water and a curly bush between her legs. The approaching boat lends a narrative, and it is hard not to read it sexually. Is it an approaching hand, a penis, or—referencing the Greek myth in the title—a party of men to devour?
Some of Colquhoun’s most striking paintings are even more explicitly vulvar, like Attributes of the Moon (1947) and Alcove I (1946). They imagine female anatomy as a landscape, using a flat, tight style to evoke an erotic dreamscape. It’s easy to compare them to Georgia O’Keeffe’s genitalia-esque flowers, but Colquhoun’s work is much more aggressive. Her interest in the clitoris, which is always clearly articulated, makes these works more than just sensual: they suggest pleasure, play, deviance, and voyeurism.
This body of work refuses a clear biographical reading as well as an obvious feminist one. Colquhoun’s goal was liberation, but not just from the patriarchy: she wanted to be free of all earthly concerns. Androgyny, or a union between male and female on a divine plane, was one of the paths she saw to enlightenment. Her tight, knotty paintings of male and female bodies overlapping evoke her desire for the genders to be united—though she sometimes painted two bodies of the same sex, reflecting her own ambiguous queerness. Her intense focus on biology also reflects a sense of essentialism that goes beyond just erotic and gendered bodies. She was after essential truths, and believed that people, places, and things had power and resonance that were inherent to their role in the universe.
COLQUHOUN BEGAN LIVING part-time in Cornwall, a rugged and remote coastal county in the southwest of England, in 1947, eventually moving there full-time in the late ’50s. She was drawn to the region’s Celtic legacy, finding in it an amalgamation of the attractions of Eastern spirituality and British ethnicity. The Cornwall that Colquhoun inhabited was constructed in the English imagination in the 19th century as “other” and exotic, at the very moment that its mining economy was collapsing
and the English government was centralizing control over the region.
Celtic identity was fraught in Britain, adopted and embellished by English Protestants to reflect an idealized romantic past for the British Isles, while also claimed by groups who had a different (and arguably stronger) claim to indigeneity and marginality, like the Cornish, Scottish, and Irish. Colquhoun lived rustically in Cornwall, in a cabin with no electricity or plumbing, but she long maintained a flat in London to which she could escape when the discomforts of such living grew too great. When she finally moved permanently to Cornwall, she lived in a much more comfortable home. She had the attitude of many wealthy urbanites who seek the simple life, romanticizing it, and never fully committing to its inconveniences.
Throughout her time in Cornwall, Colquhoun was especially mesmerized by ancient monuments and stones. She included them in her work in various ways, such as in Landscape with Antiquities (Lamorna) (1950), which depicts an imagined bird’s-eye view of the land around her home in the Cornish village of Lamorna dotted with shapes like stone circles and neolithic monuments. Some of them have rippling lines expanding outward, representing their energy fields—an idea she explored more imaginatively in her slightly earlier work Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), which also depicts a stone circle creating an intense aura of energy and magic.
The Perennialism that drove Colquhoun’s occultism as well as her desire for rustic living eventually overlapped significantly with Traditionalism, an anti-modern 20th-century philosophy. As she aged, Colquhoun’s commitment to ancient wisdom and magic expanded to include a distaste for and distrust of modernity. She had a conservative attitude to progress, believing that the path to enlightenment lay in ancient magic, not in anything the future, or even the present, could offer. She lived to see a revival of interest in Surrealism in the 1970s, but she was still not given the focused attention her work deserved. She died in 1988 in Cornwall, leaving her estate to the National Trust with the intention that it be sold to acquire and preserve wild land in Cornwall. That final choice encapsulates Colquhoun’s lack of interest in earthly fame.
The simultaneously backward-looking and radical nature of Colquhoun’s work has made it difficult to categorize and challenging to parse—but, at the same time, magnetic in its uniqueness. While she did touch one of the 20th century’s major art movements, Colquhoun was not driven by trends or even by the art world at all. She was relentlessly idiosyncratic and true to herself.