Ithell Colquhoun: British surrealist who owed an artistic debt to Greek antiquity
By James Brewer
Artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) spent only a brief part of her career in Greece, but it was a time in which she posed as an ancient goddess for one of the world’s leading photographers, formed romantic attachments, and began to amass much of her collection of more than 300 volumes on Greek mythology, alchemy, surrealism, the Kabbalah tradition of Jewish mysticism which was greatly influenced by Greek philosophy, and ceremonial magic.
These were the influences that propelled her through an extraordinary multi-decade career as mystic, magic realist and surrealist. Her unremitting search for the occult and her worldview has earned her a remarkable place in 20th century art. She sought to open new avenues of thinking that many people might find bizarre.
With interest reviving in this determinedly independent woman, she has been accorded a retrospective at Tate Britain following its initial airing at Tate St Ives, a venue which pays tribute to her Cornish connections. The London show, the largest that has been staged of her work, with 140 paintings and drawings; many of which have never been publicly exhibited, reflects how her stock is rising.
This draws to an important extent on Tate’s Ithell Colquhoun (pronounced Eye-thell Kuh-hoon) archive documenting in its scattered way her artistic and psychic career from her early narrative paintings and engagement with key personalities in the surrealist movement, to her years braiding visual art, questions of sexual identity, ecology, magic and mysticism.
She was born in Assam, northern India, where her father was a colonial administrator, and her first birthday was spent on a passenger liner bound for England. She never revisited India but felt it part of her heritage. After Cheltenham School of Arts and Crafts she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she studied under the esteemed professor Henry Tonks, who described her as “an artist of rare ability and with a very original and quick mind.”
This free spirit charted her own course from then on. Her dramatic picture of Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes in 1929 in which she combined biblical subjects with fantastic architectural settings, her mystical perspective taking a bow, won her a prestigious award at the Slade. She spent the next few years defying received expectations for a young woman artist, sketching and painting in Paris and Greece.
Ithell discovered surrealism during a 1931 visit to the French capital, getting to know Man Ray( Emmanuel Radnitsky, 1880-1976) an influential member of surrealist circles. Prophetically for her developing interest in Greek antiquity, Ray photographed Ithell cradling a sheaf of wheat as though she were a contemporary Demeter, the Olympian goddess of the harvest. Demeter presided over the Greco-Roman mystery cult which promised to its initiates the path to a blessed afterlife in Elysium, and was often depicted bearing golden grain. Myths about the goddess included the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades, and her being stalked and forcefully taken by Poseidon in the guise of a horse.
During her stay in Greece, she met Humfry Payne, director of the British School of Archaeology in Athens from 1929 until his death from septicaemia at the age of 34 in 1936. The research he was conducting into the ancient city-state of Corinth influenced her assessment of past cultures and rituals. Payne’s volume, Necrocorinthia, illustrated with his own drawings, transformed scholarly understanding of the subject. He began to excavate at Perachora, an unpromising site in the Bay of Corinth, and at the Temple of Hera uncovered remains which came to be regarded as among the most significant discoveries of 20th century Greek archaeology. He then began a study of the marble sculptures in the museum of the Acropolis, demonstrating in 1934 that a fragment of sculpture there was an exact fit with another in the Lyons Museum in France, forming a figure of Aphrodite.
Ithell and Payne were in a relationship between 1933 and 1935, but they broke up shortly before his unexpected death. Payne was married to Dilys Powell, who became a renowned film critic. Ithell went on to fall in love with a Greek woman, describing her desire as being “carried, indeed, to the Lesbian Shore.”
She was one of many who in 1936 were bowled over by the London International Surrealist Exhibition – which attracted crowds so big they stopped the traffic in Piccadilly. She was at the opening lecture when Salvador Dalí, wearing a hired deep-sea diving suit which he claimed represented his exploration of the subconscious, nearly suffocated from lack of oxygen in its helmet.
Inspired by the flamboyantly moustachioed Spaniard’s imagery of dreams, and a fascination with the theorising of surrealism torchbearer André Breton and fellow luminaries, Ithell began to win plaudits. Her paintings seem to conjure unseen spiritual planes, connecting methods of automatic picture-making with occult divination rituals, say the curators. Extracting meaning from chance manifestations, her imagery becomes suggestive of bodies and landscapes informed with sacred feminine power.
As well as being a momentous two years in global politics, 1938 and 1939 was a transitional period for Ithell.
Botanical works such as Water-Flower in 1938 show her growing interest in an esoteric, spiritual world. She became i focused on representations of the human body through the surrealist ‘double image’, exemplified in Scylla (méditerranée) from 1938, one of her most celebrated works, which merges the female form with the natural landscape.
Scylla is one of a group of seven works subtitled Méditerranée as she made the transition from what she termed her ‘magic realism’ to surrealism. This oil painting refers most immediately to the monster with six heads on elongated necks as in Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus and his men had to pass through a channel, presumed to mean the Strait of Messina, between Scylla (who ate six of the crew) and the whirlpool Charybdis. Ithell’s image of a boat approaching inward-leaning rocks suggests this narrow seaway. Scylla was the daughter of King Nisus of Megara, who, for the love of the invading King Minos, pulled the life-protecting hair from her father’s head.
At the same time Scylla has an erotic sense. Responding at the time to a Tate Gallery question as to whether the Scylla image was “the result of a dream,” the artist cited the Homeric myth, adding: “It was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath – this, with a change of scale due to ‘alienation of sensation’ became rocks and seaweed. It is thus a pictorial pun, or double-image in the Daliesque sense – not the result of a dream but of a dreamlike state.” Ithell invites the viewer to gaze at her thighs and, as the boat edges its way between the rocky pillars, to imagine her being penetrated.
An early sketch for Scylla is reunited at Tate Britain with the finished work which was bought by the gallery in 1977 from the artist through the Newlyn-Orion Gallery, Penzance. Comparisons have been drawn between Scylla and a painting made contemporaneously by Frida Kahlo: What the Water Gave Me. Frida’s study shows her legs in the bath with floating images relating to her personal life. Similarly to Ithell, Frida questioned the distinction between humans, animals and spirits, and is today admired by some as “the divine feminine.” Ithell wrote of “the interdependence of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms of the earth and their vitalisation by the sun.”
In 1939 she was meeting surrealists who were using automatist techniques to create imagery through chance, crossing the threshold into methods of “accidental” creation. Their approach was intended to plumb the depths of the unconscious mind and other metaphysical realms. This led her to incorporate occultist practice, and among the techniques were what is called decalcomania, which is pressing together two paint-covered surfaces to make a mirror image produced without the intentional use of the hand.
For instance, Attributes of the Moon and Gorgon from 1946 channel in vivid colours the mysteries of the universe. The first of these, an oil painting on wood, presents a figure in a rocky, cave-like landscape, standing on an outcrop on top of something like a crescent moon. Ten small globe shapes coming from the figure’s head may relate to the ten sephiroth of the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah tradition. It is like a dream, feminine landscape, reflecting her interest in pagan goddesses and the ways in which their worship was linked to the lunar cycle.
Gorgon brings her again to Greek mythology, and the image, topped by writhing serpents, is less a guardian angel, so much as an exterminating angel, according to Richard Shillitoe, a member of the impressive curatorial team assembled by Tate for its exhibition, writing in ithellcolquhoun.co.uk .
As she became more deeply immersed in occultism, she embraced ancient philosophical principles including alchemy, animism and mysticism, coupled with her own ideas on gender fluidity and harnessing a divine feminine power. Groups of works, such as a series from 1940-2 entitled The Diagrams of Love portray the merging of male and female forms to create an androgynous whole. She painted explicit, alchemically inspired, prints detailing her theories of the creation of the Divine Androgyne, a phenomenon she believed was, through sexual union, beyond external gender identities. The concept of androgyny as a religious aspiration is found in settings including Greek mythology – the term literally means a combining of the sexes, or at least the attributes of both sexes in one figure.
Emphasising the cyclical nature of growth and decay, Earth Process, a drawing in gouache and graphite on paper made in London in 1940, depicts a plant bursting into flower. A red-yellow bloom curves down to touch the ground, and a green line running through it connects it back to the roots below the earth. Earth Process is one of three works including Volcanic Landscape and Three Elements concerned with natural processes and cyclical renewal, with erupting circular sequences of plant growth, atmospheric phenomena and volcanic activity.
After a week’s wartime holiday in Cornwall, she settled in the county in 1959, living in a corrugated iron shack that she dubbed Vow Cave (a tautology as vau means cave in Cornish). Later she moved to Lamorna, a fishing village near Newlyn, where other artists had lived – among them Laura Knight, Alfred Munnings and Arnold Bennett. Ithell’s friends included the talented bohemian painter of portraits and flowers, Hannah Gluckstein, known as Gluck, and she loved the physical and psychic buzz of the prehistoric sites of the area, and of the sea, cliffs, and coves.
She understood the layering of ancient sacred structures to represent the residue of different psychic histories in the Cornish landscape. Landscape with Antiquities (Lamorna) thus represents both a personal journey and a map of the mystic forces in the Lamorna Valley. She had already featured sacred sites and standing stones in Cornwall and Brittany in works such as Dance of the Nine Opals in 1942 and La Cathédrale Engloutie of 1940, which are brought together in the Tate exhibition for the first time.
In Cornwall, she pushed ever further into the occult and her concept of the world as a connected spiritual cosmos, studying beliefs drawn from the custodians of Kabbalah, Gnosticism or Sufi mysticism, Rosicrucianism, Indian Tantra and Celtic lore. She sought to reconcile the philosophies of hermetic traditions (that is, encompassing alchemy, astrology, and theosophy) and the mystical lore of the Jews, Muslims, ancient Chaldeans and Egyptians, with Christian truth, and to reveal the essential unity of being.
She had gained a reputation in the occult world for her 1975 history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (a secret society established in the 1880s focused on Renaissance forms of mystical alchemy, the Kabbalah, astrology, tarot, and geomancy), and her 1950s books on how the rural environments of Ireland and Cornwall influence psychological experience.
Typically, the oil painting Volcano from 1972, is replete with symbolism. It was based on the eruption of Mount Etna after nearly 20 quiescent years. A triangle with point uppermost is the alchemical symbol for the element of fire and of masculinity, and a triangle with the point downwards symbolises water and femininity. The partial super-imposition of the triangles suggests an incomplete Seal of Solomon, the token which supposedly gave King Solomon the power to command the supernatural.
Ithell became involved with the Druids and Egyptology and in 1977 was ordained as a High Priestess of Isis. From the last years of her life are shown designs for a deck of tarot (she used the term Taro) cards, a synthesis of her art and magical practice, in which she replaced the traditional imagery of such cards with abstract splashes of enamel paint.
Tate has a united archive of 5,000 sketches, drawings and commercial artwork covering her career from the 1930s-1980s, part of which she had bequeathed to the National Trust, while occult and other papers were left to Tate. There are loose papers: drawings, sketches, murals, book jackets and illustrations, manuscripts, poems, magical experiments mapped out on graph paper, invocations of angels, love spells written to a woman in Greece, early watercolours and correspondence from figures in the art world including Man Ray and Lady Ottoline Morrell; and surrealist paintings produced by her students.
Ithell Colquhoun is curated by Dr Emma Chambers, curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain and Katy Norris, curator of exhibitions and displays at Tate St Ives with Eliza Spindel, assistant curator at Tate Britain and Emma Sharples, collaborative doctoral partnership researcher, in consultation with Dr Amy Hale, Honorary Research Fellow at Falmouth University, Professor Alyce Mahon, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Cambridge and Dr Richard Shillitoe, independent writer and researcher.
Ithell Colquhoun is in partnership with Lockton, the independent insurance brokerage.
EJ Hentenaar, chief executive of Lockton Europe, said: “Lockton is delighted to support Ithell Colquhoun, a landmark exhibition which explores themes of gender, sexuality, identity, and ecology. At Lockton, we are proud of our culture and commitments to embracing diversity and celebrating individuality with our clients, Associates, and communities.”
Images in detail:
Ithell Colquhoun as Demeter, c 1932. Photograph by Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky). © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP.
Volcano, 1972, oil paint on paper laid down on board. Private collection.
Exhibition installation view © Tate Photography (Larina Fernandes).
Scylla (méditerranée), 1938. ByIthell Colquhoun. Tate: purchased 1977. © Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans.
Attributes of the Moon, 1947. By Ithell Colquhoon. Tate, presented by the National Trust 2016. © Tate. Photo © Tate (Matt Greenwood).
Water-Flower, 1938. By Ithell Colquhoun. Arts University Plymouth © Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans Tate Photography (Larina Fernandes).
Self-Portrait, 1929. By Ithell Colquhoun. The Ruth Borchard Collection, courtesy of Piano Nobile, London © Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans.
Landscape with Antiquities (Lamorna), 1950. By Ithell Colquhoun. Presented by the National Trust 2016 © Tate.
Gorgon, 1946. By Ithell Colquhoun. Private Collection © Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans.
Earth Process, 1940. By Ithell Colquhoun. Tate, presented by the National Trust 2016. © Tate. Photo © Tate (Sam Day).
Dance of the Nine Opals, 1942. By Ithell Colquhoun. The Sherwin Family Collection permanently housed at The Hepworth Wakefield (Wakefield, UK) © Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans.
Ithell Colquhoun practised surrealist automatist imagery technique.
Ithell Colquhoun at Tate Britain runs until October 19, 2025, in parallel with an exhibition of works by Edward Burra, on one ticket.
