Ithell Colquhoun

There are four letters from Ithell Colquhoun to Ruth Borchard. The first three, dated between December 1965 and January 1966, relate to the purchase by Ruth of Colquhoun's self-portrait; and were sent from the artist's Cornish home, Stone Cross Cottage, Green Lane, Paul, Penzance. It was a poetically appropriate address for someone so concerned with ecological and mystical issues and with – as in the title o her 1967 illustrated book on Cornish history and pre-history – Cornwall's 'Living Stones'. The fourth letter, in January 1970, is by far the longest (running to over 800 hand-written words over three pages), and seems to be part of a larger correspondence between the two women, discussing esoteric spiritual matters.

In the first letter. 'I have two very early self-portraits in oil, both painted (as far as I remember) in 1929 or '30. Both are on canvas, but unstretched and unframed. The one I consider the more characteristic and better suited to your purpose measures 2'5 x 1'8”; it is a full-length (upright).'

The second letter states, 'I am interested in your project and accept your offer of £22-1-0 [21gns.] for the portrait I described.' The two women were already corresponding about Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition – apparently Ruth had informed Colquhoun about what the letter here describes as 'the correlations of sound (musical note) with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which I hadn't heard of before... I simply love drawing these letters... Alas, I have never had a Rabbi to teach me, I am mainly self-taught.' Indeed Colquhoun was, in many respects, self-taught as an artist too (though her tutors at the Slade School of Art from 1927-31 included Henry Tonks and Randolph Schwabe); she could also be described as a truly original, self- motivated researchee and writer in her books on various esoteric and occult subjects.

In Colquhoun's 1970 letter to Ruth, she says that she 'will look forward to seeing your book on the Quabalah', and asks 'who is publishing it?' Light of Quabalah on The Unknown Secret of the Bible by Dr. Ruth Borchard-Berensohn was eventually published in 1989 in Jerusalem. The letter is notably interesting regarding contemporary attitudes to women interested in studying Kabbalah. Referring to one Kabbalah study group, Colquhoun writes: 'I much fear [it] would not be too welcoming; even if your contribution might throw light on some aspects new to them, they would tend to undervalue it, simply because you are a woman. They are very anti-feminist.' As a highly intelligent woman of independent mind and spirit, Colquhoun had encountered some anti-feminist prejudice throughout most of her adult life, not least fom the notably male chauvinist British Surrealist Group (which she left in 1940). There is a story that at a 1944 poetry reading organised by her husband Toni del Renzio (whom she had married in 1942, divorcing him five years later), Colquhoun was violently interrupted by some leading British Surrealists. Her response to prejudice, and to the limitations it sought to impose on her, was always to pursue her art, writing and researches as independently, thoughtfully and unwaveringly as possible; nothing seemed to deter her.

As  Colquhoun had noted, her self-portrait now in the Borchard Collection was 'painted (as far as I remember) in 1929 or '30', when she was still a student at the Slade. The palette inclines to a certain lightly green-tinged muddy hue characteristic of much early twentieth century British art, from Sickert and Gilman onwards. At the Slade, Tonks had encouraged closely-observed, anatomically correct yet sensuous drawing of the human form; certainly Colquhoun's muscular, volumetric rendering of her legs, hands, neck and face here in oil reflects Tonks's Renaissance draughtsman's-type dictum: 'Notice the constant change of line that forms the contour.' She was awarded the Slade Summer School Competition Prize in 1929.

This is a daringly upfront and unabashed female self-portrait for its time. The short skirt is upraised somewhat by the figure's casually seated posture, showing sturdy legs and the inner right thigh, and the breasts are revealingly modelled by the tight sweater. What the formidable Professor Tonks – if he ever saw it – made of such a work, a feminist statement of such sensuous poise and natural allure, is unknown. Another first-rate artist, Stella Bowen (who was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1893, settled in London in 1914, studying then at Westminster School of Art, and who died in Essex in 1947) later reminisced about how she happened not to go to the Slade: 'I went first for an interview but was completely crushed by the aspect of the  professor who received me. I don't know whether it was the famous Tonks... but he was eight feet tall and conceived it as his duty to put the fear of god into me.' (quoted in Germaine Greer's 1979 book The Obstacle Race). The kind of gender-biased critical assumptions and sexist prejudices that female artists such as Colquhoun and Bowen had to face as students, and then persistently during their painting careers, are summed by the comments made by Roger Fry in a 1920 letter to the painter Vanessa Bell about her painting of a model in an exhibition – and then describing how differently Professor Tonks responded to Bell's work and that of her close colleague Duncan Grant: 'the amusing thing is Tonks doesn't to this day know who it is by. He's got you and D[uncan] exactly inverted and gave me a little lecture on what a pity it is that women always imitate men.'

The somewhat dun palette in Colquhoun's self-portrait is relieved and heightened by the considerable and subtle use of white to highlight and illuminate flesh, clothes and surging currents of water and a small patch of sky. The figure's expression is reflective, watchful, 'luxuriating in  quiet' – a phrase Colquhoun herself used in a much later book, translating the Gaelic word suaimhneas. Though somewhat melancholically withdrawn or circumspect, the figure's gaze (from below the rather boyish, flapper-like hairstyle) does engage with that of the spectator. It cannot be said for certain where this landscape is, or whether it was imaginary or partly so, yet the human figure seems to grow organically out of the elements, to be composed out of the same primal stuff as the rocks and flowing water. The manifold waterfalls seem to serve as a powerful, maybe unconscious symbol of the artist's creativity and her inner resources of sexual vitality and sensuous energy. The artist's long, curiously expressively twisting fingers seem partly to echo in form the many long, singular 'strands' of water falling behind her. Everything in the picture has a dynamic, sculpted look – even flesh and water appear as if modelled out of stone, out of the living rock, as it were.

Colquhoun's later writings about Cornwall, relating human character to terrain, are relevant here:

        'The life of a region depends ultimately on its geologic substratum, for

        this sets up a chain reaction which passes, determining their character,

        in turn through its streams and wells, its vegetation and the animal-life   

        that feeds on this, and finally through the type of human being attracted

        to live there. In a profound sense also the structure of the rocks gives    

        rise to the psychic life of the land: granite, serpentine, slate, sandstone,

        limestone, chalk and the rest have each their special personality         

        dependant on the age on which they were laid down...'

During the 1940s Colquhoun experimented with automatism in writing and painting, and 'Merz' collage techniques. She also took part in surrealist group games of collective poetic inventiveness, such as that of the chain poem. Here, one player writes a line, then folds the paper to conceal it from view, passing it to a second participant, who follows the same procedure before passing it to a third. This game was viewed as a surrealist activity for navigating unseen, unconscious modes of consciousness. The results may seem, by turns, crude, humorous, sometimes lascivious but also quite often bizarrely revelatory. Some of Colquhoun's chain poems were published in the surrealist periodical TRANSFORMAcTION [sic] in 1973 though they were written at a much earlier date. This witty, subversive example is interesting to read bearing in mind the subject matter and erotic symbolism of her 1929 self-portrait painting:

                He: If my love could be written down

                She: Then the waterfalls would all turn black.

                If one turned around three times

               He: Then I would fuck you all day long.

               If my tongue could reach your womb through your mouth

               She: Then the toads would spit fire and all the gates would creak.

               If I went on a long sea-trip

              He: Then even apple-trees would be monogamous

Head, a 1931 oil portrait by Colquhoun, an upwards-inclining view of a woman's head, naked torso and arms gently crossing her stomach, is a marvellously honest, unprurient view of the female form. The powerful realism of nipples, breasts, long, elegant fingers, muscular neck, and face with its look of mysterious gentleness and determination, co-exists with an impression (like that rendered by her self-portrayal a year or two earlier) that here is a fully sentient being being somehow carved out of stone – and a model of perfection in every detail.

Ithell Colquhoun was born in 1906 in Shillong, Assam, India, later returning to England with her parents to study at Cheltenham School. Following her art education at the Slade, in 1931 she visited Paris, where she became aware of the French Surrealist movement, and then toured Corsica and Greece. Two years later, she returned to Paris, where she met André Breton, the movement's founder, and other members of the group. Her first one-man exhibition at the Cheltenham Municipal Gallery in 1936 was shortly followed by a show at the Fine Art Society in London, where she exhibited mostly studies and paintings of flowers and plants. Her paintings of flowers, plants, rocks and water are seen and portrayed with such preternatural intensity and clarity that they take on a virtually surrealistic air (as is the case too with the plant and flower paintings of her contemporary, Cedric Morris (1889-1982). In the catalogue for her Fine Art Society show, the critic Frank Rutter wrote: 'This artist is never content to paint the mere flower from its living structure and immured in a bowl or vase, but always prefers to paint the whole plant as it grows.'

Colquhoun's impassioned text The Water-Stone of the Wise (published in the Surrealist Section of an anthology of new writing, New Road in 1943, alongside writings by André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst and André Masson) is at once a cri de coeur and personal manifesto pleading for the restoration of humanity to a primordial and innate state of liberty and harmony, with 'No more tyrants and victims.' Colquhoun's short yet poetically vibrant text articulates similar ideas to those expressed in Cecil Collin's illustrated text, The Vision of the Fool, published in 1944 when he was living and teaching at Dartington Hall in Devon – with Collins's plea that 'We must drive out the old Gods from their hiding places in our minds and make them fresh again to receive the spirit of life. I personally feel that the God of life is appearing in the world again, and will, with creative rays, burn away the sterile, meaningless institutions and pierce the suffocating vestments of the priest to find again the naked human heart.'

Amidst the darkness and horror and insanity of war, both artists and writers, Colquhoun and Collins, were speaking of the necessary dawning of a new age of liberated consciousness, in which, as Collins wrote, 'Society must be based on our sense of wonder, the one experience which justifies our being alive. Art is a form of transcendental magic which is created out of that awakened sense, and returns to it.'

Such a sense of wonder and transcendental magic pervades Water-Stone of the Wise: 'Myth is a volcanic force, liberty a perpetual stream... myth must break through the crust, scatter a thousand comets in the sky... we must have liberty. It is the clear stream, the embracing element without which we cannot move. Free air and free water! They are the interpenetraing silver-and-blue, they come from the gushing side of the mountain whose mouth yet streams. Freedom to move, to act, to speak; freedom to be still, to look, to be silent.

'Myth comes from the region between sleeping and waking, the multitudinous abyss [a phrase from Christopher Smart's c.1759 poem Song to David], the unceasing cauldron rimmed with pearls [a reference to the tenth century Welsh poem The Spoils of Annwn, traditionally attributed to the bard Taliesin, with its reference to the magically rejuvenating cauldron which King Alfred obtains on a raid, as well as an allusion to the pearl as a symbol for the clitoris, and also as a symbol of mystical wisdom, as in the biblical 'pearl of great price']. If we let it pour out unhindered, we shall be free to plunge into its depths.'

Inspired by sources such as W.B. Yeats's poems, ancient Alchemy and modern Surrealism, Colquhoun expresses her vision of a new, harmonious cosmic way of living for humankind,far removed from stifling, artificially constructed differences made around gender and social hierarchy – but rather one rooted in 'the hermaphrodite whole... [in which] The Twins, a boy and a girl... are united face to face, having passed forward to the condition of the universal egg. Their faculty is dream... induced by the incandescence of their own body and mind... They weigh down equally each scale of the Balance, and as the two Fishes, are held together in watery dance by a single chord.'

Both Ithell Colquhoun and Cecil Collins were prophetic artists and writers who, in straitened, conformist, often dangerous times, courageously imagined an alternative and hopeful vision of how society could flourish; as such, their art and writings from the 30s, 40s and 50s were far ahead of their time, portending countercultural and Green-oriented themes of later decades, and Colquhoun was fortunate to live to see her radical and originally articulated feminist beliefs become more mainstream. 

In 1947 and 1948, she had one-man shows at the Mayor Gallery in London, and over the next few years exhibited with the Leicester Galleries, and with the London Group. In 1949 she moved into a studio in Hampstead, which she had bought from the painter Gluck for £2,000. A Colquhoun retrospective exhibitiion took place at the Newlyn Orion Galleries in Cornwall in 1976,. The following year the Tate Gallery acquired her 1938 painting, Scylla, depicting the female monster (appearing here with a minatory shark-like head) who, according to the ancient legend in Homer’s Odyssey, inhabited narrow straits and devoured passing sailors. The twin rocks either side of the channel, are portrayed with strong feminine sexual symbolism and sensual allusion. As Colquhoun explained, ‘It was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath…it is thus a pictorial pun, or double-image’. A 2016 Tate catalogue entry notes: 'Produced during Colquhoun’s transition from magical realism to surrealism, this painting is one of her most introspective.'

In 1986, on the 50^th anniversary of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition held in London, her work was included in several major surveys of British Surrealism (at venues including the Mayor Gallery, London, the Glynn Vivian gallery, Swansea, and Leeds City Art Galleries). Ithell Colquhoun died in 1988.

In 1991, her late pen-and-ink drawings of ancient standing stones, as well as rugged Celtic coastline, were published under the (re-visited) title, 'The Living Stones'; in some of these, her characteristic transformation of flesh into stone, and vice versa, becomes explicit, as rocks take on a more than passing resemblance to human sexual organs.

Colquhoun's early portraits are especially strong, based on astute observation and immense technical skill, yet heightening reality through an underlying (partly deliberate, partly unconscious) use of symbolism. Her 1935 oil on the archaeologist Humfry Payne (1902-36) – who made a name publishing pioneering research papers on archaic Greek sculptures – portrays him carelessly leaning against a cottage doorway which frames him. The picture, which is in the NPG Collection, shows a characteristically diaphanous yet muscularly wrought treatment of details of the physical world. In 1934 Payne had begun a systematic study of ancient sculptures at the Acropolis museum, causing (as the richly informative website devoted to Colquhoun's life and art states) 'a sensation [the same year] when he demonstrated that a fragment of sculpture in the museum was an exact fit with another fragment in Lyons museum in France, the pair forming a figure of Aphrodite... In the midst of all this he found time and energy to write from Athens several times a week to a young, unknown artist: Ithell Colquhoun. ' In these letters, 'he continued an extended debate with her over what each expected (or hoped) of the other: platonic affection or physical consummation. The subject was often approached in tortuous, earnest tones....'. Initially, Coluqhoun responded positively and romantically to his advances – but soon she felt she could not proceed with a relationship with a married man...Within months of the relationship ending Payne was dead. A minor knee injury led to septicaemia. Antibiotics were not available and death came swiftly.'

The following appears on the same website devoted to Colquhoun's life and art: 'During the early months of Humfry Payne’s pursuit of her in 1933, Colquhoun was infatuated with a rather older Greek woman named Andromaque Kazou. Her appearance in Colquhoun’s life was powerful, but short-lived. Colquhoun made some ink and watercolour sketches of her and a fully worked oil portrait...The first part of their friendship is described in “Lesbian Shore”, a lengthy text that exists in a number of longhand drafts. It went through substantial revisions, but may have been abandoned incomplete. Colquhoun saw her first across a dining-room in an hotel on Mykonos. For several days she could not take her eyes off her...'my mind wandered into a Kabalistic reverie, of how each type of beauty has its own place in the tree of life, and how the signs of the Zodiac, and the planets that are at home in them, can influence the forms of the body. Her beauty must be lunar, I thought; her morbid charm derives from the pallid spell-weaving of Hecate. … Her rhythm is of the watery element — she owes to the sea-ruling constellation of the Crab, the moon’s only mansion; she shares that attractive force which draws the tides. The moon pulls up the emotional surge, the waters that are under the earth; she stirs that cauldron of abundance where the dissolving past is recalled, the unformed future given a voice.' She began to become aware of her feelings: 'I did not try to analyse the stirrings within me , I could not reflect upon them while thus borne along. It was not until later and in calmer intervals, that I recognised this torrent that swirled me onwards as the ‘swift Hebrus’. I was being carried, indeed, to the ‘Lesbian shore’. Here the manuscript ends abruptly, and the story has to be pieced together from Kazou’s letters. They are written in French, which was not her first language, but she is far less circumspect than Colquhoun: 'I’ve always had extremely strong feelings for you and I’ve hidden my true sentiments under a mask of indifference and sometimes hostility… I don't believe that anybody could ever guess the extent of my love and affection…' and: 'I often ask myself, do you also dream about what it would have been like if we had stayed only friends?'  .. The paucity of hard evidence invites speculation – or fantasy – but the relationship was clearly more than a passing fascination.'

In Colquhoun's 1947 painting Attributes of the Moon, we see a surreally abstracted, majestic female figure standing upon a crescent moon, her own reflected 'lunar beauty' composed of cloudy forms in billowing hues of turquoise, green and white; she wears a crown of ten silver globes, referring to the ten Sephirah of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah. In relation to this picture, one so clearly rooted in the artist's own experience, both intimately and philosophically speaking, it has been written that, 'The female aspect of matter – philosophic mercury – is often depicted in alchemy as a queen or as the moon....The crown shows that she has authority over her domains. The lunar crescent under her feet alludes to the astral world and to the cycles of time.' (http://www.ithellcolquhoun.co.uk, 2017)

There are two ink-and-wash Colquhoun self-portraits c.1930s, also in the NPG Collection: in one, where she is seen in noble semi-profile, her long, cascading hair unmistakeably suggests the appearance of a waterfall, and also a sense of inspiration generously flowing. In the other, in which eyes are given a strikingly bulbous shape, her look is directed inwards, recalling her won comment, 'My life is uneventful, but I sometimes have an interesting Dream.' The latter portrait, whose spontaneous use of calligraphic line for her tousled locks and the stormy use of wash for her complexion make her appear careworn, weather-beaten, was included in the exhibition, 'Mirror Mirror: Self-Portraits by Women Artists' at the National Portrait Gallery (October 24^th 2001 to February 24^th 2002) – which included works by, among others, Eileen Agar (a fellow Surrealist artist), Vanessa Bell and Gwen John.

In 2016, a small Colquhoun Retrospective, the first exhibition in a public gallery since her death, was held at Penlee House Museum and Gallery in Penzance, Cornwall. There was particular emphasis here on her portrayal of the human figure in nature. The show included about thirty works borrowed from The National Trust, as well as from public and private collections.

In her 1956 book The Crying of the Wind, Colquhoun reflected on 'looking at portraits' after viewing the Hugh Lane Bequest in Dublin: 'Perhaps an attitude neglectful of aesthetics is the best in any case for looking at portraits, unless a veritable masterpiece is under conisderation, like Antonio Pollaiuolo's Simonetta Vespucci, or unless the subject is seen as generic, transcending the partricular model, like Cézanne's Old Woman with a Posary. Certainly portraits should be arranged as they are here, unmixed with any other genre, but linked by some social or historical theme.'