Living the dream

“At ten”, wrote Ithell Colquhoun, “I said that when I grew up I never wanted to do anything but paint, and write and study nature. Already I knew my own mind.”

Born in Shillong, Assam, in north-east India, of British parentage, Colquhoun moved to England as a small child and began her schooling in Cheltenham Ladies College in 1919, before attending Cheltenham School of Art in 1925-27, then the Slade in London. In her unpublished essay ‘Until Twelve’, she explains she could not read until she was eight, and took pleasure instead from concocting little plays with her toys; her first artwork was of “an oval rose on a triple stem, with a bud at each side; my second was a purple sun with orange rays setting behind a green slope.”

Flowers and landscapes often appear in her adult work, in addition to figurative studies of mythology and the Bible, and abstracts in which colour takes on an occultist significance. Her writings also explore these ideas and drew on her study of the Kabbalah, alchemical treatises and the writings of Aleister Crowley, as well as her participation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Where many in the European avant-garde engaged with occultism, Colquhoun practised it. Inculcating others in spiritual progress was critical to her art.

In 1929, while studying at the Slade, Colquhoun painted Nativity and Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes. Both are in a classical, monumental painting style, reminiscent of Picasso’s 1920s neo-classical nudes and Fernand Léger’s heavy-limbed ‘tubist’ figures, on the one hand, and the social realism of Thomas Hart Benton’s and Diego Rivera’s murals, on the other. Nativity’s androgynous couple in bohemian clothing speaks to the birth of a new age as well as the birth of the Christ child, while the Brutalist building in the background signifies new directions with its emphatically modernist architecture. Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes won Colquhoun first place in the Slade’s prestigious Summer Composition Prize in 1929. Founded in 1871, the Slade was at the forefront of the move to women’s rights, allowing them equal opportunities to develop as artists. Colquhoun’s triumphant Judith is a subversive virago, perfect for this exciting period of change that followed the Representation of the People Act of 1918 finally granting some British women the right to vote.

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New avant-garde ideas (notably surrealism) were now infiltrating Britain, where modernism had too long been dominated by formalist concerns alone. For the surrealists, magic, alchemy and occultism were vehicles for the overhauling of traditional hierarchies. Colquhoun wrote in 1930 that the occult could overcome oppositions, leading to the “communion” of human and non-human, “metal and deity, beast and precious stone, the months of the year and parts of the human body”. As with fellow British artists Leonora Carrington and Eileen Agar, whom she met in 1936, Colquhoun turned to Paris and surrealism for inspiration and support, but also strove to bring their ideas back to Britain, recognising that surrealism went beyond national borders.

Surrealism quickly inspired Colquhoun to break away from the outmoded Slade school style – “to draw in the style of Michelangelo but to paint in that of the French Impressionists” – and embrace the unconscious impulse and the “influence of Dalí’s technique” instead. This included experimentation in all forms of “pure psychic automatism”, dreamscapes, depictions of sexual desires and fears, paranoia and double images, as she discovered when she visited Paris in 1931 and in 1939.

The International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936 was momentous for Colquhoun. At the opening, Dalí attempted to deliver a lecture wearing a deep-sea diver’s suit and holding two hounds on a leash, while the British artist Sheila Legge wandered among the crowds as the ‘Surrealist Phantom of Sex Appeal’, in an evening gown and headdress made of roses, carrying a raw pork chop. Colquhoun noted the huge impact this exhibition had on her: within three years, she was exhibiting in London alongside the British surrealists in the ‘Living Art in England’ exhibition and in a joint exhibition with Roland Penrose at the Mayor Gallery on Cork Street.

This impact was multifaceted and nuanced, as revealed by Colquhoun’s paintings Double Coconut (1936) and Sunflower (1936) which give the genres of the still life and the portrait new surrealist frisson. The watercolour-on-silk painting of an exotic coconut plant suggests testicles and female buttocks, a Dalí-like double image that gives erotic significance to a nature study. Similarly, the painting of the sunflower is much more than a still life. Helianthus annuus had a particular place in modern art and literature as a symbol of desire. Blake’s illustrated poem ‘Ah! Sun-flower’ (1794) spoke to his doctrine of free love, as symbolised by the flower’s reaching for the sunlight, while the surrealists seized it as a symbol of alchemical desire, magnifying how sol in the French name for the flower (tournesol) incorporates the Latin word ‘sun’, ‘earth’ in French, and the agent ‘sol’, used in litmus tests, denoting chemical change. Colquhoun’s flower thus pays homage to the transformative power of desire. “Sometimes I copy nature,” she wrote, “sometimes imagination: they are equally useful. My life is uneventful, but I sometimes have an interesting dream.”

Colquhoun’s membership of the London surrealist group was short-lived, with E.L.T. Mesens ousting her for her occultist interests in 1940, even though occultism remained central to international surrealism. Her experimentation with automatic painting techniques blossomed as she sought new divinatory processes, a further fusion of surrealism and occultism. Paint began to take on an emphatically material role, acting as an alchemical agent so that transformation literally takes place on the surface of the canvas. Her experiments included blowing paint, decalcomania (pressing ink or paint together to create blob-like forms), fumage (making smoked patterns on paper with a burning candle) and parsemage (sprinkling coloured chalk or charcoal on to water, then dipping paper into it). She aligned these four techniques with the four elements: air, earth, fire and water.

From the 1940s with works such as Gorgon (1946) and Arbour (1946) through to the tarot cards (Taro series) she designed in 1977, Colquhoun viewed these automatic painting processes as a means to enter radically different spiritual realms: with Oil on a Wet Road (1963), the eye delves into an amoebic mass to discover a creature that is part woman, part sea creature.

In her book The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957), Colquhoun noted the importance of “the strange powers” of Cornish geography; she had moved to the county in 1947, staying until her death. The Dance of the Nine Opals pays homage to the importance of the real British landscape to her surreal painted ones, with the Merry Maidens stone circle in Penzance, Cornwall, morphing into a universal eulogy to goddess energy.

Colquhoun’s The Book of the Dead translation, Masonic activities, occult practices, and ordainment as a Priestess of Isis in 1977, all remind us of the inseparability of her art and life. Poetically entangling magic and the marvellous, occultism and automatic technique, dancing maidens and phallic stones, she not only rejected the confines of her world, but re-enchanted it for future generations.

Alyce Mahon has published books on de Sade, Surrealism and eroticism in art.