Ithell Colquhoun didn’t sit still, visually or spiritually. This exhibition attempts to make sense of a sprawling oeuvre that engages with an incredibly wide gamut of spiritual, religious and formal ideas. Though not always coherent, it reveals her to be an artist of immense talent and invention. Across her engagements with the occult, Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism and the Jewish Kabbalah, Colquhoun’s eye for composition remains a constant, and might be the best part of a sometimes confusing show.
Born in 1906 in India, where her father worked in the British colonial administration, Colquhoun moved to Cheltenham at a young age and went on to study art at the Slade, where she developed an interest in the esoteric. She was a card-carrying surrealist until 1940, when the group’s British leader E.L.T. Mesens declared that members shouldn’t join other societies. A practicing occultist, she took her cue to leave.
Throughout the exhibition, various strains of surrealism and ways of understanding the world serve as a kind of tasting menu for Colquhoun. Here, in a relatively small-scale restaging of her broader exhibition at Tate St. Ives, the jumps between various artistic mediums and grand ideas can be jarring. Spanning painting, drawing and a number of more experimental techniques, the diversity of Colquhoun’s output seems to work against the constraints of the exhibition. What might be an expansive exploration often feels like a whistle-stop tour.
Standout moments are deeply – if quietly – impactful. The painting Scylla (1938), for example, depicts two tubular and fleshy rocks emerging from the ocean. They meet underwater among a tangle of coral. It’s as suggestive as it is strange, reflecting the Surrealist idea of a ‘double image’, where one thing masquerades as another. A phallic interpretation is tempting, but a second look yields something more elegant and subtle: a pair of legs emerging from the water, seen from above as though painted from the point of view of someone sitting in a bathtub. A transatlantic counterpart, perhaps, to Frida Kahlo’s surrealist masterpiece What the Water Gave Me, which was painted in the same year.
The formal virtuosity that Scylla demonstrates is constant through Colquhoun’s practice. This clearly comes naturally to her, as is evident in some beautiful small-scale examples of her experiments with new techniques. The symmetrical, rainbow-coloured Rorschach tests yielded by her ‘Stillomancy’ technique and the ghostly shapes applied using Fumage – holding paper above a flame and painting with its smoke – are highlights. Elsewhere, a tarot deck is adorned with psychedelic abstract constellations formed by pouring brightly coloured enamel paint.
Bonsoir (1939) is the work that best demonstrates this talent for composition. Across a grid of 42 small-scale, simplistic photographic collages (some comprising only one image), Colquhoun tells an ambiguous story of attraction between two women. She crops, clips and combines images with the keen graphic sensibility of a pop artist. Though this show might bite off more than it can chew conceptually, it succeeds in communicating Colquhoun’s impressive abilities as an image-maker.
A ticket to this exhibition also gains you access to Edward Burra.
