Ithell Colquhoun

(England, 09/10/1906 - 11/04/1988)

Alcove II (1948)

As an occult artist, writer, and theorist, Colquhoun’s career spanned seven decades and explored themes of sex, gender roles and gender fluidity. Deeply influenced by her spiritualism, Colquhoun skillfully navigated between the esoteric and the surreal to produce work that provokes the castration and impotence anxiety explored by many male Surrealists through her depiction of powerful women from mythology and sexually liberated women.

Beginning her formal art training in 1925 at the Cheltenham Art School, followed by the Slade School of Fine Art in 1927, where she won joint first prize in the 1929 Summer Composition Competition, her artistic and mythical interests are first seen in her childhood notebooks, filled with finely detailed and delicate drawings of fairies, elves, goblins and botanical subjects. “My first painting” she later recalled “was an oval rose on a triple stem, with a bud on each side; my second was a purple sun with orange rays setting behind a green slope”. Her aptitude for art was, too, evident early in her career, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1931 and the Royal Society of Scotland in 1934.

Colquhoun discovered Surrealism while visiting Paris in 1932 and began featuring Surrealist imagery in her work, especially automatism, which is clear in the work shown in her first solo exhibition at Cheltenham Art Gallery in 1936. It wasn’t until 1939, however, that she officially joined the British Surrealist Group. Her fascination and studies of the Occult resulted in her expulsion from the group the following year when she refused to denounce Occultism.

Colquhoun sought to redefine female identity through rich and symbolic archetypes: the Goddess, the Alchemist, the Scientist, the Weaver of Destinies, the Spiritual Guide and, most resolutely, the Great Mother Goddess. In doing so, she defied Surrealism’s confines of women and her unique combination of Surrealism and the Occult result in a body of work unlike any other that, thanks to reevaluation of her work, is being understood in new light by contemporary audiences.

Image: Ithell Colquhoun, Alcove II (1948). Oil on board, 22.9 x 34.3 cm. Private collection.