The Tate Colquhoun archive

A few years ago the National Trust handed over to Tate a large trove of work by the mystical Surrealist female artist Ithell Colquhoun (1906 to 1988) which significantly added to Tate’s existing archive. As far as I can tell, this exhibition is by way of showcasing the new expanded archive and sets out to demonstrate the impressive length, breadth and variety of Colquhoun’s career. As the Tate blurb puts it:

This landmark exhibition of over 140 artworks and archival materials traces Colquhoun’s evolution, from her early student work and engagement with the surrealist movement, to her fascination with the intertwining realms of art, sexual identity, ecology and occultism.

1. Variety of style

Thus the exhibition displays seven or eight completely different visual styles or approaches which Colquhoun developed over her long life, many of which are very attractive. In doing so the curators have to convey quite a lot of information – they have to explain to us the sheer range of Colquhoun’s purely artistic techniques or approaches to art-making, including the ones she copied or adapted from the European Surrealists during her Surrealist phase (1930s and 40s).

2. Esoteric knowledge

But the really striking and distinctive feature of the exhibition is the extraordinary range and depth of Colquhoun’s interests in esoteric wisdom. Almost every painting or drawing requires a hefty label explaining how it relates to ancient theories of magic and mysticism which she moulded and adapted to create a strikingly wide and diverse range of styles and pictures.

3. Eroticism

Then there’s the sex. Plenty of esoteric traditions attribute magical, mystical powers to our sexuality, assigning particular attributes to the male or female ‘principles’, discussing the union of male and female in sexual congress or in mystical figures where male and female actually become one, and so on.

Throughout her career Colquhoun was very interested in the many overlaps between esoteric traditions and sensual and sexual imagery. None of the paintings or sketches is pornographic, most of them are not even what you’d call particularly sensual, but a good number of them, maybe half, deal with sex as described in various mystical traditions.

This includes some of her best and most striking works, such as the lovely ‘Drawing of a red and yellow couple conjoined’, a small ink and watercolour work on delicate tracing paper, which I kept coming back to. Of its kind, perfect.

Drawing of a red and yellow couple conjoined by Ithell Colquhoun © Tate

Thoughts

I’ll give you my opinion now, before itemising some of the traditions and techniques in more detail. My opinion is that Colquhoun is a minor but very attractive figure. By minor I mean that she didn’t establish a school or have followers. If she innovated numerous techniques and approaches these have disappeared into art school practice i.e. are not particularly attributed to her.

Also she didn’t really produce any knock-down masterpieces, pictures which take your breath away. Maybe that’s another definition of a ‘major’ figure. There are only a handful of large, standout, finished pictures. The most striking one is ‘Scylla’, which is why it’s on the poster and all the promotional material.

Scylla (méditerranée) by Ithell Colquhoun (1938) Tate © Spire Healthcare © Noise Abatement Society © Samaritans

But instead of big knockout numbers, there are lots of smaller, not quite finished, not quite perfect, but still very attractive images, which become more appealing the more you read up about her mystical views and beliefs.

There are images to admire in every room and over time it took to wander round, immersing myself in her personality and interests and approaches, well, I came to like her and her work more and more. In particular to admire her restless drive to experiment. The sheer range of styles and approaches is as impressive as any of the actual works.

Artistic styles

1. Narrative paintings / murals
2. Art school William Blake
3. Botanical paintings
4. Cutout book
5. de Chirico Surrealism
6. Dali Surrealism and the double image
7. Automatic painting
8. Enamel drip (Taro)

1. Narrative paintings / murals

At the Slade she painted a number of large narrative paintings, especially of biblical subjects with fantastic architectural settings. There’s a death of the Virgin Mary in which the figures kneeling by her bedside are all in modern dress. Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes (1929). Judgement of Paris (1930), Aaron meeting Moses (1932). She remained a member of the Society of Mural Painters into the 1940s.

2. William Blake figures

These early works depict highly stylised human figures, positioned so as to fill the picture plane to overflowing, with a strong outline of the schematic and stylised figures, the exaggerated drawing in of the forehead, and the highly stylised eyes. All this reminded me of William Blake’s highly stylised, moulded and sculpted human figures, drawn with strong defining outlines, only amped up with 1920s modernism, with Art Deco features.

Song of Songs by Ithell Colquhoun (1933) © Tate

3. Botanical paintings

Completely different from these historical subjects, Colquhoun developed a different line, painting flowers and plants in a figurative style, inflected by 1920s modernism to produce what in the German art of the time was referred to as ‘magic realism’. At the same time, you can see how the stylisation of the flowers points towards her interest in surrealism, at the same times as the flowers are becoming symbols.

Water-Flower by Ithell Colquhoun (1938) Arts University Plymouth © Spire Healthcare © Noise Abatement Society © Samaritans

4. Cut-out book, Bonsoir, 1939

One entire wall is devoted to 40 or so small black and white photos and photomontages she created as the storyboard for an unmade surrealist film titled ‘Bonsoir’, which was never made.

The curators point out that the storyline appears to be a lesbian love story, moving from a woman in a cab with a man in a top hat, on towards scenes where two women are lying together in bed, scantily clad and kissing. On the wall opposite are sketches of a woman she apparently had a lesbian affair with, Andromaque Kazou, and the curators quote from ‘Lesbian Shore’, a lesbian text she wrote but which was never published. What I take from this is that Colquhoun was bisexual, or gender fluid, highly and sensual and completely unembarrassed about expressing it in her paintings.

• Article about Bonsoir in Elephant magazine

Surrealism

Colquhoun had come across Surrealism in 1931 when she briefly lived in Paris. The 1936 London International Exhibition of Surrealism bowled her over and for some years she submitted entirely to the Surrealist influence, contributing to English Surrealist magazines, exhibiting with fellow British Surrealists. On the evidence here the influence can be divided into several distinct styles.

5. de Chirico surrealism

Next to the ‘Bonsoir’ cut-outs is a very finished and complete painting of a church, with no people in it and a few coloured ribbons or flows of some liquid leaking over the steps. This has the architectural precision but unpeopled ominousness of a de Chirico painting.

• Rivieres Tiedes (Mediterranee)

6. Dali surrealism

More common is the influence of Salvador Dalí. Colquhoun was very taken with Dalí’s concept of the ‘double image’, of the immaculately painted image of one thing which, on closer examination, can also be another. This is why the Scylla painting is so central to this period of her work. On the face of it, it is a depiction of two large rocks emerging from the sea, with the prow of a yacht coming round behind one of them. Look closer, and you realise it is also a portrait of the artist’s thighs rising out of the water of a bath, with the kelp or seaweed at the bottom representing her pubic hair. As the exhibition progresses there is to be quite a lot of pubic hair…

7. Automatic painting

The Surrealists rejected the world of reason and logic and business and politics which had led to the catastrophic First World War. Inspired by Freud’s theories of the human unconscious – i.e. that the unconscious mind is the large and determining part of our personalities – the Surrealists developed a range of techniques designed to access the unconscious or, alternatively, to startle the conscious mind out of its settled habits. Hence their new aesthetic ideas such as ‘convulsive beauty’ and so on.

Back in the early 1920s the founders of Surrealism, notably André Breton, had developed ‘automatic writing’ i.e. writing down the first random thoughts that came into your head then elaborating them. Later in the 1920s, as the movement became more art-based and visual, various members developed the notion of automatic painting. Colquhoun took this up with a passion. She developed different ways of making the picture creating process random.

She published an influential essay, ‘The Mantic Stain’, in 1949. This explored the spiritual possibilities of automatism and she compared the automatism to divination, the perception of future events or forces beyond our earthly senses.

The exhibition presents a group of paintings made using the decalcomania technique. This involved pressing together two surfaces covered with paint to create a mirror image produced without the intentional use of the artist’s hand i.e. a kind of automatism – to produce a messy gloopy shape (this is what she meant by ‘stain’ in the phrase ‘Mantic Stain’). Which she then worked up into a more elaborate and finished work.

So here’s an initial decalcomianac paint pressing, or what she called the ‘peel’.

Counterpart for Gorgon by Ithell Colquhoun (around 1946) © Tate

And here’s the finished, highly worked-over painting:

Gorgon by Ithell Colquhoun ( 1946) Private Collection © Spire Healthcare © Noise Abatement Society © Samaritans

Note the use of very Dalí-like eggs. But they are placed in a fantastical landscape which is not really like Dalí at all, more like the fantastical highly coloured worlds of Max Ernst or Yves Tanguy. But the gorgeous vibrant colour palette is very distinctive. Lots of her works are very attractively bright and colourful.

She also worked with:

• écrémage – dipping paper into water with oily ink on the surface
• fumage – the smoke from a candle or lamp on a surface like paper or canvas
• parsemage – submerging paper in water sprinkled with powdered charcoal or chalk

Then, in each case, overpainting the random, automatic, ‘spiritual’ images which result.

8. Enamel drip (Taro)

A lot later, and on display in the final room, Colquhoun developed a technique for dripping vibrant paints onto enamel surfaces. She used this in her full set of Tarot cards, created in the 1970s. These are included in their entirety and cover a wall. I know and care nothing about the names and mystical significances of the cards, but I was struck by the abstract beauty of the patterns, almost always a multi-layered blot at the centre of the card but amazing how many variations on the same idea were possible.

The Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty from Taro: Major Arcana by Ithell Colquhoun (1977) Tate Archive TGA 201913. Photo © Tate Photography (Kathleen Arundell)

Esoteric knowledge

While still a student Colquhoun began to be interested in esoteric literature and occult sects and it became a lifelong interest which heavily influenced her art but it was in the early 1940s, sort of emerging from her initial enthusiasm for Surrealism, that she began to base paintings and drawings on esoteric knowledge. From this point onwards barely a wall label goes by without mentioning the influence of one or other of the classics of esoteric thought. These include:

• alchemy
• ancient Egyptian religion
• the Divine Androgyne
• animism
• astrology
• Buddhist Tantra
• Christian mysticism
• fertility cults
• the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
• Hindu Tantra
• Jewish kabbala
• magic
• mysticism
• the occult
• the Philosopher’s Stone
• shakti, the feminine force in Hindu mysticism which combines spiritual and earthly worlds
• spiritualism
• tantra
• the Quest Society
• theorhythm
• theosophy
• yoga

She had a particularly feminist or female take on all these belief systems, incorporating them into her own bisexual or gender-fluid values, producing numerous images reflecting on the interaction on male and female principles, exploring the idea of a divine feminine power. Take the idea, central to alchemy, that the male and female forms can be merged to create an androgynous whole.

The curators tell us Colquhoun produced work in sets or series which explored various aspects of these esoteric theories, often using particular techniques for particular ideas. As I’ve mentioned, I really liked some of the smaller, more intimate images created from watercolour and ink on delicate tracing paper. Take this attractively schematic watercolour from 1940, ‘The Thirteen Streams of Magnificent Oil’.

The Thirteen Streams of Magnificent Oil by by Ithell Colquhoun (1940) © Tate

The curators explain that in Jewish mysticism the Supreme Being has a beard divided into 13 strands from which flow streams of divine oil which illuminate the earthly world. Colquhoun explored how this substance might enter the human body via different openings, twelve into men’s twelve openings, but women have thirteen openings, can therefore receive all 13 flows, and are therefore superior beings.

But that’s not all. In the writing on the paper Colquhoun refers to the key text of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky’s ‘The Secret Doctrine’ which makes a connection between the streams of oil and the Tree of Life. The numbers next to each stream indicates the Tree’s ten sephiroth or energy points.

That’s just one wall label. There are a hundred or so like this, quite densely packed with arcane and esoteric learning underpinning the great majority of Colquhoun’s works and series.

Colquhoun the author

Talking of texts, Colquhoun wrote and published a number of essays and books. She described and explained her approach to automatic painting in two important texts, ‘The Mantic Stain’ (1949) and Children of the Mantic Sun’ (1951).

Later, once she’d moved to Cornwall, she wrote a number of works about the mystical landscape including ‘The Living Stones: Cornwall’ (1957).

Cornwall

Colquhoun moved to Cornwall in the late 1940s, where her interest in automatism and the esoteric became combined. She was an acknowledged authority on the occult, and her writing ranged from contributions to such periodicals as Prediction, to Surrealist texts gathered together and published as ‘The Goose of Hermogenes’ (1961).

Colquhoun’s understanding of the world as a connected spiritual cosmos brought her to Cornwall from the early 1940s, where she was inspired by the region’s ancient landscape, Celtic mythologies, and neolithic monuments.

She bought a studio in Lamorna on the Penwith peninsula in 1949 before settling in the nearby village of Paul. She published extensively: essays, surrealist novels and atmospheric travelogues including ‘The Living Stones: Cornwall’ in 1957.

Colquhoun’s fascination with the psychic histories of Celtic lands is evident in visionary works of sacred sites and standing stones in Cornwall and Brittany. This part of the show features the exhibition’s largest works, enormous oil paintings such as such as ‘Landscape with Antiquities’ (1950), the enormous ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie‘ (1940) or ‘Dance of the Nine Opals’ (1942).

You can see how they combine a semi-figurative approach to landscape which is subsumed by a more schematic, diagrammatic imagination which is itself strongly influenced by the still very strong Surrealist influence.

Dance of the Nine Opals by Ithell Colquhoun (1942) The Sherwin Family Collection permanently housed at The Hepworth Wakefield (Wakefield, UK) © Spire Healthcare © Noise Abatement Society © Samaritans

Second conclusion

I liked many of the images here, from whichever period, in whichever style, using whichever technique, and exploring whichever of the many mystical teachings she immersed herself in. Lots of them are just very visually appealing.

Here’s one of the gorgeously rich and Symbolism-heavy paintings created using the decalcomania technique. The curators point out that it combines 1) an automatic origin, with 2) a Surrealist finish, in which 3) lingers the figurative idea of a magical cave, which is also – and very characteristically – 4) a sort of stylised depiction of female genitalia.

Alcove by Ithell Colquhoun (1946) Private Collection © Spire Healthcare © Noise Abatement Society © Samaritans

Compare and contrast that with one of the double images, not really in the full Dalí mode but nonetheless a recognisably human figure made entirely out of, well, what? Clouds? Bits of fabric? And what are those hands made out of? All wrapped up in esoteric symbolism of the crescent moon, at the bottom of the image.

Attributes of the Moon by Ithell Colquhoun ( 1947) Tate, presented by the National Trust 2016 © Tate. Photo © Tate (Matt Greenwood)

And in a different style again, here is another overtly erotic work from the extensive ‘Diagrams of Love’ sequence, 20 or so examples of which cover one wall, along with the short elliptical poems she wrote to accompany the series. I think you can see the rude elements without my commentary but what I enjoyed was the spangles scattered over the torso, and the delicate blue of the figure’s wings, tinged with pink and yellow.

Diagrams of Love: The Bird or the Egg? by Ithell Colquhoun (circa 1940) Tate Archive, TGA 929/4/17/3. Photo © Tate Photography (Lucy Green)

It’s full of images like this. The more I looked, the more I liked.

Related links

• Ithell Colquhoun continues at Tate Britain until 19 October 2025
• Tate’s Ithell Colquhoun page
• Ithell Colquhoun’s website
• Article about Colquhoun on the Unit website

Related reviews

• Surrealism reviews
• Tate Britain reviews
• Women artists