productive curatorial framing might have explored the possibility that his work reflects a negotiation of social identity rather than a formal or stylistic alignment with modernism. Fra Paris reinforces this reading: it demonstrates that he had the ability to pursue more modern tendencies, but also that this ability was ultimately secondary to self-reinvention, upward social mobility and institutional and financial recognition. His ambition, in other words, may simply have been to be a successful artist, not necessarily a modern one.
1 The exhibition was first shown at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden (8th November 2024–2nd March 2025).
2 Accompanying publication: Mot det moderne: Christian Skredsvig. Edited by Øystein Sjåstad. 208 pp. incl. 80 col. + 45 b. & w. ills. (Orfeus Publishing, Oslo, 2024), NOK 349. ISBN 978–82–92870–43–0.
Ithell Colquhoun
Tate Britain, London 13th June–19th October
by dawn ades
Scylla (méditerranée) (Fig.27), the painting chosen as the poster image for this exhibition, occupies a curious place in the career of Ithell Colquhoun (1906–88).1 Her best-known work, it was acquired by Tate in 1977 and was the only work of hers included in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1978.2 Yet, despite its prominence, it is far from typical of her work, as this major retrospective makes clear. The most comprehensive account to date, it reveals an artist whose output was informed by Surrealism as well as esoteric and magical traditions, and who was equally prolific in writing as she was in drawing and painting. There are complex reasons for Colquhoun’s relative invisibility both before and after her death, not least her will, in which she left the contents of her workshop to the National Trust and her archive of occult works to Tate. Happily, the subsequent complications – including issues of overlap between the two bequests and questions over the legal and physical status of major paintings stored by the National Trust
– have, according to the exhibition catalogue, now been resolved.3
It is fitting that this exhibition first opened at Tate St Ives before travelling to Tate Britain, London, as Cornwall – its landscapes, culture, myths and ancient histories – was of profound significance to Colquhoun.4
Although both shows follow the same thematic structure, there have been some changes in the London iteration and inevitably the spaces hold the works differently. The galleries at St Ives seemed to this reviewer to be more sympathetic to the work: intimate and free flowing. By contrast,
the Tate Britain rooms are more formal, the works are more crowded and the wall colours too emphatic; pink is singularly ill-suited to Scylla, for example. The exhibition was also slightly larger at St Ives. Some watercolours and oil paintings, such as the hallucinatory Woman of Beare (1950; private collection), have not travelled to London. Also missing are the artist’s mural designs from the late 1920s; Decad of intelligence (1978–79), a series of ten enamel paintings on paper bound in a sketchbook; and some of the illustrations to The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957), Colquhoun’s personal account of the region. A dozen or so works on paper, including fumages, have been added at Tate Britain. Nonetheless, across both venues, Tate’s painstaking conservation efforts and restoration of the works from the archive have finally made the full range and depth of Colquhoun’s work accessible. Among the resulting surprises is a sequence of tiny, evocative photo-collages from Bonsoir (1939), an unrealised film project that follows a heterosexual couple setting out for the evening, during which the female partner takes up with a woman. Alyce Mahon and Sarah Pucill discuss the project in a brief contribution to the exhibition catalogue titled ‘Reflections on film: “Bonsoir” and the queer female gaze’. Indeed, the catalogue wisely includes a number of relatively short essays that explore the many different aspects of Colquhoun’s creative life, not always in accord with one another, as well as tributes from the contemporary artists Tai Shani (b.1976) and Linder (b.1954), which underline her contemporary relevance. It also scrupulously identifies which works are only exhibited at one of the two venues.
Both exhibitions begin with a relatively straightforward chronological approach, presenting early paintings alongside an anticipatory nod towards Colquhoun’s long-term, if officially brief, engagement with Surrealism. After joining in the late 1930s, Colquhoun refused to accept E.L.T. Mesens’s demands of the English group, which required members to sever ties with any other association or secret
society and to boycott exhibitions or publications not affiliated with the Surrealist movement. Her tentative move to reassociate with the English Surrealists in the late 1940s was brusquely rejected. Colquhoun’s early paintings, made while she was studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in the late 1920s, are quite startling: heavily modelled, they show a kind of exaggerated figuration, without a trace of modernism (Fig.28). The prescribed subjects for the school’s Summer Composition Prize were still drawn from history, the bible and other myths, as they had been in the past. Colquhoun was awarded the 1929 prize for Judith showing the head of Holfernes (1929; UCL Art Museum, London). Whether she was aware of Artemisia Gentileschi’s versions (Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples; and Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence) is an interesting question, although there is no clear evidence of this.
In Colquhoun’s scene, the severed head with streams of
blood clashing with flames, the surrounding bystanders, the devillike figure on the right and the strange, ghostly architecture all suggest an unorthodox emotional and intellectual engagement. As the curator, Katy Norris, points out in her introduction to the catalogue, Colquhoun’s spiritual search for meaning in the world started early, and by the time she was at the Slade she was already a member of the Quest Society, which was dedicated to the ‘comparative study of religion, philosophy and science’ (p.14). The next group of paintings, from the early 1930s – also based on mythological and biblical subjects –were unsuccessful attempts to win the Rome Scholarship in Decorative Painting, awarded by the British School at Rome. From this point onwards, a tension emerges between the worldly pursuit of a career through exhibitions and publications and an uncompromising commitment to her own work and research into alchemical and esoteric forms of knowledge and instruction.
28. Self-portrait, by Ithell Colquhoun. 1929. Oil on canvas, 76.5 by 51 cm. (© Spire Healthcare; Noise Abatement Society; Samaritans; Ruth Borchard Collection, London; courtesy Piano Nobile, London; exh. Tate Britain, London).
In the following gallery, titled ‘Into Surrealism’, a beautiful sequence of plant and flower paintings (Fig.29) usher in Colquhoun’s discovery of the movement. Here, there is a kind of collective sigh of relief as the artist encounters the ideas and practices that informed the rest of the career and released her from the pictorial traditions taught at the Slade. Colquhoun began to engage with Surrealism after a visit to Paris in 1931. The International Surrealist Exhibition in London five years later, and above all the work of Salvador Dalí, was a revelation. In 1939 she exhibited at the Mayor Gallery, London, alongside Roland Penrose (1900–84), where she showed some botanical paintings and a new group of works known as the Méditerranée series (c.1938–40), which included Scylla.
In response to the relative invisibility of women painters in Surrealism, this reviewer published the article ‘Notes on two women Surrealist painters: Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun’, which addressed the contradictions in the male Surrealists’ attitudes to women (‘we loved them’)
and the impact of their emphasis on eroticism.5 Colquhoun responded with a generous letter recognising the attempt: ‘Please thank Dawn Ades for her perceptive essay [. . .] She may be interested in the following points: 1. Breton said somewhere – I quote from memory, “que la femme soit libre et adorée”. But I’m sorry to say that, as her essay implies, most of Breton’s followers were no less chauvinist for all that. Among them, women as human beings tended to be “permitted not required”’.6 To the suggestion that the sexual imagery in Scylla was somewhat phallic, Colquhoun replied ‘Scylla in my view is primarily a feminine symbol, but I suppose one could see it as phallic as well’.7 A feminine symbol it undoubtedly is, with the vulvic opening between the knees and the seaweed pubic hair, but the erect fleshy forms of the clashing rocks nonetheless challenge the classic gender trope of woman as nature: passive, fecund, often lying flat and
awaiting entry. In their catalogue essay, Norah Bowman and Astrida Neimanis develop Colquhoun’s visual critique of an outworn gender identity with gusto, turning it on its head in a protest against climate disaster and the rape of land and waters: ‘In Colquhoun’s vision, where lands and waters are no longer necessarily, submissively, and violably feminised, can we also reimagine our (Western, masculinist) mastery of the earth?’ (p.141).
Colquhoun ascribed what she called the ‘double images’ in Scylla and other paintings of the Mediterranée group to Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method. However, her double images are not quite the same as Dalí’s. As the exhibition wall texts state, Colquhoun’s configurations produce two or more associations that are simultaneous, whereas Dali’s are read alternately. As with the well-known psychoanalytic sign of the duck/ rabbit, which he added to one of his most elaborate paranoiac paintings, it is either/or. The closest Dalí comes to Colquhoun’s approach is Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937; Tate Modern, London), in which two forms – a hunched body and a skeletal hand – mirror one another and are meant to fuse together through an optical trick. With Colquhoun, the associations prompted by the forms flow into or grate against one another, functioning as poetic metaphors.
As meagrely represented in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed as women painters was automatism. As Colquhoun put it, ‘the fact that automatism was underexposed in a show as comprehensive as Dada and Surrealism Reviewed at the Hayward Gallery in 1978 suggests that its possibilities have yet to be fully appreciated’.8 Colquhoun may be the most faithful and inventive of all the artists who belonged at some point to the Surrealist movement and its founding principle of automatism. After the group of paintings that includes Scylla and Gouffres amers (méditerranée) (1939; Hunterian Gallery, University of Glasgow) – works in which her traditional training at the Slade is deployed to such unusual ends – Colquhoun’s expressive vocabulary was greatly
enriched by the ideas, histories and possibilities of automatism. It melded naturally with her long-term investigations into the unconscious and ‘the beyond’ of different belief systems and occult practices. In the summer of 1939 she met Roberto Matta (1911–2002), Gordon Onslow Ford (1912–2003) and other members of the Surrealist group at the château de Chemillieu – their last gathering before the outbreak of the Second World War – and embraced Matta’s version of automatism, which he termed psychological morphology. In her essay ‘Children of the mantic stain’, Colquhoun described her understanding of psychomorphology as ‘the discovery by various automatic processes of the hidden contents of the psyche and their expression through different media. The principle of all these processes is the making of a stain by chance, or “objective hazard” to use the surrealist term, the gazing at the stain in order to see what it suggests to the imagination, and, finally, the developing of these suggestions in plastic terms’.9
Colquhoun practised, wrote and lectured about automatism –for example, in Cambridge, where she gave a ‘Live demonstration with paint’ in November 1951 – and explored its potential in original ways. For this exhibition, the curators have uncovered a film she made for the BBC in 1948, in which she demonstrates several different processes, including one she invented herself, named parsemage. This involved sprinkling powdered chalk and graphite over water, then passing a sheet of paper below to skim the surface and capture the marks. She also demonstrated fumage and the most well-known and successful of the automatic techniques, decalcomania, which is the basis for many of the striking works on view here, in a section titled ‘The mantic stain’. Decalcomania is a flexible process, in which gouache, oil paint or ink is freely applied to a surface such as paper, before another is pressed on to it and carefully lifted off. Seeing the works in this context is revelatory: the textures of the originals, along with the details and subtleties of
Colquhoun’s interpretations cannot be fully captured in reproduction. In the oil on wood panel Attributes of the moon (Fig.30), for example, the figure of Hecate emerges from passages of delicately developed decalcomania;
30. Attributes of the moon, by Ithell Colquhoun. 1947. Oil on wood panel, 98.1 by 45.5 cm. (Tate; exh. Tate Britain, London).
images move effortlessly between figuration and abstraction.
The final work in both exhibitions – more accessible at Tate Britain, where it is hung at eye level – is Colquhoun’s Taro series (1977). Her cards, which are conjured through mesmerisingly varied abstract forms and colours, offer a fascinating contrast with the Jeu de Marseilles, the deck inspired by the Tarot de Marseille created by the Surrealists in Marseille in 1941 – a reminder of how much Colquhoun shared with the movement, not least in terms of their common interests in alchemy, occultism and magic. It has taken a long time for women – both as human beings and artists – to be recognised as supremely eloquent exponents of the ideas of a movement that did not always appreciate them. This exhibition is a significant step in redressing this oversight.
1 The artist’s name is pronounced ‘Eye-thell’, as she regularly explained.
2 D. Ades: exh. cat. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, London (Hayward Gallery) 1978.
3 Catalogue: Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds. Edited by Katy Norris and Emma Chambers. 240 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2025), £40. ISBN 978–1–84976–943–3, pp.6–7 and 87–89.
4 The exhibition at Tate St Ives and the accompanying catalogue have the subtitle Between Worlds, which has been dropped for the Tate Britain iteration.
5 D. Ades: ‘Notes on two women Surrealist painters: Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun’, Oxford Art Journal 3 (1980), pp.36–42.
6 I. Colquhoun: ‘Women in art’ (Letters to the Editors), Oxford Art Journal 4 (1981), p.65.
7 Ibid.
8 I. Colquhoun: ‘Notes on automatism’, in R. Shillitoe, ed.: Medea’s Charms: Selected Shorter Writing of Ithell Colquhoun, London 2019, pp.255–57, at p.257.
9 I. Colquhoun: ‘Children of the mantic stain’, in Shillitoe, op. cit. (note 8), pp.245–54, at p.246. This essay is a revised version of ‘The mantic stain’, Enquiry 2 (1949), pp.15–21.
Art Brut: Dans l’intimité d’une collection
Grand Palais, Paris 20th June–21st September
by colin rhodes
In 1967 Jean Dubuffet (1901–85), the originator of the term art brut, showed a large selection of work from his collection at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. In tune with the spirit of the time, the
heterogeny of drawing, embroidery and three-dimensional objects was presented as a direct challenge to the prevailing dominant culture, which Dubuffet saw as beholden to state sponsorship, public approbation and the exigencies of fashion: it was an act of ‘incivism’, as Dubuffet put it in his introduction to the catalogue.1
Already concerned about the danger of institutional appropriation of art brut posed by the exhibition, Dubuffet subsequently rejected several offers from the French minister of culture to acquire his collection for the state. He eventually settled for a deal with the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, which promised to provide facilities devoted solely to its display. Nearly sixty years later, Paris is host to another largescale exhibition of art brut, this time drawn from a recent gift to the Centre Pompidou from the collection of the French film-maker Bruno Decharme (b.1951). It includes works by many of the artists who were in Dubuffet’s exhibition, including now-pivotal figures such as Adolf Wölfli and Aloïse Corbaz, as well as many subsequent discoveries and additions to the canon of this strangest of modern fields.
As the Pompidou has now begun a period of major renovation, the show is hosted in the Grand Palais, itself recently reopened after a fouryear restoration project; indeed, so recent that the opening of this
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