Ithell Colquhoun 'Bewteen Worlds' Tate St Ives Feb 1-May 5 2025

 Ithell Colquhoun ‘ Between Worlds’ at Tate St Ives,  Feb 1st - May 5 2025

Ithell Colquhoun - (‘Eye thell Cull hoon’ or ‘Ke’hoon’) was born in India to a white colonial family  in 1908 but came to UK, attending the Slade art school, spending time in Paris and in Greece and eventually living in Cornwall with a studio in Lamorna, whilst having a second home in London.
She died 1988 and it’s since her work, left to the National Trust, was transferred to Tate 2019 that it has excited new interest.

This artist was wealthy enough to pursue her eccentricities in many directions through multiple esoteric occult connections which made her unwelcome to continue in the official British Surrealist movement. She became one of the lesbian contingent in Lamorna alongside Gluck and Marlow Moss.

Her writing has been described as ‘overwrought and opaque ‘ and my own brief attempt to read some of it leads me to think she was rather batty.
She pursued beliefs in a divine presence with hermaphrodite origins and sought a utopian future, whilst apparently mentioning racist ideas and peculiar views on incest which I have only heard hinted at rather than frankly explained by Dr Amy Hale on YouTube.

So what of this extensive show greeted by a huge buzzing crowd at the Private View?
And why are no parallels mentioned with Jung?

 

Judith showing the head of Holofernes, 1929
 

The exhibition  begins with more academic work, then interest in nature, images about same sex attraction, surreal compositions, structures based on cubes, responses to Penwith’s Celtic past and stone circles in the landscape and ending with abstract colourful tarot cards which were intended not for fortune telling but for meditation.

At her best Ithell’s images are vivid and memorable - but in this show  there is some repetitious stuff like the many tiny collages that I doubt she would have chosen to exhibit and some of which are too high on the wall for me to see.
Sometimes her paint is clumsily applied as she seeks to express her ideas no doubt not thinking of anything but how to explore as she feels the need for self- enquiry and esoteric speculation.

It’s miles from the interest in applying paint with lively panache that continues a few yards away at the Penwith gallery to this day in St Ives. There the committee prefers abstract chutzpah and visual celebration to the intense preoccupation of spiritual enquiry we see in Colquhoun’s surreal world.

Both are narrow spheres with little of naturalist observation or political and social relevance although one of Colquhoun’s pictures references a communist liberation group in 1942 in Greece that were fired on by the British forces.

I found myself getting absorbed by it all much more on my second visit when the gallery was quiet. I noticed how very strange were her early paintings and how much vaginal imagery was in the later work, which is actually around the time when Judy Chicago used this in her controversial ‘Dinner Party.’

Local folk may be glad to find an artist exhibited in Tate St Ives who lived in Penwith rather than visiting briefly. This particular one fits well with the idea of our area being one with a lot of flakey practices linked with romantic spiritual or magical myth.

Tate presents the show with no parallel examples from other artists but a separate room of work by Bharti Kher who has some similarities.
If you like an immersion into one woman’s strange ideas you may really enjoy it.

Drawing for 'The Sunset birth, 1942

Ther Sunset Birth, 1942

E.L.A.S. Peoples'Army for National Liberation 1942

 

 Leave uncombed your darling hair 1953

Tarot cards 

from slide show of later works.

'A Retrospective' at St Ives Arts Club, Feb1-12 2025

 St Ives Arts Club Art Exhibition, ‘A Retrospective’ Feb Ist to 12th,  2025

Please check on St Ives Arts Club website or Facebook for opening hours.

Janet Axten is curating this new show and it was a pleasure for me to be present when Chris O’Reilly and Steve Litherland, present and past Presidents, unwrapped the Arts Club collection and we discussed ideas about presenting the selected works to be exhibited in the club’s attractive newly decorated gallery at Wescott’s Quay, which will be free to the public to view.

It’s immediately apparant that these are not contemporary work. Some of the frames are ornate, and the colours are more subtle than those artists choose now, not merely faded by the passage of time. 

My favourite is Moffat Lindner’s (1852-1949) painting of a watery scene with a lovely atmosphere of gentle open air spaciousness. He exhibited in Paris and Barcelona and was a great benefactor to the art scene in St Ives.

Most quirky is the work by John Berryman of 2005 using a piece of burnt wood from the time when the building caught fire when a candle used in a drama rehearsal was left burning. He includes an ace of clubs to refer to us being within an ace of losing the venerable building, with its wooden top storey, used as the Arts Club since 1890. It was saved by someone passing sounding the alarm and John resigned from membership and the Presidency because this happened on his watch. Nowadays any use of open flames or smoking is strictly prohibited.

There are about 25 varied pictures to enjoy.
I would pick out a small gem by Mabel Douglas of her husband, John Christian Douglass, 

 

and Marjorie Mostyn’s vibrant  portrait.

 

 There is also a charming sheet of drawings including  arts club activities from the 60’s which is by an artist so far unknown.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see this collection from the Arts Club’s heritage which is such a valuable historical resource.  The club will welcome any new relevant information from visitors.

For current members who exhibit there it’s a wonderful thing to be part of the ongoing artists’ contribution to the cultural life of St Ives, which draws visitors from far and wide.

Left Bank by Agnes Poirier

 ‘Left Bank’ by Agnes Poirier, publ 2018

This book is about Paris from the Second World War to 1953 as the place where artists and writers were working and meeting, and also drinking, taking drugs and having many sexual liaisons.
Poirier packs in an immense amount of research and detail which can fascinate but in the end the complex array of infidelities becomes wearisome.
Surprisingly the RAF dropped leaflets of a poem by Eluard entitled ‘Liberty’ during the nazi occupation. Somehow Sartre escaped from a German prison with false ID. Picasso managed in a time of scarcity to find enough bronze to cast 150 sculptures. All the paintings from the Louvre were successfully moved to safe locations. Existentialism emerged.
The film ‘Casablanca’ came out in 1942 -  a film I realised only at third viewing shows  political refugees escaping war.
Eventually de Gaulle walked triumphantly up the Champs Elysee with the rejoicing liberated crowds, although fascist snipers killed 300 people. Hundreds of returned  emaciated prisoners were placed in requisitioned hotels and had to be  fed at first small amounts as they recovered.
Jazz thrived.  The communists were very influential and many had been very brave in the resistance. Through the  Marshall Plan the USA helped Europe,  seeing it as an entity, and sending ex GI troops on grants to enjoy studying in Paris. Black people like Miles Davies, enjoying life with Juliet Greco, found racial hatred so much less prevalent than at home.
Sartre started a third way political party, the ‘ Democratic and Revolutionary Alliance’ which eventually petered out. Garry Davis publically gave up his citizenship and called for World Government. Stalin’s death camps were revealed.
Simone de Beauvoir published ‘the second sex’ which many of the men including Camus rejected as it showed how women were in need of their own liberation.
Maurice Chevalier was a collaborator. Koestler violently abused his wife.
There were witch hunts in America against those suspected of communist sympathies- Walt Disney and Ginger Rogers being on the Republican extreme of anti leftwing people.

There is a helpful digest of events and a list of the people who figure in the book with their dates.

I think it gives a vivid flavour of the times and flows well despite some absurd sentences occasionally where the author cobbles her vast researches together, not differentiating between the relative importance of her detailed pieces of information. There are a few photographs of people.

I learnt things and found writers new to me to seek out such as Irwin Shaw.

Some escaped, some collaborated with the Nazis, some fought them and others just voiced educated opinions and indulged their appetites.. Reading about them raises the question of how you would yourself act and how to decide who to trust in such perilous times.

Mary Fletcher