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.
