@eduardmsmr
Happy Surrealist Saturday!!
I thought the last one was my favorite exploration, but i loved this one waaay more. it’s interesting how each exploration feels better than the previous one
It actually makes me want to go back and re-explore the ones i’ve done before because i may have missed so many interesting facts about those artists (i am getting better at exploring/researching with each one)
Anyways, this week's exploration led me to someone who was expelled from Surrealism for being too free, and that single fact told me everything I needed to know about the movement’s contradictions, and everything I needed to know about her
Her name is Ithell Colquhoun (pronounced "eye-thel ka-HOON")
She was born on October 9, 1906, in Shillong, British India, and she became a painter, poet, occultist, and one of the most radical artists of the 20th century. The Centre Pompidou calls her the "High Priestess of British Surrealism"
Ithell was born to a military family as her father was a civil servant in the Indian Civil Service. She was sent back to England as an infant and was raised in Dorset before attending Cheltenham Ladies' College
Her interest in the occult started remarkably early, at age 17, after reading a newspaper article about Aleister Crowley's (English occultist and ceremonial magician) Abbey of Thelema and the early essays of W.B. Yeats (Irish poet and mystic)
She studied at Cheltenham School of Art and then at the prestigious Slade School of Art in London from 1927 to 1931. While still at the Slade, she joined G.R.S. Mead's Quest Society, an occult group with theosophical leanings, and published her first article, "The Prose of Alchemy," in 1930. In 1929, she won the Slade's Summer Composition Prize for Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1931
After leaving the Slade, Ithell established a studio in Paris. And this is where her world cracked open. She met RenĂ© Magritte, AndrĂ© Breton (the co-founder and principal theorist of Surrealism), Salvador DalĂ, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray (American visual artist), who famously photographed her holding a sheaf of wheat, evoking Demeter, the ancient goddess of harvest and fertility
During the 1930s, she traveled through Greece, Corsica, and Tenerife.
While in Greece, she fell in love with an older woman named Andromache Kazou, who became the subject of several paintings and an unpublished manuscript she titled Lesbian Shore
She never publicly identified her sexuality, but she lived truthfully and privately. Her art explored androgyny which is the alchemical union of male and female, as a path to enlightenment. She painted bodies overlapping, merging, and dissolving gender into something divine
Her interest in Surrealism deepened after seeing Salvador DalĂ lecture at the 1936 International Exhibition of Surrealism in London. By 1939, she formally joined the British Surrealist Group and exhibited alongside Roland Penrose (English artist and historian) at the Mayor Gallery, showing fourteen oil paintings and two objects
That same year, she visited André Breton at his studio on Rue Fontaine in Paris, a place she described as a realm of wonder, its walls adorned with Surrealist masterpieces and cases of tropical butterflies. She was introduced to automatism and "psycho-morphology" which is a method of using automatic processes to uncover hidden contents of the psyche
She then stayed with surrealists including Gordon Onslow Ford (British painter) and Roberto Matta (Chilean-French artist) at a chateau in Chemillieu, France
After only about a year as a member, Ithell was expelled from the British Surrealist Group in 1940 during a gathering at the Barcelona Restaurant in Soho, London
The group's leader, E.L.T. Mesens (Belgian artist and art dealer), demanded that members should not belong to any other organizations. Ithell refused to renounce her occult affiliations. She was expelled alongside Grace Pailthorpe (British artist and psychoanalyst) and Ruth Adams, while Eileen Agar (British painter and photographer) was the only one later reinstated
This act only proved the chauvinism within the British group that Ithell would later address directly
In 1981, she wrote: "Breton said somewhere... 'let woman be free and adored.' But I'm sorry to say that most of Breton's followers were no less chauvinist for all that. Among them, women as human beings tended to be 'permitted not required.'"
What makes the expulsion so bitterly ironic is that Breton himself was deeply interested in the esoteric. The French Surrealists embraced the occult far more than the British group did. Ithell was punished for practicing what Surrealism, at its philosophical core, was always supposed to be about: the liberation of the mind from rational constraints
In the early 1940s, she married fellow surrealist Toni del Renzio (Russian-born Italian artist and critic), who had initially criticized her art as "sterile abstractions". Their studio in Bedford Park became an open house for artists. The marriage was rocky, and they divorced in 1947
But Ithell's greatest contributions were only beginning. She was both using existing Surrealist automatic techniques and also invented entirely new ones such as parsemage (scattering chalk dust on water, then skimming it off with paper), entopic graphomania (drawing lines between the naturally occurring marks on a plain piece of paper, which she described as "the most austere kind of geometric abstraction), superautomatism, and stillomancy
She mastered decalcomania, fumage, and frottage, and later developed a method of dripping diluted enamel paint onto paper and tilting it so the pigments would pour and bleed into each other
She was one of only a few women to contribute a rigorous theoretical text to Surrealism through her 1949 essay "The Mantic Stain," which she claimed was the first English-language essay on surrealist automatism. In it, she drew revolutionary parallels between automatic art-making and ancient divinatory practices
Scholar Amy Hale called her "a nexus of all the major occult currents of the twentieth century." She was a member of Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis, Kenneth Grant's New Isis Lodge, the Druid Order, several Masonic Lodges, and a Priestess of Isis in the Fellowship of Isis
She wrote Sword of Wisdom (1975), a biography of one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She was well-read in Buddhism, yoga, Kabbalah, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and Celtic lore
In the late 1950s, she moved permanently to Cornwall, to the remote village of Paul in West Penwith which was a landscape she saw as sacred. Its ancient wells, megalithic stones, and druidic relics became her spiritual world
She published novels written through automatic processes, The Goose of Hermogenes (1961), and two volumes of poetry. Two more surrealist gothic novels were published after her death: I Saw Water (2014) and Destination Limbo (2021)
Perhaps her crowning achievement was her 1977 Taro deck (she preferred the archaic spelling). It was a set of 77 abstract works made with dripped enamel paint using pure psychic automatism, with no pictured figures and no symbols, only color based on the Golden Dawn's Kabbalistic color theories
She designed it as a meditative tool. After completing the pack, she saw photographs of nebulae and the birth of stars and they looked exactly like her designs
In her later works, she stopped signing her name entirely and instead used a magical monogram: "SV," for Splendidior Vitro which meant "more brilliant than glass."
Ithell died on April 11, 1988, of heart failure, at 81. She left her literary works to the writer Derek Stanford, her occult work to the Tate, and the rest of her art to the National Trust
The copyright for works she'd sold during her lifetime went to three unexpected beneficiaries: The Samaritans, the Noise Abatement Society, and St Anthony's Hospital
In 2019, the Tate acquired approximately 5,000 items from her archives. In 2025, they mounted "Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds", the largest exhibition of her work ever staged, at Tate St Ives and Tate Britain
Her work was included in the Centre Pompidou's 2024 "Surréalisme" exhibition celebrating the movement's 100th anniversary. She has been cited as a major influence on the artist Linder (British artist celebrated for punk performances and photomontage), who contributed a chapter to the Tate exhibition catalogue and has one of her five-foot paintings hanging in her home
Critics are calling her the next artist to have a "Hilma af Klint moment"
Thank you for reading🌹
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