Latest news with #IthellColquhoun
Irish Times
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colquhoun – An exquisitely strange British-Celtic artist's travels in Ireland
The Crying of the Wind: Ireland Author : Ithell Colquhoun ISBN-13 : 978-1805331568 Publisher : Pushkin Press Classics Guideline Price : £12.99 Exquisitely strange, British Celtic surrealist artist, literary writer and occultist Ithell Colquhoun's memoir of her travels in Ireland in the first half of the 1950s is now republished as a Pushkin Press Classic. Colquhoun's trove of art, writing and the fruit of a lifetime's passionate research into a vast range of esoteric subjects were nearly lost after she died in Cornwall in 1988, aged 81. Fortunately her work was salvaged by a small group of devotees. The Crying of the Wind, The Living Stones: Cornwall, and the alchemical novel, The Goose of Hermogenes, have been republished by Pushkin to coincide with the UK Tate Gallery's 2025 retrospective of Colquhoun's visual work, which runs until October. Colquhoun's trained eye scans the Irish landscape. She visits prehistoric stone monuments, about whose ritualistic purposes – reflected in the still-living folk traditions of rural people she meets – she speculates evocatively. Colquhoun's erudition comes alive through her extrasensory perception. She was a druid, witch and magician. As with the work of WB Yeats, who she met and admired greatly, Colquhoun's writing is lit from within by an incandescent glow that derives, I feel, from her deep sensing of the numinous everywhere. READ MORE The linguistic beauty Colquhoun generates with her visionary artist's eye, and her ability to describe what are generally unseen worlds, can carry the reader, for example, from the crumbling grandeur of Protestant Ascendancy culture to panoramic vistas of giant spirit beings who live alongside humans in the Irish landscape. Colquhoun describes all-night partying with Dublin's bohemians; hanging out in the studio of painter Jack B Yeats; and being brought to meditate inside Newgrange by the now almost forgotten Irish occult artist, Art O'Murnaghan, at a time when you could let yourself into the ancient mound by borrowing the caretaker's key. The joie-de-vivre of Colquhoun's Cornwall travels is noticeably absent here. Perhaps it was the author's recent divorce, alongside the menace of Catholic theocratic mind control – then reaching fever-pitch – that made the bleak Irish summers and ever-present poverty harder to bear. Nevertheless, the still-existing pagan spirituality of Ireland – the beauty of our skies, our precious extant Gaelic culture and its animistic worldview – seen through the eyes of a genius mystic polymath over 70 years ago, makes this book an enchanting read.
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Edward Burra - Ithell Colquhoun: Tate's double-bill is a revelation
Tate Britain's latest offer? Two exhibitions for the price of one. For the first time since 2013's Gary Hume-Patrick Caulfield double-header, separate yet similarly engrossing shows occupy the lower-floor galleries at Millbank, accessed with a single ticket. (The order in which you see them is unimportant, but some stamina is required; allow a couple of hours.) The juxtaposition isn't obvious but neither is it forced: although it's unlikely they ever met, the 20th-century British artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun were born only a year apart, to upper-middle-class families, and were both associated with Surrealism. They also shared preoccupations, such as an interest in same-sex relationships and a concern for the British landscape – as well as (to varying degrees) the paranormal and the occult. A ramshackle, sickly character from Sussex, Burra (1905-76) specialised in stylised, graphic watercolours with a satirical edge, often depicting people on society's margins. (For the artist Paul Nash, a friend, he was a modern Hogarth.) In part because watercolour was his preferred medium – thanks to lifelong rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia, he found it easier than painting in oils at an easel – he's often considered an idiosyncratic, tangential figure within British visitors to Tate Britain may be familiar with his composition The Snack Bar (1930), in which a chalky-faced barman suggestively slices a firm, pink ham (it remains on display upstairs), but this show of more than 80 paintings – Burra's first London retrospective in 40 years – contains so many exhibits from private collections (almost 50) that it feels like a revelation. Accompanied by music drawn from his collection of 78rpm gramophone records (he was a big fan of American jazz, which inspired a trip to Harlem during the 1930s), the exhibition tautly traces Burra's career, from his teeming early pictures of bohemians and pert-bottomed sailors living it up in France – Le Bal (1928) is a standout – to his brooding post-war visions of an enchanted British countryside blighted by motorways and concrete. Each picture is a mini-world of incident and observation, often saturated with seediness and innuendo. The conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s cut Burra deeply, darkening an already dour disposition, and inspiring in his work a menacing new strain (sometimes charged with sadomasochism), as the flirting, gurning hedonists of his earlier paintings are replaced by hooded wraiths and sinister men in birdlike masks. Colquhoun (1906-88), an avowed occultist, was more interested in magic and the power of female sexuality than in macho menace; whereas Burra fetishised the male form, Colquhoun – who may have been bisexual, and was married only briefly, during the 1940s – painted imagery evoking impotence and castration. Who knew that a trimmed cucumber could be so troubling?This show, first seen earlier this year (at Tate St Ives) in Cornwall, where Colquhoun lived during her latter decades, takes her obsession with magic seriously – devoting space to diagrams of tesseracts and tarot-card designs, and teasing out impenetrable alchemical concepts such as the 'Divine Androgyne'.Don't let this put you off. Inspired by the crisp art of Salvador Dalí, which she encountered in London in 1936 (at an exhibition of Surrealist art in which Burra also participated), Colquhoun's mature paintings – often produced using 'automatic' techniques – have a flaming, dream-like intensity. In Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), a ring of opalescent rocks inspired by a Cornish stone circle appears to revolve around a golden tree of life before pink-tinged mountains. Fantastical pictures like this – like much of Burra's original output (which, although the shows aren't in competition, probably edges it) – deserve greater prominence in the history of 20th-century British art. From June 13;
Time Out
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Ithell Colquhoun: ‘Between Worlds'
Ithell Colquhoun didn't sit still, visually or spiritually. This exhibition attempts to make sense of a sprawling oeuvre that engages with an incredibly wide gamut of spiritual, religious and formal ideas. Though not always coherent, it reveals her to be an artist of immense talent and invention. Across her engagements with the occult, Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism and the Jewish Kabbalah, Colquhoun's eye for composition remains a constant, and might be the best part of a sometimes confusing show. Born in 1906 in India, where her father worked in the British colonial administration, Colquhoun moved to Cheltenham at a young age and went on to study art at the Slade, where she developed an interest in the esoteric. She was a card-carrying surrealist until 1940, when the group's British leader E.L.T. Mesens declared that members shouldn't join other societies. A practicing occultist, she took her cue to leave. Throughout the exhibition, various strains of surrealism and ways of understanding the world serve as a kind of tasting menu for Colquhoun. Here, in a relatively small-scale restaging of her broader exhibition at Tate St. Ives, the jumps between various artistic mediums and grand ideas can be jarring. Spanning painting, drawing and a number of more experimental techniques, the diversity of Colquhoun's output seems to work against the constraints of the exhibition. What might be an expansive exploration often feels like a whistle-stop tour. Standout moments are deeply – if quietly – impactful. The painting Scylla (1938), for example, depicts two tubular and fleshy rocks emerging from the ocean. They meet underwater among a tangle of coral. It's as suggestive as it is strange, reflecting the Surrealist idea of a 'double image', where one thing masquerades as another. A phallic interpretation is tempting, but a second look yields something more elegant and subtle: a pair of legs emerging from the water, seen from above as though painted from the point of view of someone sitting in a bathtub. A transatlantic counterpart, perhaps, to Frida Kahlo's surrealist masterpiece What the Water Gave Me, which was painted in the same year. The formal virtuosity that Scylla demonstrates is constant through Colquhoun's practice. This clearly comes naturally to her, as is evident in some beautiful small-scale examples of her experiments with new techniques. The symmetrical, rainbow-coloured Rorschach tests yielded by her 'Stillomancy' technique and the ghostly shapes applied using Fumage – holding paper above a flame and painting with its smoke – are highlights. Elsewhere, a tarot deck is adorned with psychedelic abstract constellations formed by pouring brightly coloured enamel paint. Bonsoir (1939) is the work that best demonstrates this talent for composition. Across a grid of 42 small-scale, simplistic photographic collages (some comprising only one image), Colquhoun tells an ambiguous story of attraction between two women. She crops, clips and combines images with the keen graphic sensibility of a pop artist. Though this show might bite off more than it can chew conceptually, it succeeds in communicating Colquhoun's impressive abilities as an image-maker.
Telegraph
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
London was the centre of the art world. Now it's the English countryside
Where would you start looking if you wanted to find the heart and soul of British culture? Is there somewhere you can pinpoint, like the source of a great river? 'That's easy!' I used to think, considering these questions. 'The city is where art gets made.' From the Italian city-states that birthed the Renaissance to the metropolises of Paris, Berlin and Vienna from which Modernism emerged, dynamic urban environments have provided the settings for important cultural vibe shifts. The same is true of Britain, isn't it? Elizabethan theatre flourished in playhouses on the fringes of the capital. Four centuries later, the Young British Artists flocked to empty warehouses in the East End. A symbiosis between art and cities makes sense. To thrive, significant new art requires certain conditions: the circulation of stimulating ideas; proximity to ever-shifting entertainments; networks of like-minded creative types on the lookout for inspiration. These things are commonplace in cities. Yet, to deny that culture can also coalesce in the countryside would reflect terrible metropolitan bias, as I realised while visiting Tate Britain's enthralling new double exhibition devoted to the 20th-century artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun, both of whom had a profound sensitivity to the British landscape. Towards the end of his life, Burra depicted rural locations that he believed were menaced by modernity. After the war, Colquhoun settled in Cornwall and produced visionary paintings inspired by topographical features such as standing stones. Both were products of their times. A generation earlier, the British avant-garde – led by Wyndham Lewis and his fellow Vorticists – had been an urban affair. But hankering after rural spots gradually became de rigueur for progressive artists. (The same period witnessed the British folk-song revival associated with the musician Cecil Sharp.) In 1907, the artist Eric Gill settled in the Sussex village of Ditchling. A little later, the Bloomsbury set began congregating at Charleston, a few miles to the east. In the 1930s, Paul Nash lived in Dorset, in the coastal town of Swanage, where he cavorted with fellow artist Eileen Agar (the pair became known as the 'seaside surrealists'), and painted Event on the Downs (1934), with its mysterious face-off between a tree stump, a cloud, and a levitating tennis ball. By the end of that decade, Ben Nicholson had moved to the Cornish enclave of St Ives. In 1945, the exiled 'degenerate' German artist Kurt Schwitters ended up in Cumbria (following in the footsteps of the artist and writer John Ruskin, who lived in the Lake District from 1872 until his death). During the 1970s, Henry Moore – who for decades had been collecting pleasing pebbles and flints, which he often used as a starting point for new work – made a series of dramatic prints depicting Stonehenge. It isn't only aspects of British modernism: various earlier cultural moments could be considered rural phenomena too. Romanticism wouldn't have happened without a newfound interest in awe-inspiring native mountain scenery: swathes of the country, once written off as desolate wilderness, were now 'sublime'. Several artists from the British Isles responded to this fascination for rugged landscapes, including, famously, JMW Turner – who was struck by Snowdonia during a trip to north Wales in 1798 – but also Francis Danby and John Martin, and, of course, James Ward, whose colossal, 14ft-wide Goredale Scar (exhibited 1815), an epic, primordial vision of limestone cliffs in Yorkshire, dominates Tate Britain. And what was the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement if not a reaction against the Industrial Revolution? Perhaps, like an ancient chalk figure cut into a hill, the spirit of British culture should be located far beyond the city's gates. That said, we shouldn't romanticise the countryside as a bucolic paradise where artists perpetually work and play. The truth is that rural settings aren't especially conducive to generating culture; country people aren't known for embracing change or new ideas. Still, according to Adam Sutherland, the longstanding director of Grizedale Arts (an arts organisation based in a valley in the Lake District), every so often something of lasting cultural importance 'blows up' in the countryside – and these 'little explosions', as he put it to me recently, are 'all interconnected', and even represent 'a kind of rural movement'. Are we witnessing another rural 'explosion' today? I suspect so. Signs of a so-called 'rural renaissance' have been evident for a while – since the success of Jez Butterworth's rambunctious 2009 play Jerusalem, which was set in the middle of nowhere in Wiltshire, and debuted shortly after the artist Sarah Lucas (the most gifted – and urban – of the YBAs) had swapped Shoreditch for Suffolk. More recently, the BBC's brilliant 'mockumentary sitcom' This Country, which shone a light on everyday ennui in a Cotswolds village, ran for three series between 2017 and 2020. During the pandemic, people moved out of cities in droves, and 'gorpcore' – an outerwear fashion trend associated with hiking – became a thing; judging by the footwear sported in my patch of east London, it's still going strong. Nature writing by the likes of Olivia Laing and Robert Macfarlane, whose latest best-seller, Is a River Alive?, was published last month, remains popular. Within visual art, too, there's been a 'turn' towards the rural. In 2021, two artists, Matthew Shaw and Lally MacBeth (whose study of enchanting folk customs, The Lost Folk, will be published by Faber & Faber next week), set up Stone Club (membership: £7), as 'a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate'. Next month, the finale of the National Gallery's bicentenary celebrations – a 'day-long spectacular' in Trafalgar Square orchestrated by the artist Jeremy Deller – will involve hundreds of participants including Boss Morris, a troupe of 'progressive' Morris dancers. A few years ago, this would have prompted sniggers. But Boss Morris have performed at Glastonbury and the Brits. What is motivating this interest in non-urban modes? The root cause may be economic. Thanks to sky-high rents, younger artists can no longer afford to be in the capital. Many are clustering instead in seaside towns where a relationship with the natural world is more pronounced. Is St Leonards the new St Ives? Since there isn't much of an art market in these places, they're also finding other ways to work, e.g., by creating art that's useful, and embedding themselves in local communities. Rural art is as much a mind-set as a cultural product. Above all, though, the rural renaissance is surely a reaction to the Digital Age, and a call-to-arms for those of us who are sick of staring endlessly at screens. Back to the land!
Telegraph
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Edward Burra - Ithell Colquhoun: Tate's eccentric double-bill feels like a revelation
Tate Britain's latest offer? Two exhibitions for the price of one. For the first time since 2013's Gary Hume-Patrick Caulfield double-header, separate yet similarly engrossing shows occupy the lower-floor galleries at Millbank, accessed with a single ticket. (The order in which you see them is unimportant, but some stamina is required; allow a couple of hours.) The juxtaposition isn't obvious but neither is it forced: although it's unlikely they ever met, the 20th-century British artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun were born only a year apart, to upper-middle-class families, and were both associated with Surrealism. They also shared preoccupations, such as an interest in same-sex relationships and a concern for the British landscape – as well as (to varying degrees) the paranormal and the occult. A ramshackle, sickly character from Sussex, Burra (1905-76) specialised in stylised, graphic watercolours with a satirical edge, often depicting people on society's margins. (For the artist Paul Nash, a friend, he was a modern Hogarth.) In part because watercolour was his preferred medium – thanks to lifelong rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia, he found it easier than painting in oils at an easel – he's often considered an idiosyncratic, tangential figure within British modernism. Regular visitors to Tate Britain may be familiar with his composition The Snack Bar (1930), in which a chalky-faced barman suggestively slices a firm, pink ham (it remains on display upstairs), but this show of more than 80 paintings – Burra's first London retrospective in 40 years – contains so many exhibits from private collections (almost 50) that it feels like a revelation. Accompanied by music drawn from his collection of 78rpm gramophone records (he was a big fan of American jazz, which inspired a trip to Harlem during the 1930s), the exhibition tautly traces Burra's career, from his teeming early pictures of bohemians and pert-bottomed sailors living it up in France – Le Bal (1928) is a standout – to his brooding post-war visions of an enchanted British countryside blighted by motorways and concrete. Each picture is a mini-world of incident and observation, often saturated with seediness and innuendo. The conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s cut Burra deeply, darkening an already dour disposition, and inspiring in his work a menacing new strain (sometimes charged with sadomasochism), as the flirting, gurning hedonists of his earlier paintings are replaced by hooded wraiths and sinister men in birdlike masks. Colquhoun (1906-88), an avowed occultist, was more interested in magic and the power of female sexuality than in macho menace; whereas Burra fetishised the male form, Colquhoun – who may have been bisexual, and was married only briefly, during the 1940s – painted imagery evoking impotence and castration. Who knew that a trimmed cucumber could be so troubling? This show, first seen earlier this year (at Tate St Ives) in Cornwall, where Colquhoun lived during her latter decades, takes her obsession with magic seriously – devoting space to diagrams of tesseracts and tarot-card designs, and teasing out impenetrable alchemical concepts such as the 'Divine Androgyne'. Don't let this put you off. Inspired by the crisp art of Salvador Dalí, which she encountered in London in 1936 (at an exhibition of Surrealist art in which Burra also participated), Colquhoun's mature paintings – often produced using 'automatic' techniques – have a flaming, dream-like intensity. In Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), a ring of opalescent rocks inspired by a Cornish stone circle appears to revolve around a golden tree of life before pink-tinged mountains. Fantastical pictures like this – like much of Burra's original output (which, although the shows aren't in competition, probably edges it) – deserve greater prominence in the history of 20th-century British art.
