Review of Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds and Edward Burra: Ithell Colquhoun

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine” calls the female lover whose voice opens the Song of Solomon, her account dominating the Old Testament love poem told as a narrative to the daughters of Jerusalem, her female audience.1 Rooted in the fertility cults and wisdom literature of ancient West Asia and North Africa, the song also reflects these cultures’ erotic poetry, mapping, for Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988), an understanding of the erotic as sacred, of union as revelation, and of the body as a mystical landscape. Such themes weave throughout the artist’s oeuvre, culminating perhaps in her own poems, Diagrams of Love I and II (1953), and the depictions of what Amy Hale calls “sex magic” which accompany them.2 The biblical poem forms the subject of the artist’s Song of Songs (1933), a painting displayed at the entrance of the Tate’s two exhibitions of her work, first in Cornwall, as “Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds” at Tate St Ives (1 February—5 May 2025), and then in London, as “Edward Burra—Ithell Colquhoun” at Tate Britain (13 June—19 October 2025).

First exhibited at Colquhoun’s 1936 Cheltenham Municipal Art Gallery show, Song of Songs depicts a pair of lovers beside a carafe of wine, two glasses and a dish of peaches and pomegranates. The scene is set against a verdant background because “also our bed is green./The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.”3 Framed by foliage and an eroticised, anthropomorphic tree, Colquhoun’s iconography references the biblical love song while pointing forward to works like The Pine Family (1940), or perhaps more closely the vulvic hollow of Tree Anatomy (1942), to foreground female pleasure. Looping above the couple, a red coloured ribbon signifies an energetic circuit, fusing the sexual and the spiritual, the tantric and the alchemical. Key to the image is the male lover’s androgyny. His long, curled hair and full lips belie his muscularity, complicating gender identity and the erotic gaze. In this sense, Song of Songs reads as an allegory of the union of alchemical opposites, establishing the androgyne, one of Colquhoun’s most recurring symbols, as a collapse of duality that enables spiritual transformation.

Throughout the first rooms of both exhibitions, history paintings on the scale of murals demonstrate the artist’s compositional rigour and the classicizing figuration that testifies to her academic training under Henry Tonks at the Slade between 1927 and 1931. However, the visionary depiction of biblical subjects and Greco-Roman mythologies equally testify to Colqhoun’s feminist-hermeticist mythopoetics as she reimagines established iconographies through the lens of gender instability. In Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes (1929), a muscular Judith, androgynous but for her breasts and jewels, strides forcefully into the scene, brandishing the general’s severed head. In Judgement of Paris (1930), Athena’s victorious nudity is intensified by her shield, spear, helmet, and a radiant mop of pubic hair, establishing a presence which is all but male. Both Judith and Athena are painted an anti-naturalistic red. This channels alchemical colour symbolism to signify rubedo, the ultimate aim of alchemical transformation, which is the “union of the King and the Queen that produces the Philosopher’s Stone.”4

Departing from academic tradition, the symbolic program of both paintings already therefore owes much to the occult as Colquhoun, a member of the Quest Society from 1929 and an adherent of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, crafts her work to operate as visual grimoires in which the female-androgyne comes alive as a ritual site of transformation, perception, and power. The paintings are accompanied by a display case containing handwritten pages from Colqhoun’s unpublished manuscript Lesbian Shore (1930), alongside portraits of Andromaque Kazou, the woman who inspired it. The text’s fusion of landscape and sexuality, body and terrain, presents myth as an experiential force, foregrounding the female lover less as muse than as magician. Such early works set the stage for Colquhoun to advance what Alyce Mahon calls “a new and emphatically feminine erotic iconography for surrealism.”5

In his Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929), André Breton asked for the “profound, veritable occultation of Surrealism.”6 Fascinated by the writings of Eliphas Lévi, Paracelsus and Jules Michelet, by the tarot, mediumism, magic, and above all automatism, Breton arguably saw in occultism a symbolic language through which to destabilise positivist rationalism and bourgeois moral order. However, as Tessel M. Bauduin argues, he “was not an occult adept and his movement was not a celebration of occultism.”7 Concerned less with spiritual transformation than with intellectual subversion therefore, surrealism embraced the occult in some sense because it was transgressive. This half-serious, half-ironic relationship to hermeticism starkly contrasts with Colquhoun’s lifelong commitment to magical praxis and various esoteric orders, including the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Fellowship of Isis. In her discussion of Leonora Carrington, Susan Aberth points to how women artists took their interest in the occult further than their male contemporaries, finding themselves marginalised as a result.8 Indeed, in 1940 E. L. T. Mesens expelled Colquhoun from the British Surrealist Group for refusing to give up her occult affiliations.

That said, Colquhoun “labelled herself a surrealist throughout her life,” drawn to the movement’s radical potential to collapse inner and outer realities, and to its promise of psychic liberation via automatism, dream and the irrational.9 First introduced to surrealism in Paris in 1931, Colquhoun’s initial interest in Dalí’s double imagery is traced through her depictions of flowers and myth which take on increasingly paranoiac potential in their fusion of botanical, geological and genital forms. This is perhaps most evident in the artist’s best-known work, Scylla (1938), which evokes the Homeric sea nymph-as-monster via a simultaneously corporeal and mythological landscape of phallic rock formations, rooted to the domesticated “transubstantiation” of Colquhoun’s own legs in the bath.10 Gouffres amers (1939) from the same series, Méditerranée, equally fuses the elements and the body, setting up a kind of exquisite corpse linking earth, air, water and fire with langoustine and a play on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–1611) and The Albatross (1859), a poem by Baudelaire.

“The principle used in many processes of surrealist painting is to make a stain—by chance, or automatically, as we say, and then to look into it and see what forms it suggests to our imagination.”11 So opens Colquhoun’s essay “The Mantic Stain” (1949), her matter of fact account of automatism, published a year after she had appeared on the BBC television programme Eye of the Artist: Fantastic Art in which she demonstrated the automatic techniques of decalcomania, fumage, and parsemage (which she had invented herself). Noting the links between automatic mark making and the artist’s unconscious psychic state, Colquhoun continues in her essay, “It is for this reason that I feel these stains to have a ‘mantic’ or divinatory quality,” something she associates with “the practices of clairvoyants” and “an august ancestry in that they are traceably allied to the ‘great work’ of alchemy.”12

Stills from the BBC television programme, displayed in a vitrine at St Ives, projected on the wall in London, and originally aired on a Monday evening in mid-August 1948, show the artist in the corner of a room, wearing a sleeveless, square-necked apron dress typical of mid-century utilitarian homeware, her characteristic bobbed hair upswept in the semblance of 1940s rolled styles.13 Standing behind a makeshift counter on which her materials are displayed, Colquhoun performs a sequence of automatic actions. The images ironically echo the choreography of televised demonstrations in which women typically showcased recipes or cleaning products. This domestic parallel becomes subversive with the fusion of spiritual labour and the visual language of domestic femininity, as the images act to camouflage an esoteric act, blurring the boundaries between housework and psychic work, homemaking and spell-making.

Far beyond a surrealist flirtation, the reality of Colqhoun’s magic praxis emerges throughout the explicitly and eclectically esoteric dimensions of the works mapped out across the two exhibitions, culminating in the Tarot (or Taro) she designed in 1977, the Arcana of which fill the last rooms of both shows. Working with pure, elemental colour (yellow for Swords, blue for Cups, red for Wands and indigo for Disks), enamel paint and an automatic drip technique, the cards fuse abstraction, archetype and ritual to cast Colqhoun’s divinatory system as cosmological philosophy. Existing “between worlds,” including those of Britain where she lived between London and Cornwall and India where she was born; of figuration, abstraction, surrealism and occultism; of the physical, metaphysical, human and the divine, Colquhoun’s work repeatedly evokes the androgyne, suggesting both a radically liminal imagination and the perfection of the magnum opus. In some sense, her position is matched by Tate’s decision to frame her oeuvre “between east and west,” underscoring the transnational, transcultural and transdimensional span of her vision.14 Pairing Colquhoun, in London, with Burra’s eccentric figuration, his queering of identity and resistance to the mainstream narratives of British modernism, the show invites a dialogue between distinct yet kindred worlds.