Blogs and Interviews

^{Caption 1: Class II.3b 1920. Ithell Colquhoun, aged 13, is sat to the left of the teacher, Miss Martin (LF/220/115)}

^{Caption 2: Division 1 day girls, 1925. Ithell Colquhoun is standing in the center of the 4th row from front, behind Miss Miller (LF/230/DG5)
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Winning the 1929 Summer Composition Prize, her painting Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes was shown at the Royal Academy in 1931. Although mostly self-taught, her work predominantly consists of large-scale classical or biblical figures and shows her love of colour. A member of the Society of Mural Painters into the 1940s, she created murals for the extension to the Moreton-in-Marsh District Hospital.

Colquhoun’s interest in esoteric literature and occult sects developed while at the Slade. In 1931 to 1933, she submitted for the British School at Rome Scholarship and took a studio in Paris, having been accepted into the Paris salon in 1932, where she exhibited three paintings in 1933. Here she first encountered Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Man Ray.

At this time, during Mediterranean travels she became infatuated with a woman, Andromache "Kyria" Kazou.  The subject of several drawings and paintings and an unpublished manuscript, Lesbian Shore.

1936 saw Colquhoun’s first solo exhibitions at Cheltenham Art Gallery and later at London’s Fine Art Society, with botanical watercolours on silk, paintings, drawings and decoration.

Contributing to the Surrealist London Bulletin and joining the movement in 1939, she shared an exhibition with Roland Penrose at the Mayor Gallery, making her own contribution to the capturing of psychic space in painting. This technique of automatism¹ characterised her work for twenty-five years.

Refusing to renounce her interest in the occult, Colquhoun broke with Surrealism in 1940, but she continued with Surrealist principles. The break deepened when she married Toni del Renzio in 1942, whose polemics split the British Surrealist group. They were acrimoniously divorced in 1947. She became a member of the West London Group of Artists in 1943.

Moving to Cornwall in the 1940s, her creative explorations deepened, inspired by its ancient landscape, Celtic traditions and sacred sites. She explored the possibilities of a divine feminine power as a path to personal fulfilment and societal transformation. Focus moved away from visual art towards writing and the occult, in which she became an acknowledged authority. There were London exhibitions in the 1950s and 1960s, and renewed interest in British Surrealism led to several retrospectives in the 1970s.

Ithell Colquhoun died on 11 April 1988 in Cornwall.

In 2012, the scholar Amy Hale noted that Colquhoun "is becoming recognized as one of the most interesting and prolific esoteric thinkers and artists of the twentieth century".

The largest exhibition of her work to date, Ithell Colquhoun: Between Two Worlds, is on at Tate Britain, London, from 13 June to 19 October 2025.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ithell-colquhoun-931

Debbie Vass, Senior Archive Assistant

¹ Automatism- conscious control over mark making is suppressed allowing the subconscious mind to hold sway. She used a range of materials including collages and themes based on studies of plants and flowers, sex and gender and psychology and dreams.