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Ithell Colquhoun was always a bit of a mystery surrealist. Her greatest hit is the unsettling, dream-like ‘Scylla’ (1938), a painting of two towering cliffs, which could equally be thighs in the bath. The prow of Odysseus’s Argo peeps through them. The pubic hair is seaweed, and there are shells, but, as far as discernible, no crabs. The point of view of the painting is that of the titular monster Scylla, lying in wait. It’s witty and disturbing; mythic and domestic. A British surrealist high point, frequently anthologised.
This aside, her name was relegated to lists. She was at Dali’s lecture in London in 1936 when he got his head stuck in a diving helmet; she sat for Man Ray in Paris; she had her work censored from the 1942 edition of Artists of Fame and Promise (the annual gig Lucian Freud dubbed ‘artists of shame and compromise’). She was one of the gang, in other words. Except now thanks to this new solo Tate show, we see Colquhoun for the outstanding eccentric she was. Her creativity flowed all her life – paintings, carvings, visions, rites, poetry. Her art at first was quite conventional. She turned out charismatic history paintings at the Slade, hugely skilled, even if one feels she is wearing the painterly equivalent of a corset. Then came the mind-expanding years with the continental surrealists, the Rorschach-style blots, and the slow-motion career car-crash that began with ‘automatic’ scribbles and ended, as these things do, with ‘sex magic’ diagrams in a hut in Cornwall.
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