Colquhoun The Living Stones

Cornwall
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-096-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

'Colquhoun's unique artistic vision shines through like at no time in recent history' - Art UK 'Colquhoun's time-travelling survey of Cornwall's culture and history brings ghosts and dead landscapes to life all around you' - Stewart Lee Painter Ithell Colquhoun arrives in Cornwall in the late 1940s, searching for a studio and a refuge from bombed-out London. So begins a profound lifelong relationship with Britain's westernmost county, a land surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past reaches into the present. Sacred and beautiful, wild and weird, Colquhoun's Cornwall is a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore - and a place where everyday reality speaks to the world beyond. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. With a new introduction by Edward Parnell, the PEN Ackerley shortlisted author of Ghostland and The Listeners Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as The Living Stones: Cornwall, she is the author of The Crying of the Wind: Ireland and the novel Goose of Hermogenes, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.

Ithell Colquhoun

Autoren/Hrsg.

Colquhoun, Ithell

Leseproben

Introduction

Ithell Colquhoun was introduced to me suddenly and unexpectedly, manifesting out of the damp West Penwith air in the autumn of 2017. I was in Cornwall to research my book Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country, exploring the relationship between the British landscape and a selection of writers, filmmakers and artists whose work touches upon the supernatural and in some way captures the genius loci of those veil-intersecting locales.

I’d taken sanctuary from an unrelenting September storm in the Victorian surroundings of Penlee House, Penzance’s civic gallery and museum; inside, fittingly, pride of place was accorded to a painting of the town’s drenched promenade by the Newlyn School painter Norman Garstin, The Rain it Raineth Every Day. Later, in the museum’s shop, I was mesmerized by a paperback cover on which a kaleidoscopic tunnel of ochreous lines bordered a charcoal sketch of the phallic-looking Mên Scryfa (‘stone of writing’), situated on the wild upland behind nearby Morvah. Above the drawing of the six-foot menhir was a seriffed title, THE LIVING STONES, with the subheading CORNWALL below.

I was sold, and snapped up the museum’s copy of the book (a reissue of the 1957 work from the original publisher, Peter Owen) – though at the time I had little clue as to how to even say the author’s mysterious name, let alone knowing anything else about them. But that evening as I read the apposite opening words of The Living Stones – ‘It was the place of deluge’ – I realized I’d happened upon something enigmatic, authentic and significant. It was a sense that grew as I progressed through the book’s chapters – and as I came to learn more about Ithell Colquhoun.

Looking back, I cannot be sure that I knew her gender on first seeing that psychedelic cover. Her tongue-twister name is pronounced ‘Eye-thell Col-hoon’, I was to find out much later, having made myself look foolish (‘Ith-ell’, not to mention ‘Ethel’) on more than one occasion in the interim. As well as her father’s Scottish roots (which accounted for the surname), her mother had Irish ancestry. This may partly help to explain Colquhoun’s interest in and identification with all things Celtic; she’d visited Ireland even before the 1954 trip that formed the basis for her debut travelogue, The Crying of the Wind (1955).

Details of Colquhoun’s formative years are vague and not straightforward to decipher, adding to the overall sense of mystery that enfolds her. Indeed, Ithell turns out not even to be her forename but her second: she was christened Margaret Ithell Colquhoun. Born on 9 October 1906 in the hills of northern India’s Assam (where her father acted as Deputy Commissioner in the colonial civil service), the young Ithell left for England shortly before her first birthday. Her infancy was spent in London and Devon; at six she was put into the care of an elderly great-aunt on the Isle of Wight. Despite her mother frequently rejoining her husband in India, Colquhoun never revisited the land of her birth, a significant fracture in her psyche. She writes in the opening chapter of The Living Stones, referring to the captain of the ship that transported her to England: ‘He brought me away from home, and I have never returned.’

Her nomadic childhood continued until 1919, when she was enrolled at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, close to the Colquhoun family home. Established in 1853 with the somewhat radical aim (for the period) of providing ‘a sound academic education for girls’, Colquhoun remained at the college for the next six years. She then spent two years at the Cheltenham School of Arts and Crafts, a precursor to her study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Here she was described by Professor Henry Tonks (whose earlier students had included Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash) as ‘an artist of rare ability with a very original and quick mind’, and in 1929 Colquhoun won the school’s most prestigious award, the Summer Composition Prize. Her surviving artworks in the Tate archive, from her time in Cheltenham and the Slade during the 1920s, though already of a high standard, tend towards traditional still lifes, watercolour landscapes and portraits that are much less avant-garde than the works with which she is now usually associated. A visit to Paris in 1931 was her first proper introduction to Surrealism, but it was the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at London’s New Burlington Galleries – where she witnessed Salvador Dalí nearly suffocate on stage in a diving suit – that altered the direction of her artistic career.

Through the remainder of the turbulent 1930s, Colquhoun’s work took on more of the characteristics of Surrealism, with Dalí’s dream-inspired imagery a clear influence; later, automatism was to feature increasingly strongly. Her output became more sexualized, too. The painting Scylla (1938) depicts both a coastal landscape and an image of herself in the bath – her raised legs and knees emerging from the water double as wave-eroded sea stacks, while a clump of strategically submerged seaweed functions as pubic hair; in the distance the half-hidden prow of a ship sails towards the opening in the rocks. During this time Colquhoun began to exhibit frequently and was becoming a noticeable figure of British Surrealism. She visited André Breton in Paris in 1939 and, also in that year, held a joint show with Roland Penrose (the future husband of Lee Miller, and one of the organizers of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition) at London’s Mayor Gallery. The images on display included Gouffres Amers (1939), with its striking depiction of a reclining naked man. His skin has been flayed and a flower sprouts from a bulbous vase where his penis should be; coralline plant tendrils form his hair, beard and moustache – a visceral representation of mortality and masculine frailty that recalls Andreas Vesalius’s pioneering anatomical work of 1543, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body).

The Second World War was an unsettled period for Colquhoun – as for almost everyone – despite her days in many ways remaining unchanged: she was deemed unfit for National Service and continued to lead a comfortably privileged and financially independent existence, pursuing her artistic and esoteric interests. Still, the toll of the Blitz on her run-of-the-mill reality must have been significant – as the novelist Elizabeth Bowen described life in London at that time, ‘We all lived in a state of lucid abnormality.’ To escape the aerially besieged city, Colquhoun writes in The Living Stones, she took a week-long break to the Cornish fishing village of Mousehole. On arrival, the first person she met at Penzance railway station was Colonel Paynter, from whom she would start renting her Lamorna studio a few years later.

Two other events took place during the war that were to have a vivid bearing on Colquhoun. In 1940, aged thirty-four, she split from the British Surrealists, unwilling to adhere to an edict from E.L.T. Mesens, the Belgian artist, promoter and co-organizer of London’s 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. Mesens insisted that all members of the group should solely affiliate themselves with Surrealism and that their creative output should at all times further the aims of the movement. Colquhoun was too much of a free spirit, and had too many other artistic interests (chiefly her study of magic and the occult), to acquiesce. Her official association with British Surrealism came to a swift and painful conclusion.

In July 1943 Colquhoun married Toni del Renzio, a Russian-born Romanov aristocrat nine years her junior who had spent a comfortable childhood in Italy and at school in Dorset, his family having fled their motherland after the October Revolution. This charming would-be saviour of Surrealism – who seems to have been something of a playboy, enjoying dalliances with the artists Marguerite Salle and Emmy Bridgwater prior to his involvement with Colquhoun – had arrived back in England in 1939. In March 1942, the lone issue of del Renzio’s Surrealist publication Arson came out, outlining his revitalizing vision for the future of the movement. Despite disparaging Colquhoun’s latest paintings as ‘sterile abstractions’ in the journal, the couple began a relationship; before long the younger man moved into her flat and she extinguished the significant debts accrued by the ill-fated Arson. Just over three years later they separated, before divorcing acrimoniously in 1947 (infidelity on del Renzio’s part was rumoured). Although Colquhoun’s published non-fiction books are generally guarded, a telling aside in The...