Demeter and Persephone

Until only recently, the British Surrealist artist, writer and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun has been an obscure figure within British Surrealism, often outshone by her contemporaries Eileen Agar (1899–1991, Argentine-British painter and photographer), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011, British and Mexican painter who was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s) and Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012, American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer and poet). Tate’s 2019 acquisition, however, of Colquhoun’s impressive 5,000-piece archive, previously in the possession of the National Trust, became a pivotal step in recognising the artist’s contributions to Surrealism.

After leaving the Slade School of Art in London (where her 1929 painting Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes won the Slade’s Summer Composition Prize), Colquhoun moved to Paris, where she set up a studio in 1931. While in Paris she read Peter Neagoe’s (1881–1960, American writer and painter) 1932 essay What is Surrealism?.

Of even greater importance, however, was meeting several of the Surrealists in the flesh. Some of these important encounters were with artists like André Breton (1896–1966, French writer and poet, known as a principal theorist and co-founder of surrealism whose writings include the first Manifeste du surréalisme/Surrealist Manifesto of 1924), René Magritte (1898–1967, Belgian artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation) and Man Ray (1890–1976, American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris and became a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements).

Colquhoun’s interest in Surrealism deepened after seeing Salvador Dalí (1904–1989, Spanish artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draughtsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work) lecture (during which he famously almost suffocated wearing a diving suit) at the 1936 International Exhibition of Surrealism at the New Burlington Galleries in London.

In 1937 she joined the Artists’ International Association, and in the late 1930s she became increasingly associated with the surrealist movement in Britain. She published work in the London Bulletin in 1938 and 1939, visited André Breton in Paris in 1939, and stayed with a group of surrealists, including Roberto Matta (1911–2002, one of Chile’s best-known painters and figures in 20th-century surrealist art across the Americas and Europe), at a chateau in Chemillieu, France, that summer.

In the same year, Colquhoun joined the British Surrealist Group and exhibited with Sir Roland Penrose (1900–1984, English artist, historian and poet who was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom) at the Mayor Gallery, showing fourteen oil paintings and two objects.

After only a year as a member of the British Surrealist Group, Colquhoun was expelled in 1940 due to her refusal to comply with demands that the surrealists should not be members of any other groups, which Colquhoun felt would interfere with her studies of occultism. This led to Colquhoun’s exclusion from other exhibitions organised by the British surrealists, but she continued to work with surrealist principles.

Though only formally involved with the Surrealist movement in England for a few years, Colquhoun first gained her reputation as a surrealist and identified as a surrealist for the rest of her life. She used many automatic techniques (which were described in André Breton’s first surrealist manifesto as a defining feature of surrealism) as well as inventing several herself. Colquhoun began to experiment with automatic techniques in 1939 and used a wide range of materials and methods, such as decalcomania, fumage, frottage and collage (which would become her main focus in the 1960s and 1970s). Colquhoun also developed new techniques such as superautomatism, stillomancy, parsemage, and ectopic graphomania, writing about them in her article ‘The Mantic Stain’. Automatism continued to be an important part of Colquhoun’s artistic practice for the rest of her life, and following her split from the British surrealist movement, it also became a key part of her spiritual activities.

Colquhoun’s work often explored themes of sexuality and gender. Her early work depicts powerful women from myth and Bible stories, such as Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes (1929, oil on canvas, 122 x 91.5 cm) and Susanna and the Elders (1929, oil on canvas, 76 x 53 cm) – both of which are likely homages to Artemisia Gentileschi’s (1593–1654, female Italian Baroque painter considered among the most accomplished 17th-century artists, initially working in the style of Caravaggio) works on the same themes.

Dawn Ades (born 1943, British professor of art history and theory at the University of Essex, United Kingdom) sees Colquhoun’s treatment of gender as responding to the masculine and patriarchal themes in the art of other surrealists – for instance, where they drew landscapes as women’s bodies. Colquhoun’s Gouffres Amers (1939, oil on canvas, 71 x 91 cm) shows a male body as a landscape. Several of her works, including The Pine Family (1940, oil on canvas, 46 x 51 cm), also explore themes of castration and male impotence, while she portrays female sexuality much more positively, such as in Scylla (1938, oil on board, 91.5 x 61 cm). She was also deeply interested in androgyny, particularly in the early 1940s, and produced several works on the theme.

Demeter and Persephone from 1928 is a good example of Colquhoun’s early work portraying female intimacy and sexuality. In this specific case she cleverly disguised the underlying theme with the help of the ancient Greek myth telling the story about Demeter and Persephone.

Demeter was the ancient Greek goddess of the harvest. She was thus a very important goddess to ancient Greek people, who farmed a lot of their food. Demeter had a kind and beautiful daughter, called Persephone, whom she loved very much.

Persephone, like her mum, loved nature. One day she was walking in a beautiful meadow and gathering flowers to take home when a huge hole opened up in the ground. Hades – the God of the Underworld – arrived through the hole and captured the lovely Persephone, whom he wanted to be his wife.

Demeter could no longer see her daughter and missed her hugely. She was so sad; it affected the harvest across Greece. Crops, fruit and nature all stopped growing. She went to Zeus, the king of the gods, to ask him to help get her daughter back from Hades. Zeus could see how Demeter’s sadness was affecting Earth, and so he agreed to help her.

Meanwhile, Hades wanted to make it more difficult for Persephone to leave the Underworld and gave her some delicious Underworld food – a fruit called a pomegranate. Zeus visited Hades to ask him to let Persephone leave. Hades said, ‘Persephone can only leave if she hasn’t eaten any of the food that I’ve given her.’ But she already had. Persephone had eaten six pomegranate seeds. Zeus and Hades therefore agreed that Persephone would have to spend six months in the Underworld but that she could return to Earth for the other six months of the year. One month for every pomegranate seed. From then on, whenever Persephone was with Demeter on Earth, Demeter would be so happy, and crops, fruit and plants would grow and flourish beautifully – but when she went back to the Underworld to live with Hades for six months, the plants would stop growing entirely.

Against a background of an ancient Greek myth, Colquhoun thus managed to paint a depiction of female same-sex intimacy where two women, wearing contemporary 1920s clothing and coiffures, are seen sensually embracing each other, oblivious to the rest of the world.

Inscribed verso: ‘DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE ITHELL COLQUHOUN C: 1928’.

Provenance

Fieldings Auctioneers Ltd, Stourbridge, United Kingdom.

Firestorm Foundation.