The Iconography of Coniunctio Oppositorum: Visual and Verbal Dialogues in Ithell Colquhoun's Oeuvre

chapter 15 The Iconography of Coniunctio Oppositorum: Visual and Verbal Dialogues in Ithell Colquhoun’s Oeuvre

Victoria Ferentinou

It is essential … to undertake the reconstruction of the primordial Androgyne that all traditions tell us of, and its supremely desirable, and tangible, incarnation within ourselves.1

… it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy; Or else, to alter Plato’s parable, Into the white and yolk of the one shell.2

Art and spirituality have been linked in diverse ways from antiquity onward. In the course of history artists often sought to conceptualize and represent the invisible, the ineffable and the sacred, while various belief and religious systems engaged art as a vehicle for conveying spiritual meaning. This relationship was dominant in the late nineteenth century during the so-called “occult revival”, when heterodox religiosity and anti-materialist philosophies exerted an impact upon several painters, poets and intellectuals. Contemporaneous studies in psychology and psychiatry also placed particular emphasis on the importance of inner life and art was often seen as the mirror of the soul. Recent scholarship has established the modernist fascination with esotericism3 and traced the influence of esoteric ideas on artistic movements of the avant-garde, such as Symbolism, Orphic Cubism, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism.4

1 Breton, ‘On Surrealism in its Living Works (1953)’, 301–302. 2 Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, cited in Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes, 33. 3 In this article the term “esotericism” will be utilised as an equivalent of “Western esotericism”, whereas “occultism” is understood as a subcategory of esotericism that refers to the development of esoteric currents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The terms “occult” and “occult sciences”, although different in content, will be used interchangeably with “occultism” for convenience only. For a concise account of the history of the terms and their scholarly usage see Hanegraaff et al (eds.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, 337–338, 884–889. 4 On a comprehensive study and overview of the interrelation between modern art and esotericism, see Tuchman et al. (eds.), The Spiritual in Art; see also Henderson (ed.), Art Journal 46:1 which contributed eight special studies on the subject. These two publications paved

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Surrealism, in particular, provides an illustrative example.5 In 1929, the leader of the surrealist movement, French theorist and poet André Breton (1896–1966), called ‘for the profound, the veritable occultation of surrealism’, adding in a footnote that we should ‘prob[e] seriously into those sciences which for various reasons are today completely discredited. I am speaking of astrology, among the oldest … metaphysics … among the modern’.6 Breton himself and his comrades in Paris showed an interest in the “occult sciences” in the 1920s, but it was from the mid-1930s and particularly from the 1940s and beyond that occultism and more generally esotericism informed surrealism: surrealist reading included esoteric books; esoteric images and ideas made their appearance in surrealist writings and artworks; occultist techniques were adopted as an avenue for the recuperation of the mind’s powers and the en- hancement of artistic creativity. Yet the impact of esotericism was not of equal importance to all surrealists; several exhibited no interest; others appreciated the multi-layered symbolism of esoteric language and experimented with the artistic potential of esoteric motifs; and certain others were involved in the ex- ploration of esotericism so that their work was fuelled by their studies in terms of imagery and structure. This marriage of esotericism and art is particularly evident in the work of British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, an artist, writer and occultist who was born in India in 1906 and died in Cornwall in 1988.7 Widely read in esoteric literature, Colquhoun borrowed ideas from esotericism and made it the basis of her visual and verbal language. Her esoteric preoc- cupations are attested to by her private collection of papers bequeathed to the Tate Archive.8 Her book collection also offers valuable insight into her esoteric

the way to a re-assessment of the interaction between esotericism and modernism, often thought of as unworthy of academic study in the past, and spurred an interest in the work of individual artists influenced by esoteric currents. For more recent publications see Pacque- ment et al. (eds.), Traces du Sacré and Fauchereau (ed.), L’Europe des Ésprits ou la Fascination de l’Occulte, 1750–1950. 5 On the relationship between surrealism and esotericism see Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred; Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy, Chapter 4; Ferentinou, Women Surrealists and Hermetic Imagery, Chapter 1; Szulakowska, ‘The French Surrealists and Alchemy’, 31–44; Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult. 6 Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)’, 178. 7 On Colquhoun see Ades, ‘Notes on Two Women Surrealist Painters’, 39–40; Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, passim; Remy, Surrealism in Britain, passim; Ferentinou, Women Surrealists and Hermetic Imagery, Chapters 5 and 10; Nichols, The Magical Writings of Ithell Colquhoun; Ratcliffe, Ithell Colquhoun; Shillitoe, Ithell Colquhoun; Ferentinou, ‘Ithell Colquhoun’, 1–24; Ferentinou, ‘Theosophy, Women Artists and Modernism’, 159–175. 8 See tga 929/1–10.