Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun were both Surrealists, which makes you understand their twinning at Tate Britain from earlier provincial shows: hers St Ives, his Pallant House. Unlike Burra, she was expelled as soon as she joined by E L T Mesens, who ran the London Group (and who George Melly worked for). He decreed you couldn’t be a member of more than one club. Ithell would not give up the esoteric Golden Dawn practices, just as Claude Cahun in Paris would not give up her girlfriend; both were kicked out of the Surrealist Movement. Ithell managed to get two shows at The Mayor Gallery in 1947, courtesy of Roland Penrose and then disappeared. Surrealism, just like the art scene in Cornwall, was a boy’s club.
Certain shows shape you as an artist when you are young. I still remember the impact that the German Realism show at The Hayward had on me in the late 70s, Bruce Lacey’s Robot show as a child at The Serpentine, Artemesia Gentileschi in the Uffizi, Florence, and the Academia in Venice. If I had been given the chance to see Ithell Colquhoun’s work in 1980, it would have saved me a lot of time and searching, but as it says on the poster, the first major solo show of female surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, because like most women of her generation she and her work were not deemed worthy, until now. Even when she moved to Cornwall, where artists had formed a Colony in St Ives, Newlyn, and Lamorna, she and the other women were not included. Barbara Hepworth was the exception, along with the extraordinary force to be reckoned with of Gluck, the artist. Otherwise, it’s the usual postwar roll call… Feiler, Frost, Lanyon, Heron, Hilton, Scott, etc.
What really disturbed people about Colquhoun was her determination to be a writer as well as an artist, and on top of that, her involvement in strange, ancient spiritual magic and her divorce. Was she a witch? She was certainly bi-sexual and put sex into her paintings. It showed she had little respect for either of the two crafts, not to dedicate herself wholly to one, and she had no excuse, for she wasn’t a mother either! She must be a witch, for she wrote The Crying of the Wind, about ancient Celtic Ireland, The Living Stones of Cornwall, about the wells and stone circles that proliferate West Penwith, and a very surreal novel, Goose of Hermogenes, whilst beginning to be embroiled with the Druids and Egyptology. Even becoming a Freemason didn’t help her gain any more exhibitions until, at the age of 70, in 1976, she was given a retrospective show in Newlyn, Cornwall. The following year, she was ordained as a High Priestess of Isis and had an exhibition of her complete pack of Tarot card designs also in Newlyn, maybe the Freemasons did help? Nothing happened for the next eleven years until her death in 1988, and then nothing happened. From 1975 to 1979, I lived less than 10 miles from her, never met her, or heard of her, and yet I knew all the Cornish living artists in West Penwith, even other women who weren’t included, like Wilhemina Barnes Graham and Winifred Nicholson, with whom I said hello in the street.
This is quite a different story for Edward Burra.
Born within six months of each other, both of them had similar upper-middle-class county backgrounds (Rye and Cheltenham other than Ithell being born in India) and interests, sexually off-key for current values then, they could travel as independently wealthy, but Burra was celebrated as an artist throughout his life and across the world. He was accepted into the theatre and ballet world as a designer, as well as a painter of high life, and low life in docks and bars, exhibited with other male surrealists such as John Armstrong, Nash, Wadsworth and Ben Nicholson. Promoted by George Melly in the 70s, I’d seen his work and read about it whilst he was still alive and I was at school. He is celebrated as a painter of different nationalities, races and colour, Burra painted what surrounded him outside in nightclubs and bars in a surreal, witty style vivid with jazz, yet Colquhoun was far more radical. She went within herself, trying to capture her subconscious in a true surrealist manner. She kept on experimenting, pushing herself further into the void of what critics saw as unexplainable doodles and art dealers viewed as blatantly uncommercial. Some saw her work as abstract, yet sex is never far away, vulvas, penises, and entangled bodies leap out from her work and relentlessly penetrate it, amongst her draughtswoman’s skill. But would we have ever seen any of it if she hadn’t left it all to the Tate and the National Trust? Would she have disappeared into obscurity if she’d had relatives to inherit it? As it is, it’s only taken thirty-seven bloody years for The Tate to show it. Was it because of the raw sexuality or the fact she was a woman, or both? We should be grateful they accepted it and didn’t throw it away.
So when male artists or critics try to tell me that it was equally hard for men to be shown in galleries, especially if a disabled homosexual, I shall point out the wonderful discrepancies between ‘the witch and the cripple’, neither as is termed these days, career artists but both lived as artists their whole lives recreating their worlds, within and without.
Saying all that, this is the best show I’ve seen at The Tate in quite some years; maybe it’s because of my age and the fact that I can see the bigger picture of the 20th century and how it unfolds, captured in these two galleries. This is a conversation that most politicians seem incapable of having at this time, when WAR seems to be so shockingly prevalent, but it’s a conversation that needs to be had. Politicians need to visit these exhibitions, to see the way these artists have watched and painted through the century in different styles, both ending with the same result that it’s all about #MotherEarth in the end, landscapes breaking up full with trucks for Burra, exploding Volcanoes for Colquhoun, makes you realise how very immaterial we humans are, as our bodies give up and our spirits fly off. Eileen Agar’s work ended with the same landscapes at The Whitechapel exhibition in 2021, for what else is there? What is more monumental than nature? Give yourself a treat and a history lesson, and drag a politician along with you. Make them really look at the Burra war paintings and the spirits trapped within and wriggling out of bodies by Colquhoun, which show that we are all one, trying for individuality. Art, I maintain, is about feeling, but if it is meant to tell us anything, it is this. This is not a show of entertainment, a day out before scones and tea; absorb it; this is art. Truly joyful.
Edward Burra – Ithell Colquhoun, Tate Britain 13 June – 19 October 2025