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The Tate, a network of four museums dedicated to the legacy of British art, holds a large selection of Colquhoun’s work in their permanent collection, much of which has never been publicly shown before. The Tate’s acquisition in 2019 of her entire archive has sparked a thorough re-evaluation of her legacy. The curators were able to draw on that material to feature over 200 works along with theater projects, ephemera, letters, notes and sketches tracing the artist’s exploration of the occult, myth, and magic with a particular focus on how these elements relate to divine feminine power. Considered one of the most radical artists of her generation, Colquhoun’s originality, along with her exploration of taboo subject matter often related to gender and sexuality, seems prescient. 

Born in 1906 in Shillong, British India and the daughter of a British diplomat, Colquhoun was academically precocious, demonstrating an interest in spirituality and the occult as a teenager. She had some formal art training, having attended the Slade School of Art in London, and in 1929, she received the Slade's Summer Composition Prize for her painting Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes. 

Although many of the most well-known paintings of Judith and Holofernes were done by men, that subject has served as a feminist tour de force for several talented, bold artists like Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656), as well as Colquhoun. Even in this early work, one of the largest in the exhibition, Colquhoun’s distinctive palette, modeling, and distortion of bodily form was evident.

In Paris, 1931, Colquhoun encountered the surrealists, including Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), André Breton (1896-1966), Man Ray (1890-1976), among others. Man Ray seductively photographed her holding a sheaf of wheat. Like other attractive female artists, she became their muse, a role she disparaged.  

Coloquhoun does not shy away from describing specific bodily references in Scylla (méditerranée) (1938), the featured artwork of this exhibition. The wall text quotes Colquhoun, who stated that the work “was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath.” 

The title of the painting references the Greek myth of Scylla, blending elements of seascape (the bath water is painted as a transparent sea) and self-portrait, reflecting the artist's exploration of her own body and identity. The fleshy mounds that rise up like twin peaks may be Colquhoun’s thighs, and the weedy tangle at the bottom of the image could be a stand-in for pubic hair. Regardless, the first impression is that this image is decidedly phallic, which was also likely the artist’s intent. 

For Colquhoun, much of her work has a Surrealist-inspired “double-image in the Daliesque sense,” in which the viewer sees multiple things at once, like in a Rorschach test. She  connected techniques such as automatic drawing and decalcomania, which requires applying blobs of paint and pressing them down with paper, before “reading” the resulting textures and patterns, similar to divining tea leaves. 

Song of Songs (1933), oil on canvas, depicts a male and female body of almost Michelangelo-esque monumentality engaged in a struggle of mythic proportions. The figures are naked except for the female’s red pumps and her neckless of vulva-like jewels. In the Bible, the Song of Songs comprises eight chapters of ancient Israelite poetry championing sexual love. The multiple suggestions of meaning in the term “down below” runs through Colquhoun’s writings, as well as her imagery. It is physical, of the female body, but also conjures up the dark side of human nature, or the hellish “underworld” of devils and witches.

Colquhoun, like Leonora Carrington, found the intersection of art, magic, alchemy, and occultism in the Tarot and hand-painted her own interpretation of the Tarot card deck. This work occupies an important section at the end of the exhibition. Dr. Amy Hale, an Atlanta-based writer, curator, ethnographer and folklorist, has written extensively on Colquhoun and has been involved in the Tate’s event programming. In 2020, the MIT Press published Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of The Fern Loved Gully by Hale. It was the first in-depth biographical study of the artist situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her creative life and work. 

In 2024, The Tate published Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love by Hale. Described as “exploring Colquhoun's blend of alchemical, Kabbalistic and Tantric imagery placed within the context of theories of sex magic extant in the occult subcultures of the early twentieth century,”  the book offers a seductive entrance to Colquhoun’s world contextualized fully and insightfully by this exhibition.