A VISITATION (I), 1945
Oil on canvas. 24 x 20in. (61.5 x 51.0cm.)
Signed and dated ’45 . Inscribed on the reverse.
Provenance
Sotheby’s studio sale, London, 24th April 1985, lot 527.
James Birch Fine Art.
Exhibited
London, Redfern Gallery (Summer), 1947 No. 76.
Exeter, City of Exeter Art Gallery, 1972, No. 7.
London, Leva Gallery,1974, No. 19. Illustrated in b/w in the catalogue.
Newlyn, Newlyn Art Gallery, 1975, Summer Exhibition, No.1.
Penzance, Newlyn Orion Gallery, 1976, No. 15.
London, Blond Fine Art, 1985, No. 42.
Leeds, City Art Gallery, 1986, No. 13, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Wolverhampton, Art Gallery and Museum, 1995, No. 23, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Literature
Colour illustration in Remy (1999) pl.125, discussed p. 246.
Ratcliffe (2007) illus. col. pl. 26.
The technique is decalcomania.
Aerial perspective and the absence of a horizon are used to suggest a background of infinite depth. The technique, as so far described, is very similar to that of Yves Tanguy in the 1930’s. The forms that inhabit this featureless space, however, are very different. Whereas Tanguy’s forms always have referents in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, here Colquhoun has used decalcomania to startling effect, to produce forms that seem to pre-date life. It is a painting about the generation of life from gaseous and liquid components. It is no accident that the lower forms resemble the retort of the chemist and the alembic of the alchemist, with, at the upper part of the painting, matter fizzing and spitting with the spark that breathes life into inert matter.
The author of the Leeds catalogue agrees: ‘The startling vision of Visitation I conjures up the earth's cosmological forces at the moment of some colossal creative act.’ (Leeds catalogue, 1986, p104.).
Art is born out of death. From the Palaeolithic hunters who drew magical representations of their quarry on the cave walls to ensure a successful kill or the Egyptian sculptors who carved the portrait statues for the pharonic tombs in the promise of immortality, art has existed in the shadow of the Other world. In A Visitation (I), however, Colquhoun takes art out of the mortuary and moves it into the delivery suite.
See A Visitation II (1945)
References
Leeds, City Art Gallery. Angels of Anarchy and Machines for Making Clouds. Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties. 1986.
Ratcliffe, E. Ithell Colquhoun. Mandrake, Oxford. 2007.
Remy, M. Surrealism in Britain, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999.