GOUFFRES AMERS, 1939
Oil on canvas. 28½ x 36in. (71.2 x 91.3cm.)
Fairfax Road address label on the reverse.
Provenance
Glasgow, Hunterian Art Gallery 1971.
Exhibited
London, Mayor Gallery, 1939, No. 7.
RSBA 1940
Harrogate, Harrogate Gallery, and Batley, Bagshaw Art Gallery 1941.
Penzance, Newlyn Gallery 1961, No. 12.
London, Hamet Gallery, 1971, No.32.
Nottingham, Castle Museum, 1982. No. 92; illustrated in b/w in the catalogue.
Berkeley, California, University Art Museum 1990; illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Literature
Illustrated in b/w in the London Bulletin (1939) No. 17, p18. Referred to in The Sunday Times, 18th June 1939, where the painting is compared to Patinir.
Referred to in The News Review, 22nd June 1939, and reproduced in b/w.
Referred to in The Weekly Scotsman, 24th June 1939.
Referred to in The Listener, 5th October 1940 and compared to Gaetano Zumbo’s La Putrefazzione.
Referred to in The Sunday Times, 6th October 1940.
Illustrated by Ades in b/w and discussed p 40.
Illustrated by Chadwick in b/w p.125, pl. 109, and discussed p. 128.
Discussed by Stich p74.
Ratcliffe (2007) illus. b/w, pl. 35.
One of the Méditerranée series.
The Nottingham catalogue says: “like the 16th century painter, Arcimboldo, whose work was highly prized by the surrealists, the decaying corpse is constructed from disparate objects using limpets, sponges, coral, razor-shells and sea weed. The imagery was suggested from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange
In a note from the artist to the Hunterian Museum written at the time of its purchase, she states that the inspiration was more Baudelairean than Shakespearian.
In a letter from the artist published in the Oxford Art Journal, July 1981 p 65 she mentions that the work “has been likened to the work of Gaetano Zumbo, but I had never heard of him when I painted it”. Commenting on Ades comparison with Joost de Momper, she denies ever having heard of him.
This is one of the most arresting of Colquhoun’s images. The figure of a naked, bearded man lies, partly propped and partly sprawled, dominating a barren rocky landscape. Commentators have generally seen the painting as a parody of the Surrealist’s obsession with the erotic female (Chadwick) and a mocking denial of the metamorphic process that lies at the heart of Surrealist theory – here it leads only to decay (Chadwick; Stich).
The figure is, indeed, far from erotic, except, perhaps, in a fetishist sense. The male nude, in Colquhoun’s hands, is not the object of desire and liberation that the female nude represented to many male Surrealists. But, surely, it is also far from decay. There is no corruption of the flesh, no putrefaction. Rather, the figure has been flayed. No blood will again flow through these clipped and stripped arterial stubs and the bones are as brittle as coral stems. The penis is a soft pipe from which issues a feathery flower. As an image of emasculation the painting has few equals. This is a ritual debasement, not the result of a process of decay.
The base of the cliff where it meets the sea on the left of the painting is positioned at the Golden Section of the vertical side.
The title, generally translated as ‘bitter abyss’ is a phrase from a poem by Baudelaire. The poem is The Albatross, from the Fleurs du Mal collection. In it, sailors capture an albatross, stripping it of its majesty and freedom, subjecting it to torment and humiliation. In the final stanza, Baudelaire compares the poet to the albatross; once brought to earth, he is humiliated and helpless. This is the bitter abyss to which the poet has been brought.
The Hunterian Art Gallery has a small archive of letters between Colquhoun and Andrew McLaren Young, the Professor of Fine Art at the time the gallery purchased the painting. In part it deals with the purchase, but it also details the artists’ efforts to mount an exhibition of her work in Scotland.
The cartoon for Gouffres Amers, in Indian ink, was exhibited at the Parkin Gallery, London, 1977, No. 55.
References
Ades, D. Notes on Two Women Surrealist Painters: Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun. Oxford Art Journal, 3(1) (April 1980): 36-42.
Chadwick, W. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, Thames and Hudson, London 1985.
Colquhoun, I. Women in Art. Oxford Art Journal, July 1981 p 65.
Ratcliffe, E. Ithell Colquhoun. Mandrake, Oxford. 2007.
Stich, S. Anxious Visions. Abbeville Press, New York, 1970.