In its capacity as a life-giving and life-sustaining fluid, blood features prominently in religious and mystical writings. For Christians, a healing flow of blood springs from the heart of the Son of God; for early Islamic writers, the soul resides in a few drops of blood at the centre of the heart; for the mystic Böhme, blood is the tincture of eternity.
A Y-shaped form with a central heart (e.g. King and Centre 1941), sometimes with eyes at the terminals (e.g. The Circulation of the Blood 1941) and sometimes in association with seed corn imagery (e.g. Heart of Corn c. 1941) can suggest the redemption that flows from Christ’s wounds on the cross but can also suggest the life force that exists throughout nature. Thoughts turn to the goddess of fertility who presides over generation and growth. She is familiar in many guises, appearing variously as Isis, Astarte, corn maiden and as Demeter in the Elusian mysteries. She is one of the personifications of Malkuth, the tenth Sephiroth, who Colquhoun had previously painted in 1934 in Design for a Painting on Silk.
Two works entitled The Tree of Veins (c.1941) feature hearts, like fruiting bodies, at the ends of branches. The branches, each with its terminal heart, have a strong visual similarity with traditional alchemical images which depict the Great Work as a growing tree. The image of the heart dripping blood also occurs in Two Pierced Hearts (c. 1938) and the chalk sculpture Heart (1938). Both these works suggest the vulnerability as well as the passion of emotional attachment. Beau Gosse (1939) suggests blood letting ritual, such as the one described in Goose of Hermogenes, to secure the lover’s devotion:
I open my veins to the east I open the veins of my arm with the cut
of a sliver of silicon. Blood pours out … a ribbon of stain in the foam
unmixing like a rusty chain to bind him in binding his home so he never
can go. (p. 68)
Menstruation
As her works demonstrate, there is certainly no danger that Colquhoun could ever be confused with the femme-enfant, “that enchanting creature who through her youth, naiveté and purity possesses the more direct and pure connection with her own unconsciousness that allows her to serve as a guide for man” that dominated Breton’s vision in the 1930s. Colquhoun had no intention of being a guide for any man. If there was any guiding to be done, it would be her own biology and intuition that would show her the way. Highly attuned to her own natural rhythms, Colquhoun wrote openly about her menarche and about menstruation. She saw menstruation as a time when a woman had ‘contact with the night side of her nature.’ It is a time of:
…intensified sensibility to hidden springs. It is the mood to divine buried treasure, to speak the oracular words, to consummate the ritual marriage. It is a natural break in natural routine; and to neglect this rhythm brings age, harshness, irritation, the loss of beauty and peace. Through retirement I become reconciled to the moon. (1)
When men discuss menstruation (in so far as they discuss it at all), they do so either as anthropologists, in terms of taboos and uncleanliness or with a sense of romantic wonderment. Until comparatively recently, when matriarchal studies became a respectable focus of enquiry, carried out by women talking with women, most writing and thinking about female sexuality was done by men and it is men who regard women’s sexuality as alienating. Ironically, the Qabalah, on which she placed so much magical reliance, was developed by celibate men who, had they met her, may well have refused to shake her hand in welcome for fear that she was unclean. For Colquhoun, menstruation is a time of privilege and celebration that is denied to men. It is difficult to imagine a male surrealist writing about male bodily fluids in such a positive manner, except in a scatological or provocative sense. (2)
Notes
1. Colquhoun, 1983, Osmazone. Dunganon, Örkeljunga, Sweden. Chadwick, 1985, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, London: Thames and Hudson, pp 182-3 prints the short text in its entirety.
2. Transgressive sexuality met automatism in the figure of Salvador Dali. There exists an engraving, ‘tossed off in a matter of minutes’, drawn in rather jerky strokes with the left hand whilst masturbating with the right. The phrase, and the information, comes from Lomas, 2004 Science, Surrealism and Visuality, Art History, 27, 627-650.
The stained artwork given by Marcel Duchamp to Maria Martins is dried semen – an autonomic rather than an automatic drawing, perhaps. See Tomkins, 1997, Duchamp. A biography. London: Chatto and Windus, p354 for further details.
back to previous section: Christian Marriage
contine to next section: Toni del Renzio and 'the monogamic tendency'