ATOMIC PSYCHOSIS, 1952
Oil on paper. 57½ x 31in. (147.5 x 79.5cm.)
Signed, inscribed and dated on the reverse.
Provenance
Sotheby’s studio sale, London, 24th April 1985, lot 551 (as oil on board). Illustrated in b/w in the catalogue.
With the Pruskin Gallery in 1985.
Exhibited
Newlyn, Newlyn Art Gallery, 1961, No. 5.
Exeter, City of Exeter Art Gallery, 1972, No. 16.
Penzance, Newlyn Orion Gallery, 1976, No. 84.
London, Blond Fine Art, 1985, as oil on board, No. 47.
Canterbury, The Herbert Read Gallery, 1986, No. 100. Illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
According to the Blond, Canterbury and Sotheby’s catalogues, the work has also been exhibited at Bradford, in 1953, No 602. The Bradford exhibition catalogue, however, provides no evidence of this.
Painted from a high aerial viewpoint, a triple-layered mushroom cloud billows above an atoll.
A nuclear explosion is a catastrophe that remodels the landscape, transforms solid rock into gas and vapour and that renders an idyllic atoll into a poisonous exclusion zone, home of cancers and mutations.
Although many of Colquhoun’s paintings deal with the power and force of nature, this is only one of two works (Bikini 1966 is the other) in which those forces are harnessed by Man and used for destructive purposes. Cold-war fear of nuclear annihilation may have been in her mind around this time, as it was for many. In 1956 she completed the jacket illustration for The Clothes of God by Alice Buck and Claude Palmer, a work that dealt with the psychological and spiritual difficulties of living with the H-bomb.
This work and Bikini (1966) are almost certainly part and counterpart.
Reference
Buck, A. and Palmer, C. The Clothes of God: a Treatise on Neo-analytic Psychology. Peter Owen, 1956.