PITCHER-PLANT, C.1936
Oil on canvas. 7¾ x 5¾in. (20 x 15cm.)
Provenance
National Trust bequest.
Probably dating from the mid 1930s, this small painting links the flower paintings of the early-mid 30s with the more overtly surrealist works that were to follow. If the proposed date is correct, this work is the earliest double image in Colquhoun’s oeuvre, comprising pitcher-plant /male genitalia.
Stand close to the painting’s surface and the pitcher plant with its surrounding pair of corms are clearly visible. Step back, however, and we realize that we have been examining male genitalia as glimpsed through shadowy undergrowth. This is a very personal view of the Green Man, the male vegetation deity. It is also a work that plays with the opposites of the container and the contained, of female and male. Anatomically, the vagina is the container and the penis is the contained. Botanically, the pitcher is a container but here it forms the phallus. Pitcher plants are carnivorous, capturing flies and insects which crawl into the pitcher and are unable to escape. The reason why they cannot escape, but are fated to drown in a pool of digestive juices, is that the passage of the pitcher is lined with downward-pointing hairs which prevent withdrawal. Colquhoun’s pitcher plant is, at once, both penis and vagina dentata. Coniunctio oppositorum has been achieved, but male sexual anxieties have also been reinforced.
Fears of castration and of female genitalia are here turned into themselves: this is the penis which devours itself, a phallus dentata. The interplay of contained/container and penis/vagina, together with the idea of a predatory vagina dentata (a female counterbalance, perhaps, to the male surrealists’ usage of mantis imagery) mark this work as an important new departure in Colquhoun’s continuing fascination with sexuality.