DREAMING LEAPS: IN HOMAGE TO
SONIA ARAQUISTAIN, 1945
Oil on paper. 31 x 21½in. (80.0 x 55.0cm.)
Signed and dated 1945 on the reverse.
Provenance
Sotheby’s studio sale, London, 24th April 1985, lot 546.
Exhibited
London, Mayor Gallery, 1947, (paintings) No. 8.
Cambridge, Heffer Gallery, 1953, no. 8
Newlyn, Newlyn Art Gallery, 1961, No.6.
Exeter, City of Exeter Art Gallery, 1972, No. 6.
Penzance, Newlyn Orion Gallery, 1976, No. 16.
Canterbury, The Herbert Read Gallery, 1986, No. 87, as c.1946.
Leeds, City Art Gallery, 1986, No. 29, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Literature
See letter from the artist published in the Oxford Art Journal, July 1981 p 65.
Illustrated in colour by Remy (1999) pl.140, discussed p. 240-1.
Illustrated in colour in Schwartz, A. I Surrealisti, Mazzotta, Milan, 1989, p464.
Ratcliffe (2007) illus. col. pl. 44.
This is one of the few works by Colquhoun where the inspiration came from a contemporary, external event. The painting was executed to commemorate the suicide of the young daughter of the former Spanish Republican Ambassador to Britain, who had leapt naked from a Bayswater rooftop. At the inquest it was disclosed that she had 'dabbled' in psycho-analysis and read Freud, which the coroner condemned. Consequently, Toni del Renzio gathered poems and drawings inspired by her gesture and Colquhoun painted this picture.
‘Filaments of colour, garish and sombre garlands, fragments of comets…entanglements of intestinal ribbons…are suspended, like improbable peelings of a twilight sky’ (Remy, p. 278). Remy also reads the paintings as ‘a depiction of stages in the alchemical processes of exaltation, multiplication and projection. The dovetailing of the falls of forms and the ascension of colours, of the body’s descent and the rising of essences, detaches death from its finality and plunges the viewer into pure otherness’ (p. 280).
References
Breton, A. Second Surrealist Manifesto. Published in English translation in Seaver, R. and Lane, H.R. Manifestos of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1967. See p.125.
Ratcliffe, E. Ithell Colquhoun. Mandrake, Oxford. 2007.
Remy, M. Surrealism in Britain, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999.