THE PINE FAMILY, 1940
Oil on canvas. 18 x 20in. (45.7 x 50.8cm.)
Signed and inscribed on the stretcher.
Provenance
Sotheby’s, London, 11th November 1981, lot 320 (as 16½ x 18½in).
With Whitford and Hughes in 1985.
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, gift of Arturo Schwarz. Accession Number: B98.0425
Exhibited
London, International Art Centre, 1942.
Exeter, City of Exeter Art Gallery, 1972, No. 3.
London, Leva Gallery, 1974.
Penzance, Newlyn Orion Gallery, 1976, No. 9.
London, Parkin Gallery, 1977, No. 22, as 1941.
Milan, Rome and Stockholm, 1980-1981.
Paris, Galerie 1900-2000, 1982, as 1941, No. 44. Illustrated in b/w in the catalogue.
London, Blond Fine Art, 1985, as 1941, No. 39 .
Colchester, The Minories, 1985 No. 22. Illustrated in b/w in the catalogue.
Jerusalem, Israel Museum, 2000-2001, No. 21, as 1941. Illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Literature
Osmazone: illustrated on the front cover.
Illustrated by Chadwick in b/w pl. 106, p. 124, discussed p. 129 (dated 1941).
See letter from the artist published in the Oxford Art Journal, July 1981 p 65.
Illustrated in b/w by Battersby (1990
Illustrated in b/w by Buck (1992).
Illustrated in colour by Stich, pl.78 (dated 1941).
Illustrated in colour by Remy (1999) pl.122, discussed p. 244.
Illustrated in colour by Robinson (2005), and discussed p284-285.
Ratcliffe (2007) illus. b/w, pl. 21.
Dysfunctional families have always been with us. The Pine Family, however, is a dysfunctional family for the Twentieth Century. It is dysfunctional in a uniquely post-Freudian way.
Three truncated bodies lie in parallel dominating the picture plane; a featureless landscape is visible in the background. Each body is reduced to the torso and the lower limbs, roughly to the knees. Each body has been mutilated, although the figures are recognisably male, female and hermaphrodite. The male and the hermaphrodite have each lost their penis and the female has lost her right leg. Each has the stylised pubic hair seen earlier in Scylla (1938) and Gouffres Amers (1939) Each body carries a label bearing a cryptic message.
The female torso is labelled “celle qui boîte”- the one who limps. It has been argued by Chadwick and others that this refers to “celle qui advance” - the one who advances – the epithet applied by Breton to Gradiva, the hero of Jensen’s novel that was so admired by the surrealists and that was the subject of an analysis by Sigmund Freud. The name Gradiva translates as “splendid in walking”. It was her sprightly walk (and, in particular, the positioning of the right foot in the original relief) that captivated Hanold, the hero of the novel. The surrealists were enchanted by the redemptive power of love and adopted Gradiva as their archetypal muse: a muse who would lead artists and poets in their attempts to glimpse what lies ahead, beyond the real. By amputating her right leg, Colquhoun has converted the muse from one who is splendid in walking to one who limps.
The male torso has had his penis neatly severed. He bears the label “Atthis”. This is almost certainly a variant spelling of Attis or Atys, who appears in Classical mythology. There are a number of variations of his story, but each deals with the same basic story, of the relationship between Attis, and Cybele. In one variant, Cybele began life as Agdithus, a hermaphrodite god/dess. The gods emasculated Agdithus, who then became known as the female, Cybele. A pomegranate tree grew from Agdithus’ blood; a river nymph ate from the tree, became pregnant and gave birth to Attis, with whom Cybele subsequently fell in love. Attis, however, was betrothed to a king’s daughter. In a jealous rage Cybele caused Attis and the King to go mad and emasculate (or, perhaps, castrate) themselves. Attis later recovered his senses and was about to kill himself when Cybele saved him by changing him into a pine tree.
The hermaphrodite torso carries a label “the circumcised hermaphrodite” although s/he has experienced substantially more than mere circumcision. S/he, like the male figure, has had the entire penis sliced through and removed. The hermaphrodite is a key figure in alchemical writings and symbolises the uniting of opposites. The word itself is a conjunction of Hermes and Aphrodite and represents a union of the masculine and feminine aspects of matter resulting in the creation of a spiritual whole. The hermaphrodite is the Magical Child, the Two-in-One and is the culmination of the Great Work. Here, however, the magical child has been mutilated. This torso no longer belongs to “the hermaphrodite whole, opposites bound together in mitigating embrace” about which Colquhoun wrote in her short alchemical text Waterstone of the Wise.
Other meanings abound. Remy adds that ‘pine’ is French slang for penis. Colquhoun herself mentioned, in the preface to her 1976 retrospective, that Isadore Ducasse, the self-styled Comte du Lautréamont, had described George Sand, the cross-dressing literary figure of the late 19th century as the circumcised hermaphrodite
Does one sense a crisis in the artist’s life? Even the Magical Child is incomplete. The Méditerranée series, with its suggestions of emotional turmoil had only recently been completed. The artist was at the start of her relationship with Toni del Renzio, but they were not yet married. Stylistically, she was making the transition from magic realism to a more extensive use of automatism. The work may well be, in part, a parody on the male surrealist obsession with sexuality, but everything hints at personal transition, uncertainty and chaos.
This was the work that Colquhoun was asked to remove from the Leicester Galleries exhibition in 1942 because of its pornographic content. See Johnstone, p236 and Oxford Art Journal, July 1981 for further details.
References
Battersby, C. Dirty words for the Tate. MAKE: the magazine of women's art. No. 33 (Mar/Apr 90) pp4-8.
Buck, L. Faceless Femme fatales. MAKE: the magazine of women's art. No. 49 (Nov/Dec 92) pp16-17.
Chadwick, W. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, Thames and Hudson, London, 1985.
Colquhoun, I. The Water stone of the Wise. in:. A Comfort and J Bayliss, (eds.) New Road, 1943. Gray Walls Press, Billericay, Essex. pp. 196-9.
Colquhoun, I. Women in Art. Oxford Art Journal, July 1981 p 65.
Colquhoun, I. Osmazone. Dunganon, Örkeljunga, Sweden 1983.
Johnstone, W. Points in Time. An autobiography. Barrie and Jenkins, London 1980.
Ratcliffe, E. Ithell Colquhoun. Mandrake, Oxford. 2007.
Remy, M. Surrealism in Britain. Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999.
Robinson, M. Surrealism. Flame Tree Publishing, London, 2005.
Stich, S. Anxious Visions. Abbeville Press, New York, 1970.