Ithell Colquhoun

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Ithell Colquhoun (1906 — 1988) was a British Surrealist painter and author. She was born in Shillong, Assam, India. From the 1930s to her death, her work was exhibited widely in Britain and Germany.

She studied at the Slade School of Art in London, and later travelled to France to study the Surrealist masters, especially Salvador Dalí. However she was actually expelled from the London Surrealist Group for not giving her unconditional support to E.L.T. Mesens in 1940.

She married Toni del Renzio in 1943 and was divorced by 1948.

Best known for her paintings, Colquhoun invented new Surrealist techniques, including graphomania, stillomania, and parsemage. She was also an author, playwright, and poet.

Throughout her life she was deeply interested in the occult, especially the Kabbalistic tree of life. Her early membership to the Golden Dawn was rejected, but she later became a member of the similar O.T.O.

Her book, The Sword of Wisdom, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1975, was the first book-length biography of Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers. It remains the longest single work specifically focused on Mathers, though it generally considered to be factually superseded in many points by later writers on the subject.

Colquhoun died on April 11, 1988 in Cornwall, where she had lived most of her life.