COLQUHON, Ithell
Bonsoir

In 1939, Ithell Colquhoun imagined Bonsoir as a Surrealist film. She constructed a storyboard using photographs cut from popular magazines, which remained unpublished until now. Employing Surrealist techniques, this collection of collages narrate a moment in time in which convention and ambiguity collide in the exploration of desire. This book brings Colquhoun’s previously unseen story to life, with texts from Matthew Gale and Amy Hale to contextualise the work.

Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) was a prolific artist, essayist, novelist, and poet whose overriding concerns were with spiritual transcendence and union with the divine energy that animated all matter. For her, surrealism provided a method and framework to explore not only the deepest reaches of her own mind, but also to connect with other beings and dimensions. Tate holds a vast collection of her works, ephemera and writings in its archive, from which this collection of collage artworks is taken and published for the first time ever. [publisher's note]

Published by Tate, 2022
Artists' Books / Documents