How the priestess of Isis brought surrealism to England: "Magical Realism" by Itel Kohun

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The life of Itel Kohun has always seemed to be split. Here is one Itel - the famous surrealist artist, rebel and inventor. Here is another, carried away by the occult sciences, Kabbalah and alchemy. Here the first Itel looks with pride at his work, exhibited to the public, while the second writes another mystical novel and receives a high position in the secret order. Here one of them disappears in the fire in his own workshop, and the other remains to live …

Artist, writer and occultist Itel Kohun was born in Shillong, British India, but her family soon moved to England. At an early age, the future "mother of British surrealism" was interested in botany, all her life she sketched plants and their parts. The first publicly presented works of Itel were canvases with multiply enlarged fragments of plants.

Itel received a good education - interestingly, in the same place where several famous British occultists studied, at the Slade School of Fine Arts. However, Itel did not particularly satisfy her art education. She tirelessly improved her technique, looking for her own path in art. During her studies, she began to take an interest in the occult sciences under the guidance of her cousin. She won her first successes in the creative field at the age of twenty-three, having received a gold medal in a painting competition. A year later, she published the first article entitled "Prose of Alchemy" in the journal of the occult society "Path".

So, in 1930, Itel's life bifurcates. She enters into several occult, magical and near-religious organizations (in the future she will reach high positions there). And he also moved to Paris, where he discovers surrealist painting and realizes that this is her vocation. Surrealism opens up to art the world of the subconscious, secret, intangible … And this is the best language that allows you to express what Itel feels.

Kohun had a chance to meet with some famous figures of surrealism - for example, André Breton. She also saw a man exclaiming “Surrealism is me!”, The eccentric Salvador Dali. And she took the new art to England, becoming there one of the first and one of the most famous artists of this direction. She called her work "magical realism", perhaps even before art critics began to use this term in relation to painting. In 1936, two personal exhibitions of the artist took place. She actively used the principles of automatic painting and enriched art with new techniques, which made it possible to create, as it were, random images, independent of the will of the creator. Kohun invented pictorial decal (using prints from fresh spots of paint on canvas) and painting with powder spots (islands of charcoal or chalk powder scattered on the surface of the water are transferred to the paper). In the late period of her work, she experimented with enamel paints and collages. In addition to easel painting, Itel Kohun has illustrated magazine covers and created her own tarot art deck.

She was accepted into the London Surrealist Society and almost immediately … expelled from there. The fact is that, according to the chairman, only artists who were free from participation in political, social, religious or magical organizations could be there. But for Itel, art and the occult were one - as for many other British surrealists. Despite the fact that officially Kohun belonged to the movement for only a year, and after leaving society, she lost the right to exhibit works at surrealist exhibitions, she considered herself to be a surrealist artist all her life - art historians and critics adhere to the same opinion.

British occultism has always paid tribute to the feminine principle, and Kohun herself could be called a feminist. She actively explored the themes of gender and gender in her works, inspired by human physiology. In some of her works, “hybrids” of plants and genitals, male or female, are guessed - a great courage for the artist, even in the liberated 30s. In her other canvases, Kohun represented the male body as a landscape, as if responding to all the “male” art, which objectifies women, transforming them into beautiful objects, something between a fragile flower and a soulless piece of furniture. Kohun's early work is a kind of paraphrase of the works of the famous Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi. Paying tribute to her love of nature, she rented workshops in the most picturesque corners of Cornwall to be in contemplation and observation.

Itel Kohun has been actively and actively engaged in painting almost all her life. And at the same time, she was a member of the Typhonian Order, several alternative Masonic lodges, theosophical societies, was ordained a priestess of Isis and a deaconess of the Ancient Celtic Church. All this required active participation - Kohun wrote articles, plays and poems on mystical topics, published two books about her travels to Ireland and Cornwall, several occult novels (Hermogenes Goose, I See Water) and a biography of the founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn S. L. Mathers. The literary texts of Itel Kohun are in many ways related to her painting - the same principles of automatism, randomness, the synthesis of spirituality and physicality, detailed stories about dreams, a combination of the most unusual images …

Very little is known about Itel's personal life. Apparently, in 1943, she married Tony del Renzio, a poet and artist of Italian-Russian descent. Their acquaintance at first was in absentia - Renzio wrote a critical article about her work and, in general, not the most approving one … Soon he changed his mind. This marriage was short-lived, lasted only four years and ended in a difficult divorce. Renzio had a dubious reputation, he was disliked by the London bohemia, and the relationship with him somewhat damaged the artist's career. The last days of Itel Kohun's life were legendary. It was said that she died in a fire in her own workshop. But in reality she passed away quietly at the age of eighty-two.