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| Pacific, 1967 Alex Colville |
Alex Colville at the AGO: A complicated man
In the art world, there are two words that never seem to meet: “Canadian” and “blockbuster,” unless you’re talking about the Group of Seven, and even then it’s touch and go.
Into this, we can now insert a notable exception: the sprawling Alex Colville retrospective the Art Gallery of Ontario is busily prepping for later this month. More than any other artist in Canada, Colville has a galvanizing, sea-to-shining-sea appeal. Maybe it’s his deep investment in repressed anxiety — a trait bred in our country’s bones — that strikes that particularly Canadian nerve, but whatever the case, one thing’s sure: when it opens in the gallery’s special exhibition space on Aug. 23, it will more than hold up its end on the ticket-sales front.
(The AGO declined to shared projected numbers or presales, saying only that it was “excited” about its prospects.)
Helping fuel interest, of course, is Colville’s passing. When he died in July of last year at 92, accolades and appreciations flowed freely, as though a tightened valve had been suddenly turned loose. A huge, stock-taking posthumous retrospective was inevitable, but the AGO surprised everyone when, in November, just a few months after he died, it announced that it would be the one to do it.
The National Gallery in Ottawa, with its much greater collection of Colvilles, would be the natural place, or maybe the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, with whom the artist had been in regular contact over the years (the show will travel to Ottawa after Toronto).
Death, of course, has always been a brilliant career move for an artist. They seem to fascinate us at no point more than when they’re gone and, with his presence suddenly re-energized in the public imagination by his death, Colville is no exception.
What it also means, though, is that an artist is reanimated and reassembled for his or her adoring masses without his or her input, the reading and translation of their life’s work left to others.
So which version of Colville will this, the biggest show of his work ever assembled, present? Colville, the stoic existentialist who grappled with the big questions from his safe remove of Wolfville, N.S.? Or the artist whose paintings penetrated popular culture on his own initiative, appearing on dust jackets for books, album covers and movies like The Shining, in which four of his paintings appear? Or how about Colville, the designer of our centennial coins and an enduring fan favourite?
Ask Andrew Hunter, the gallery’s curator of Canadian art, and it’s all of the above.
“One thing we didn’t want was to close the book on Alex,” says Hunter, who joined the AGO not long before Colville died last year. “I was really conscious of the fact that it couldn’t just be a memorial exhibition. Often, the storyline can get reduced: he’s an East Coast realist painter, check; got it. But he’s a lot more complicated than that.”
Mark Cheetham is an art historian at the University of Toronto who was in close contact with Colville in the ’90s while writing his biography Alex Colville: The Observer Observed. The book looked closely not only at Colville’s work as a painter, but his careful cultivation of a public persona that included outspoken positions on politics and a deep fascination with philosophy.
While Colville chose to live at a remove from the world’s major centres in Wolfville, in the house his wife Rhoda had grown up in, he was nonetheless driven to be connected to them. When he appeared publicly, it was in finely tailored three-piece suits; he was gracious and engaging but ever conscious of his public image.
“He very carefully crafted his professional life to be popular,” Cheetham says. “Selling his images for book and record covers and movies: that was a business decision. He was full of these wonderfully human contradictions that I think people really respond to.”
The result, though, has been an occasional impulse to oversimplify the work. Colville came of age at a time when representational painting had been relegated to the dustbin of serious art history. In the ’40s and ’50s, abstraction had taken hold in the U.S. and much of Europe, dominating the critical discourse as well as the marketplace.
Early on, Colville embraced ideas like Surrealism, which eventually led the way to abstraction (likely his most famous painting, Horse and Train from 1954, is dark and fantastical, and maybe a little heavy-handed in its implied metaphor for a world whose lust for progress had put it on a collision course with disaster).
But as abstraction took hold, Colville veered sharply right, applying his exacting realist gifts to quotidian scenes. Granted, daily life in the Colville universe wasn’t much like yours or mine, balanced quietly or bluntly on the knife’s edge of disaster (Pacific, from 1967, shows a shirtless man staring out across a beach at a churning sea, a pistol on the table behind him).
The decision tended to steer Colville away from the discussion of the burgeoning realm of contemporary and into the art world’s growing great divide: if work wasn’t conceptually or intellectually driven, then it was merely illustration, not worthy of deeper consideration.
“As much as he’s been lionized outside the art community, he’s really just been tolerated or even criticized within it,” Cheetham says.
Colville’s cultivated popularity didn’t help, nor did his calculated distance from his peers
“He was the furthest thing from an artist’s artist,” Cheetham says. “He said flat out: ‘I’m a conservative and I want to be an aristocrat.’”
Nonetheless, Colville dug deep into the nervous tension of his formative years. Drawing on his experience as a war artist in the Second World War, he developed a deep fascination with Existentialism, and in philosophers like Martin Heidegger and writers like Iris Murdoch. Though he felt no need to trumpet it, that fascination fuelled almost everything he did but, in his enduring popularity, that part inevitably gets left out.
Whether or not the AGO is willing to embrace Colville in full will be the measure of its ultimate success, more than ticket sales, Cheetham says.
“He was very, very serious, a serious thinker. If you want to make a claim for Colville as an artist, a great artist, an enduring one, then that’s where it lies. I don’t think we need to popularize Colville any more than he already has been. Colville is an important artist. I believe that. But I think his depth is largely unexplored. The question is, will this show do his legacy justice?”
At the AGO, Hunter has crafted an exhibition that’s not likely to close that debate. The artist’s 70-year career is broken down into five parts: Colville and the everyday; the Maritimes; animals, which he painted often and ascribed a certain kind of purity; danger and the unknown; and the domestic world he and Rhoda shared in Wolfville for almost four decades.
Dotting the exhibition throughout are interventions meant to broaden the viewer’s experience: large-scale photographs of Colville’s series of coins by artist Bill Eakin, an eerie sound collage by artist Tim Hecker. Film critic Jesse Wente discusses Colville’s presence in, and fascination with, film (he loved the Coen Brothers, for reasons that should be obvious). Author Ann-Marie MacDonald addresses his treatment of animals. Vancouver-based artist Gu Xiong talks about the profound influence Horse and Train had on him when it was shown in China in the 1980s.
“We’re trying to do a solid Colville show,” Hunter says. “We want to give people a lot of different entry points.”
More than that, though, was a priority to invigorate not memorialize. “We wanted to engage his work as a living, breathing practice in the world. These aren’t artifacts. They’re relevant now.”
As to Colville’s hidden depths, Hunter’s not likely to torque that for viewers, leaving them to their own conclusions.
“Colville’s work was deceptively simple,” he says. “There’s what you see on the surface, but you can so easily go deeper. He wasn’t controlling about that. He wanted you to come to the work and take it where you want to go.”
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