Nude and Dummy was the first of Alex Colville’s paintings to be sold to a museum (to the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John). This was the first sale of what he considered his mature work and marked his emergence as a serious artist. As he wrote, “I was therefore thirty years old before I did anything worthwhile.”[1] It is a painting of enormous importance in his development.
Nude and Dummy is set in the attic studio in Colville’s Sackville home, though it is strangely denuded of any objects except the lone female figure and a dressmaker’s dummy. Standing at the window, the nude woman looks back over her shoulder. We’re not sure what she is looking at: the dummy or the artist. Her line of sight encompasses both. Of course, it feels like she’s looking at the viewer. In the finished painting the dummy is simply a tool for dressmaking that bears only the most superficial resemblance to a human form. But in this study the form is more ambiguous, with defined buttocks and back that clearly evoke the curves of a feminine form. The armless form has a classical feel, as if the dummy was transforming into a Greek statue. The sensuous lines used by the artist to convey the softness of flesh in both the dummy and the nude figure conflate the two, evoking a Pygmalion-like transformation of a statue into a living, breathing woman.
There is more than a hint of surrealism here, echoes of René Magritte perhaps, or even of Salvador Dalí. For any realist painter of the early fifties these two artists would have been front of mind of course, but Colville never embraced the sexualized symbolism of Dalí and the Surrealists. His figures remained rooted in the world of the everyday, rather than in that of dreams and visions, yet imbued with heightened symbolic content, with mystery. Part of the mystery buried under the dummy of the painting is the more nearly human one of this study, what seems like a deliberate nod to the mysterious transformations of Magritte’s contemporaneous paintings. That he stepped away from that homage in the finished work just shows how insistent Colville was on being his own artist.
- Ray Cronin, 2023
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