Henry Moore and Alex Colville: The Shapes of Things

“I am a sculptor because the shape of things matters even more to me than the colour of them. It may be that a painter is excited as much by colour as by form. Some painters have been like this, though others have been as interested by form as sculptors are.”[1]

– Henry Moore

 

The British sculptor Henry Moore was a marked influence on the early work of Alex Colville, as is most apparent in paintings of the early 1950s, particularly Colville’s series of  figures in landscapes, such as Nudes on Shore (1950) and Coastal Figure (1950). But he also made a number of paintings of nude female figures in interiors, all of which share a weightiness and sense of gravity that is profoundly sculptural. Colville in these early works, and indeed over his subsequent career, is a painter “as interested by form as sculptors are.”

Interested in form, of course, but not disinterested in colour. Colour was never a secondary interest of Colville’s, though his palette was certainly more subdued than many. His paintings are washed in a cool, pale light, his colours don’t pop so much as they hum. Light (and what is colour after all, but light?) in a Colville painting reveals form and carves mass out of space. Where his former student, Mary Pratt, reveled in the brightness and liquidity of light, Colville wielded it like a scalpel – or a chisel.

Painting is an additive process of course, accumulated through thousands of decisions about adding daubs of paint. But composition, for Colville at least, is also reductive – a removing of detail, a stripping away of the extraneous from the observed. Using the word ‘carving’ to discuss a painting by Colville may not be strictly an accurate use of the term, but it somehow makes sense. Because Colville did not merely record what he had seen, but painted what he wanted us to see. In his compositions, strict accuracy is sacrificed to truth.

So Colville carves mass out of space. And Henry Moore carved space out of mass, because Moore was a carver, first and foremost, whether of stone, wood, or plaster. His forms were dictated by the blocks of material he had to work with, by gravity, by density, all filtered though his imagination. In many of Colville’s works from the 1950s such as Woman at Table (1951) and Seated Nude (1951), we find poses, treatment of detail, and the settings for the figures that are reminiscent of Moore’s sculpture and drawings, particularly in their monumentality. If the figure in Seated Nude were to rise from her bed, she seems like she would burst out of the room within which she is contained. And how small the table seems in Woman at Table! Like so many of Moore’s figures, Colville’s nudes are solid, with broad hips and heavy thighs, women who exude strength and substance. But Colville’s figures, unlike the women depicted by painters such as Rubens or Renoir, do not convey the flesh, they do not feel overtly sensual. Nor are they ethereal. They seem, rather, to be simply present, self-contained and self-sufficient. They are rooted – like Moore’s sculptures and drawings – in the lworlde. Moore’s settings tended towards the archetypal, a convention which Colville followed in his early work, depicting rooms and landscapes that have no specific identity. Six Figures on a Beach (1951) or Two Seated Figures (1952) do not show an actual beach or shore, but they do not need to, Colville’s focus is on the figures.

Colville’s women loom in their rooms and landscapes, much as Moore’s figures take up space and seem to fill the landscapes within which the artist considered them to be ideally placed. “I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in the most beautiful building I know,” Moore said.[2] Over time, Colville’s landscapes and interiors became more and more specific, actual places rather than the stripped down, mostly imaginary settings of his works from the early 1950s. Eventually he found that the more specific the setting, the more the figures belonged. But he retained his sculptural sense, his way of shaping light into solid form.

By the early 1950s Henry Moore was one of the most famous artists in the world. That fame had been secured by a remarkable series of works from the Second World War: his Shelter Drawings made during the London Blitz. During the furious German bombing campaign of London, Moore spent many nights in the underground shelters, observing and making notes, from which he developed a series of drawings and prints that celebrated the indomitable spirit of ordinary Londoners during one of the darkest moments of a very dark time. Colville, who was an official Canadian war artist and worked in London at the end of the war, was encouraged to study Moore’s work by the Saint John painter (and fellow war artist) Miller Brittain. One need only look at such Brittain works from before he enlisted, such as The Rummage Sale (1940), or Longshoreman (1940), both at the National Gallery of Canada, to see why he would have had an affinity for Moore – and Colville.

Both Moore and Colville strove to make their figures monumental, Moore to integrate the figure into the vastness of the landscape, Colville to imbue his figures with the symbolic and intellectual depth he had found in pre-modern, particularly Renaissance, painting. The commonplace, the familiar, in Colville’s hands, became uncanny and profound. Moore strove to make his figures seem larger than the blocks of material from which they were carved, and Colville, in works such as Woman at Table, Nude and Dummy, and Seated Figure, makes his figures push the limits of the enclosing space. His Coastal Figure becomes the landscape. Scale, in a painting, is more easily manipulated than in a sculpture, yet Moore was able to make it somehow fluid, what one art historian called a “formal springiness.”[3] Colville’s painted figures, on the other hand, somehow contrive to be more solid than Moore’s. Even the sinuous lines of Four Females Standing on their Head II (1954) do not give a sense of “springiness,” though they do evoke a kind of coiled power.

In the two drawings both entitled Two Nude Women Standing (1950), the figures are strongly modelled, weighty and somehow massive, while their setting fades away – a simple horizon line, a rudimentary fence. All that matters is the sheer presence of the figures. In his famous essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, a philosopher Colville greatly admired, wrote of a Greek temple, that “in its standing there, [the temple] first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.”[4] The temple, or any artwork, Heidegger maintained, created a world. These figures, too, constitute a world, and their verticality, set against the horizon and the diagonal of the fence, marks them as having agency in that world. In standing there, they provide “their outlook on themselves.”

            For both artists, it is the shapes of things that matter, because it is through those shapes that they convey meaning. Asked once to list his personal pantheon of great artists, Colville named such painters as Jan Vermeer, Nicolas Poussin, Georges Seurat, Thomas Eakins, and Edward Hopper. He also listed three sculptors: Donatello, George Segal, and Henry Moore. As Mark Cheetham wrote, “Colville shares with them a concern for placing the figure in a convincing three-dimensional space.”[5] That space, of course, is a world. “I’m trying to make a painting that will not seem horribly inferior, [to] produce a world, make a world, that won’t seem horribly inferior to the actual world…”, Colville told Cheetham.[6] In part, it was through his attention to the shapes of things that Colville created worlds. His careful, painstaking process of getting to that world is documented as much through his finished works as through his preparatory sketches and drawings, and through his abiding interest in the history of art and his working through the influences of artists he admired, such as Henry Moore.

 

About the author

Mira Godard Gallery

View all posts by Mira Godard Gallery