Like many of Colville’s works from the early 1950s Four Figures on a Wharf (1951), has a certain surreal effect, though he was certainly no Surrealist. But because he was considered a realist painter, many people have a confused idea that Colville painted just what he saw. Of course he didn’t, rather he combined images into compositions, based on what he imagined as much as what he might have seen. René Magritte, an artist with a similar heightened approach to reality, was, like Colville, often called a “magic realist.” In rejecting the Surrealist label, Magritte said, “It should be that realism means the real with the mystery that is in the real.”[1] Evoking that “mystery that is in the real” was Alex Colville’s lifelong project.
Four Figures on a Wharf does not so much depict four female figures as it does one figure passing through time and space. In the painting, the figure closest to the land is nude, holding a cloth behind her back, while each succeeding figure is more clothed, until the last figure at the end of the pier is fully draped. This depiction of a figure moving in time is often described as ‘filmic,’ but of course it predates the invention of photography. Medieval painting often depicts multiple scenes of the same figures in paintings to suggest travel or to tell different parts of a well-known story. Classical relief sculpture would also use this “filmstrip” technique to enlarge upon a theme.
In the finished painting the figures progress from nude to clothed, perhaps suggesting a progress from innocence to experience (following the Adam and Eve myth), or of from vulnerability to protection. The figures in this study, however, are all clothed, showing that Colville was still working out his final composition. Here the figures almost become part of the wharf itself, like the caryatids from the temple of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens. They become pillars, supporting an imagined architecture, a nod to the occasional classicism of some of the European painters that Colville would have been well aware of, such as Magritte, de Chirico, and Dali. Colville, as evidenced by his studies, often started with more information than was conveyed in a finished work. Through his studies, we see him searching for his image, refining the composition by paring down the idea to its essence. Study for Four Figures on a Wharf gives us a glimpse into his process, a tantalizing hint of how through a series of decisions he honed his imagery into a world.
- Ray Cronin, 2023
[1] René Magritte, quoted in Helen J. Dow, The Art of Alex Colville (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd, 1972), p. 103.
Add a comment