Posts by Mira Godard Gallery

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

In his painting Coastal Figure (1951) Alex Colville integrated his model into the landscape, enclosing the woman in a tight box. This served to make her size completely ambiguous. If the figure was to stand up, she could be human sized or vastly tall, there are no visual cues – beyond our own expectations that an image conform to reality – to give us any clue as to the scale of this figure. A more romantic artist might have titled such a work “Giantess Contemplating the Sea” and we would immediately see the figure as enormous in the landscape. She is, quite simply, monumental.

Colville’s concerns here are sculptural, that is, they are about how the body exists in space. His use of a reclining figure quotes both classical art history and is a nod to a contemporary artist of great renown in the early 1950s. No artist of the 20^th century spent more time thinking about how a reclining figure could achieve a monumental scale in the landscape than did Henry Moore. The relationship of figure to landscape was one that Moore mostly worked out in three dimensions, in actual rather than imagined space. But in several drawings and etchings throughout his career he made images of reclining figures in the sort of pastoral landscapes of rolling hills that he imagined as the setting for his monumental sculptures. However abstract his figures became, these drawings attest that they are always figures. But they are also of the earth. As one contemporary art historian has written, “Moore’s works are as solid and as stable as landscape.”[1]

So too, of course, are Colville’s, and in this beautiful study we see how Colville was working out that solidity, monumentalizing an anonymous figure so that it almost becomes the land, a physical embodiment of the coast.

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

            The figure in the landscape was one of Henry Moore’s enduring themes, one which he never exhausted over his long career. In the early 1950s, Alex Colville was exploring this theme as well, influenced by his own experience of Moore’s work, and his interest in European art history, particularly the art of the Renaissance which he saw in galleries while serving as a war artist. In paintings such as Nudes on Shore (1950) and Coastal Figure (1951) he presented figures as masses in the landscape, sculptural forms contrasted against the horizon and the shoreline. In later years Colville was to concentrate more and more on the figure in the constructed environment, often in relation to machines: to cars, trucks, boats, and trains. But his desire to imbue the day-to-day human world with the metaphorical and symbolic weightiness of the landscape was not something he was able to achieve overnight. Like Moore, he needed to both perfect and then constantly refine the themes that compelled him throughout his long career.

The two figures in this work sit in an indeterminate setting, though the horizon line and the darker band underneath suggests that the figures are on a beach. The figures themselves are somewhat indeterminate as well, the figure on the left could be male of female, while the figure on the right is probably male. Colville has done many figure group paintings, but never two nude males together, so it is a safe assumption that this work depicts a couple, an early example of a theme that he returned to many times. A few years later, with his first serigraph After Swimming, he made a finished work of a couple on a beach, and 1957’s Couple on Beach (1957) is another example. There are many more of course, as the image of a couple, intent on each other and at home in their setting, is one of the most enduring themes of Colville’s painting.

- Ray Cronin, 2023

         Throughout the early to mid-1950s many of Alex Colville’s paintings featured unclothed women in empty landscapes or bare interiors. Interestingly, the spare settings helped make the figures somehow less exposed, nude rather than naked. In paintings such as Seated Nude (1951) and Nude and Dummy (1950) Colville uses the barest of interiors to create settings that are weighted with import. The attic of Nude and Dummy lacks any furniture or objects of any kind, except for the dressmaker’s dummy of the title. The figure in Seated Nude perches on the edge of a bed covered in a blanket that drapes on the floor. The walls are bare, and no pillows or other covers mar the spare solidity of the bed. The slanted angle of the ceiling in Seated Nude suggests that the figure is situated in the same attic as that of Nude and Dummy,  perhaps at the opposite end of the narrow room. Both paintings have a sculptural solidity to them, the figures massive, as if carved out of blocks of stone.

            Sources, especially for an artist who draws from such a depth of art historical knowledge and who pares down images to the bare essentials, as Colville does, can be hard to find, and the search is often pointless. How the artist arrived at an image is rarely that important. But it is fascinating to get glimpses into the working methods of an artist such as Colville, because his finished work rarely renders up any clues to his process. We know Colville made numerous preparatory drawings as he developed his compositions, and in Two Nudes we have a sketch that shows evidence of being an early version of both Seated Nude and Nude and Dummy. The figure in the foreground of the drawing sits more comfortably on the bed, but the woman’s posture is identical to the figure in Seated Nude. In the background a figure stands, looking back towards the central figure. This woman has the same pose as the figure in Nude and Dummy, showing how two important early Colville paintings have their origins in a figure study of a pair of women (or two views of the same figure). Colville considered Nude and Dummy his first mature work, highlighting the significance of this study. The background figure becomes the central focus of its own painting, while the seated figure is replaced by the dressmaker’s form and then becomes a painting in its own right. With Colville, it seems, nothing is wasted.

- Ray Cronin, 2023

            Colville’s knowledge of art history was wide, and if he was loathe to acknowledge much in the way of contemporary influences, his quoting of Renaissance and earlier painting is constant. Here though, the echoes have a less distant source. The group of bathing women in Six Figures on Beach have unmistakable similarities to the late series of bathers by Paul Cézanne. One, Bathers (1894-1905) is in the collection of the National Gallery in London and likely would have been on view while Colville was working as a war artist there. Colville’s bathers share the partial draping that is found in all the older artist’s bather paintings, though his open beach is less pastoral than the shady, tree-lined stream that Cézanne favoured.

            Interestingly, in his late career, Henry Moore too turned to the theme of bathers, with nude groups depicted on an open beach in a work such as Group of Women Bathers (1981) and his small sculpture Three Bathers (After Cézanne) of 1978. No artist who came of age in the early 20^th century could ignore Cézanne, of course, and neither Colville nor Moore did. As Colville’s compositional style matured throughout the 1950s, the outright evocation of earlier painters, such as Cézanne, faded. The echoes weren’t gone, however, just buried under the more quotidian scenes he chose to depict. Three Girls on a Wharf (1953), for instance, or June Noon (1963) no longer pay homage overtly to Cézanne, but with a sketch such as Six Figures on Beach we can see how Colville had absorbed and transformed his influence.

- Ray Cronin, 2023

          A familiar convention of Renaissance art was the depiction of the Three Charities or Graces (goddesses from Greek mythology that represented the youthful ideals of grace, charm, and beauty). Whether in sculpture or painting, the figures were often shown as if they were dancing, with each figure turned a different direction so the viewer could see all sides of the female figure from one vantage point. Sandro Botticelli’s La Primavera in the Uffizi Gallery is one famous example, as is Antonio Canova’s marble statue The Three Graces in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In his depiction of four figures Colville follows the convention of having each figure present a different aspect to the viewer, side, back, and front. Much as the four women in Four Figures on a Wharf seem to progress through time as well as space, the woman in Four Females Standing on their Head II could be one woman, depicted as if she was spinning, or four distinct figures, the artist leaves it up to the viewer to decide. Again like Four Figures on a Wharf,  the figures echo the Greek architectural element of the caryatid, a female figure that served as a post or pillar.

Of course, those figures were not shown standing on their heads. There is a wry wit at play here – has the world been turned upside down? One doesn’t often think of humour as an element in the works of Colville, but this drawing certainly has its humorous aspect. The architectural setting is reminiscent of Di Chirico, putting this drawing in the magic realist period of Colville’s work. The frieze of figures also suggests a team of acrobats or gymnasts. Colville did paint an acrobat in Circus Woman (1960), a figure whose spinning in mid-air is frozen as she gazes at the viewer. He also returned to the image of a figure standing on her head in Headstand (1982), another painting with a humorous edge (how else can we read an image of a nude woman doing a headstand on a front porch while a cat nonchalantly strolls by?).

Four Females Standing on their Head II never became a painting, but the artist finished it to a degree far beyond his regular practice in preparatory sketches, clearly showing his interest in the composition, an interest that seems to have eventually manifested itself in two very different paintings. 

- Ray Cronin, 2023

Known for his knockout oversized paintings, Deep Yellow Down is a rare example of a small abstract canvas by Jack Bush. After 1960, Bush only made three paintings on canvas that measure smaller than Deep Yellow Down, which is 31.75 x 16.5 inches. Despite its atypical size, the colour in Deep Yellow Down packs a punch that commands a room and expresses exactly what so many of his best paintings shout: POW!

At the time that Bush painted Deep Yellow Down, in September 1970, his work was included in a group exhibition titled “Color and Field 1890-1970,” which opened at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and later traveled to the Daytona Art Institute and the Cleveland Museum of Art. By the end of October 1970, Bush enjoyed a solo exhibition at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York City and was included in the prestigious annual exhibition at the Carnegie Institute (“The 1970 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture”).

Just one year before this surge of showings in the US, Bush was celebrated in a solo exhibition at Galerie Godard Lefort, simply titled “Jack Bush” (18 February to 8 March 1969). This exhibition was significant for the artist. It was his first solo exhibition in Montréal, the city in which he grew up, from age 8 to 19. Mabel Bush, the artist’s wife, was also from Montréal and while the vast majority their adult lives were spent in Toronto, many of the couple’s family members lived in Montréal. Bush explained the personal significance of his exhibition at Galerie Godard Lefort in an interview with Dennis Reid which appeared in the April 1969 issue of artscanada: “I was determined that my first show in Montreal, really my ex-hometown, would be major; the best work I could turn out and shown at its best. That’s why I held out for a show in Mira’s new gallery. I wanted to go back ‘home’ as strong as I could go.”

While Bush’s association with Mira Godard and her gallery was brief, their connection occurred at an important time, at the peak of his career, and an important place, on the stomping grounds of his youth. For years, Godard held a Bush painting in her personal collection, which had similar, though slightly larger dimensions than Deep Yellow Down. Little Yellow, from 1968, was stretched at 44 x 25.5 inches, and suited Godard’s own taste, small but mighty. No doubt she would have enjoyed Deep Yellow Down, too.  

- Sarah Stanners, Ph.D.

It’s a wistful painting, its pinkish palette knife-streaks trailing off into an evanescent white ground. It’s tempting to read nature into its imagery, but one must be careful. At this stage in his work Borduas was given to stress the material body of his work: the way in which he almost sculpts his fields of white paint, their thick skin punctured with equally solid opaque black and brown patches. In 1958, therefore, Transparence’s lyricism is a little unique, and certainly at the opposite end of the spectrum from the three monochromes - red, white and grey - that Borduas made the same year, which seem almost entirely about the paint’s body and viscosity.

Transparence was executed in Paris where Borduas had arrived, full of optimism, in September 1955, after two fruitful years in New York. But Paris had disappointed him. It was no longer the hot spot that it was when the Automatistes had shown there in the Galerie de Luxembourg in 1947. Its creative daring had been far surpassed by Abstract Expressionism in New York. If Paris also failed to give Borduas’ work serious attention, the last five years of his life in the city were nevertheless remarkably productive. They were a period both of consolidation, Borduas bringing to new resolutions the lessons learned in New York, and of his striking out in new inventive directions. Although he himself stayed faithful to painting, his increasing fascination with sheer materiality suggests that he may have looked with more than curiosity at the proto-Arte Povera innovations, like Lucio Fontana’s punctures and Alberto Burri’s burlap collages, work that he would have seen in both New York and Paris.

Transparence is reticent, the paint applied discreetly, sometimes leaving exposed bits of the white gessoed canvas ground or applied in layers so thin that they retain the canvas’s texture. The painting is organized into four horizontal bands, two of which are slightly bluish, all four feeling out tonal shifts as if to evoke atmospheric illusion. Over top of, and sometimes embedded in the white ground, flutter a quartet of rose-pink configurations, either windblown, or hovering there like a small flight of winged insects above a snowy field. To resort to representational analogies seems unavoidable. 

It is the freshest of paintings. But maybe it is also a touch nostalgic, as if Borduas were taking time to glance backwards into his own memories, to reconsider and rethink earlier themes for the present. For his colour and lightness of touch there are distant echoes in his early Spring Morning, 1937 (Art Gallery of Hamilton), a small painting that he showed at the 55^th Spring Exhibition at the Art Association of Montreal in 1938. Its pastel pinks and its loose, delicately sketched whites are resonant with the lessons of Impressionism and of Maurice Denis, in whose school he had studied in Paris in the 1920s. The painting had caught the attention of John Lyman, and Jacques de Tonnancour admired “its freshness of touch and of colour.”[1]

There are other nearer echoes, especially of his paintings from 1953, executed after he had arrived in New York while in the process of absorbing the lessons of Abstract Expressionism. This was when he collapsed into flatness his former Surrealist figure-ground spaces, often deploying lateral knife strokes to shut out our look into depths beyond. Sometimes he overtopped his flattened grounds with individual sign-like gestures, adding descriptive titles like The Signs take Flight (1953, MMFA). An especially apt forerunner to Transparence might be The Dance of the Glacier,1 953 (Private Collection). In it darker paint strokes flit rhythmically across a lighter background that the title identifies with ice and snow. And, referencing the title again, the overlain paint strokes “dance,” a metaphorical description that led François-Marc Gagnon to recall the figure of the Automatiste dancer, Françoise Sullivan, as she was photographed by Maurice Perron performing her 1948 Danse dans la Neige.[2] But in 1948 Sullivan was in her winter boots. The choreography of Transparence, instead, is gravity-free, even ethereal, and the painting luminous and intimately poetic. Is this perhaps why Ayala Zacks – she and her husband Sam may have acquired the painting already in 1958 from the Paul-Émile Borduas -- Harold Town exhibition held that year in London[3] - did not include it as one of the many Zacks donations to museums, but kept it close until the end of her life?

- Roald Nasgaard

It’s a day in late Fall, 2025 and I am on the top floor of Mira Godard Gallery in Toronto where I am surrounded by Takao Tanabe’s paintings. I sit or stand or walk about studying them. Lying on a large coffee table are portfolios of Tanabe’s works on paper. These are the works, along with a few others still to come, that will constitute Tanabe’s exhibition in the Gallery in May, 2026 to celebrate his 100-year birthday. I am to write an essay for the show’s catalogue. I’ve been in a like situation with Tak’s work before, and again here, as before, I encounter familiar works, but equally discover new ones that surprise me and that I find myself revelling in.