Sold for: $1,561,250

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Toronto
Important Canadian Art, Sotheby's, May 6, 1991, lot 114
Private Collection, Ottawa
Important Canadian Art, Sotheby's, May 15, 1996, lot 225
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, June 17, 2009, lot 40
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Helen Dow, The Art of Alex Colville, 1972, listed page 219
David Burnett, Colville, 1983, page 64, reproduced page 72, catalogue raisonné #28
Andrew Hunter, Alex Colville, 2014, reproduced page 53 and listed page 143

EXHIBITED
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Alex Colville, August 23, 2014 - January 4, 2015, traveling in 2015 to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Alex Colville has fascinated Canadian and international audiences since his work came to prominence in the 1950s. A public figure whose proudly conservative values cut against the perceived image of what an artist is and does, Colville the man - very like his quietly enigmatic and sometimes unsettling work - has staying power.

Coastal Figure embodies many of the qualities that give Colville's unique images their potency. Painted in 1951 when he was teaching studio art and art history at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, it is part of a group of early pictures with which he was, for the first time, satisfied. The sophistication of the work is manifest. The divisionist application of pigment is confident, as is the sense of place on Canada's East Coast and the presentation of the female nude, a recurrent theme for Colville. He had his first solo exhibition in Canada in the year this painting appeared, 1951. By 1953, he was exhibiting successfully in New York.

Colville has said that there are "two qualities which are essential to an artist - the sense of humility and the sense of mystery." Here we see both, even though Colville presents us with an everyday scene, one which we can easily understand, at least initially. A woman on a beach gazes towards the horizon. Colville values the quotidian, the rhythms of our everyday lives, those details and habits that he believes define us as individuals. He reveres nature as something much larger than the human. He is humble. Coastal Figure magically conveys a sense of mystery, too, an oddness that is less than menacing but not easily forgotten.

While the landscape here may seem natural, its detail is radically suppressed. The scooped out shoreline at the top left of the picture - a line that repeats the curves of the woman's back and thus weaves her into nature's fabric - is the simplest of forms. Her line of sight is continuous with the horizon, melding the two. The beach and the woman are almost the same colour and both are rendered with Colville's signature small, multicoloured brush-strokes. But what is the form in the water in the right middle of the picture? It seems attached to the bather's right knee yet appears behind it in space. We know rationally that it must be an island in the middle distance, but so akin to the woman's form and texture is this shape that we are given pause to think about the connections between nature, ourselves, and the artistry that makes these links apparent.

Colville is the consummate observer. He is methodical in his working methods, constantly measuring and balancing elements within the image. The paradox of his work - evident in Coastal Figure - is that his compulsive precision allows us to see what he cannot present visually. The foreground nude commands the picture space but she is ultimately dwarfed by nature. Colville thus manipulates and brings into close relationship two of the dominant themes of Western art, landscape and the female nude. The locale seems identifiable, yet the generality of the landscape points towards the universal. Colville thus has us ponder the connection between the local and the global. The work appears direct, even innocent, but it echoes not only the sculptural and more abstract nudes of Henry Moore but also the stillness of early Italian Renaissance painting. Colville's seeing - like ours - is individual but also predetermined by the norms of art history.

Coastal Figure was created only a few years after Colville returned from World War II. He stated, "The question in my mind at the end of the war was, 'What does it mean?' There were questions of not only what to think, but of what to do." It is within this large frame, one drawn for Colville by his readings in the existentialist philosophy of Albert Camus and others, that Coastal Figure emerges as a profoundly contemplative work. The woman gazes thoughtfully at nature. As a category - female, nude, the natural - rather than an individual, her gaze is that of art as a way of seeing. Colville asks what art can and should do.

We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto and author of Alex Colville: The Observer Observed, for contributing the above essay.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars