It signalled the end of an era last month when Alex Colville passed away in Wolfville, Nova Scotia at the age of 92. His wife of 70 years, who had been the model for almost all the women in his paintings, had predeceased him by only a few months and there was a certain sense of order and correctness when Alex died at home  in the old family home in a small town in Nova Scotia.  Like several of the elite formers of modern American literature – we’ll just mention the great American poets Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht and the novelist Norman Mailer – Colville had experienced the horrors of the Second World War first hand, where it really counted, as a young lieutenant with the Canadian troops that fought their way from Juno Beach in Normandie through the Netherlands to the concentration camps of Central Europe.
Like Hecht he had been there when a concentration camp was freed – in his case it was Bergen-Belsen – and witnessed a scene he could never forget. And he was commissioned to catch that for the historical record, for he was a war artist. He was under orders to use the primitive painting materials in his pack to make the sketches on site that he could later turn into oil paintings. Years later, when he was considered one of the elite world artists and his painting were sold for small fortunes, he would indicate that he felt that those sketches, now almost all in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, captured something of the nightmarish horror he was witnessing but that he could not transform them successfully into oil paintings. The colour itself was so out of place that it destroyed even the painterly illusion of reality by its very existence.
And then Hecht would go on to write splendidly controlled presentations of an ordered world that on occasion ended with a messenger of death and concentrations camps knocking at the door.  Wilbur would go on to be one of the best classical poets in the English language, a complete master of linguistic form, but the reader  often  had the strange feeling that something threatening loomed just below the surface of the beautifully described things of this world.  Mailer offered the naked and the dead in all their helplessness in  the battles of the South Pacific islands, before himself becoming an anarchic self-destructive wanderer in an inebriated universe.
As for Alex Colville – He returned to his roots, rarely leaving his Maritime home base with all its beauty and idyllic familiarity.  He would soon become a reasonably celebrated artist of this world, often drawing on family, animals and the sea for his compass.  But beneath the surface of an apparently tranquil scene of beauty, a kind of terror emerged from the beginning of his career and never disappeared.  Often it was conveyed by the unexpected presence of a gun on a table or a potential weapon in a hand and sometimes it was the due to the dramatic  presence of  a horse he railroad tracks running straight at a roaring train.  In all of his great works Colville displayed a masterly control of the scene on the canvas, often geometrically prepared in advance, that  drew on old and new masters of realism like Vermeer and Hopper and made no attempt to join the popular movements toward abstract expressionism.  With the exception of a year spent in Berlin at the invitation of the German government (in this time he painted one of his greatest works, The Woman on the Spree) he spent no time in the art centres.  In his professional isolation and family centrality, he knew that he was gathering together an oeuvre of superlatively painted super-realistic works containing more than a strain of explosive power that  could erupt at any time and destroy the idyll.   just as the march to Bersen-Belgen would destroy the old hope of basic human decency and a superior European culture.