The long love of Alex and Rhoda

Alex Colville was a Canadian painter who, while less well-known in Europe and little appreciated by critics, was greatly admired by such perceptive film directors  as Stanley Kubrick, the Coen brothers, and Wes Anderson. Giovanni Mariotti has selected thirteen paintings, which we can observe in progression, as a love story, not unlike the painter’s own 70-year love for his wife Rhoda. Harking back to the geometric clarity of the Italian Quattrocento, especially the work of Piero della Francesca, Colville conferred the status of Sacred History on the everyday life of a middle-class couple and on transformations of the body over time. Gabriele Reina oversaw the selection and transcription of several letters written between 1957 and 1965, drawn from the extensive correspondence between Alex Colville and his friend Lincoln Kirstein, one of the most notable figures in 20th-century New York’s cultural life, an art collector and the founder of the New York City Ballet.