Have we reached peak Harris? It’s a fair question to have on your mind as you make the trek to the woodsy sprawl of the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, where, yet again, a mass of paintings by the Group of Seven commandant — 60-plus, all told — are now on view.
Enough, already, you might say, wearied by the constant presence of The Idea of North, the two-year-long Lawren Harris/Steve Martin travelling road show, as it launched at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, crossed over to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and wrapped up, finally, in September here at home at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
It’s a concern that the McMichael’s chief curator, Sarah Stanners, had well in mind as the gallery started working on Lawren Harris:Higher States, some four or so years ago. It was conceived before Martin declared his intentions and that announcement, when it came, was deflating.
“For us, there was definitely a moment of, ‘Could you follow a Harris show with another Harris show?’” said Stanners, on a walk-through of Higher States this week. “But The Idea of North was hard for those of us who have our heads in Harris a lot, because the good bits at either end were overlooked. So, yes, we thought about it. But we have something very different to say, I think.”
If the Idea of North was an introductory sliver of Harris’s best-known work, the brief period in the 1920s in which he painted sleek, high-Modern mountains, lakes, islands and icebergs — since yoked into the service of quintessential Canadiana — Higher States is its long goodbye.
It presents a paradox: the show puts on view both the least-known and longest and most productive period of Harris’s painting life. By the mid-1930s, Harris, head swimming with the transcendental thinking of theosophy, a semi-secular mysticism, had left Canada in fact and on canvas both, arriving at an astral plane of abstraction, never to return.
To put a fine point on it, one bizarre little painting here seems a cheeky outright farewell: in Winter Comes From the Arctic to the Temperate Zone, from 1935, Harris seems almost to be erasing his best-known works with a self-effacing glee.
A weirdly self-conscious mash-up of Harris’s famous iceberg/mountain/island motifs in the process of being swallowed, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like, by a mass of white goop seeping up from the foreground, it reads almost as self-caricature and, if not that, a clean break. From that point on, Harris, the artistic flag-bearer of the true north strong and free, was an abstract painter, only and always. Just a year later, Mountain Experience, from 1936, is a jagged mound of slim, sharp forms and makes the departure complete.
At the McMichael, a brief interlude — Pic Island, one of those greatest lake-and-island hits, roots Harris one last time to the ground and makes a launching pad for his ascent — leads into the clean, crisp forms of his cosmic explorations (Harris, like his contemporaries, was seeking a view into a fourth dimension and the infinite, of course.)
By the time of his death, in 1970 at 85, it had been 35 years since he’d painted so much as an iceberg. The last major retrospective of his lifetime, in 1967, when he chose the works to be shown, was more than half-abstract. The last time a big display was made of Harris’s abstract work was more than 30 years ago, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1985.
If most of us know anything about this, it’s only vaguely and certainly not well. There’s good reason for that. Icons need to be uncomplicated to achieve iconic status. In the nationalist myth we’ve built around Harris and his cohorts in the Group, their visions of the mythic wilderness and, if you’ll pardon the phrase, the idea of north have been intertwined with an equally narrow version of Upper Canadian national identity.
If the standard story hasn’t been enough to keep a lid on the bulk of Harris’s career, the art market surely has. Mountain Forms, a particularly heroic scene of the Canadian Rockies, sold for $11.2 million in the fall, burying all previous records for works sold at auction in Canada and further narrowcasting Harris’s oeuvre.
“The market often tells the public what’s important,” Stanners says. “Mountains and icebergs sell for millions of dollars and the abstract works haven’t hit six figures.”
Put that way, Higher States is a bit of a risk, but a necessary one. The Idea of North, part one, was a tightly curated suite of 30 Harris paintings of near-identical tone: all cool blues and purples, mountains and lakes and beatific light, tailored for an American audience who didn’t know him.
When the show came to Toronto, AGO curator Andrew Hunter built the back story, of Harris’s sympathies with the rough transition of early industrial Toronto, whose grit and social inequities he painted with a compassionate eye, and whose roughness, you could reasonably guess, drove him into the light of spiritual landscapes, cleansed of the complications of humankind.
If you like, you can see Higher States as chapter three, with some revisions. “I’m calling the Steve Martin show our warm-up,” laughs Gwendolyn Owens, one of the show’s curators. That icy moment was only a blip in Harris’s lengthy, border-traipsing career.
Higher States begins with a chapter, so to speak, that ties Harris to the avant-garde New York art world of the 1930s, where he was a familiar of Georgia O’Keeffe’s, an acquaintance of the Surrealists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and a frequenter of the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz. (“I kept gritting my teeth every time people said Steve was introducing Harris to America,” Stanners said. “He introduced himself.”)
Harris lived in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Sante Fe, New Mexico, where he’d become a co-founder of the Transcendental Painting Group, where much of the work here was made. It’s gleefully uneven, toggling from crisp, geometric abstraction to weirdly organic-seeming, flitting happily into variations of colour and form that reveal a hectic imagination at play.
“The early paintings are solemn and silent. These are fun and noisy,” said Roald Nasgaard, Owens’ co-curator, glancing around at the taut colour fields that surround him.
Individual works aside, what Higher States does is yank Harris from his patriotic artistic statesman role and recast him, a little more realistically, as a seeker, however eccentric, hungry for new knowledge and experience. (Harris, famously, said in an interview with the CBC that he wasn’t afraid of dying, because he thought it might be “fun,” a new adventure, a mountain to climb.)
Maybe he had wearied of his role as Canadian-artist-in-chief. Maybe, in the accelerating march of Modernism, Harris knew that representational painters would be left in the dust, at least for a time. And maybe the anonymity of a new world, and the spark of new communities and fresh challenges, was what fed his creative soul.
If Harris wasn’t content with the cut-and-dried tale of the painter of the mystic north, then neither should we be. But the end of that story, when Harris, the abstract painter of rigid forms, bumped in the 1950s into the gestural explosion of Abstract Expressionism, is yet to be written and Higher States stops deliberately short.
So can we please stop talking about Lawren Harris? Soon. I promise. But maybe not just yet.
Lawren Harris: Higher States continues at the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art to Sept. 4.
The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
