Northern Eye
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It sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch when you first hear about it. Steve Martin— the Steve Martin—is curating a museum exhibition of works by a supposedly famous Canadian painter you've never heard of. You expect Dan Aykroyd to come out dressed as a lumberjack in a beret, using a hockey stick and some maple syrup to paint a picture of a duck. He and Martin would then exclaim: "We are two wild and crazy art connoisseurs!"
But this reaction only shows how uninformed most Americans are about the great tradition of Canadian painting, which includes such world-class artists as Emily Carr and Alex Colville and no one more significant than Lawren Harris. He is the subject of a very real traveling exhibition, which is indeed curated by the comedian Steve Martin, who turns out to be a knowledgeable art collector. This exhibition of 31 Harris paintings has already appeared to glowing reviews at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. It is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (through June 12) and will close out its run at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (July 1-September 18).
By all means, go to this exhibition: It offers a rare opportunity to discover a major creative talent—one of the great landscape painters of the 20th century, a visionary artist who showed how modernist techniques can transform a traditional genre. But if you cannot get to The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, fortunately that is also the title of this book published to accompany the exhibition. While the book cannot do full justice to the grandeur of Harris's paintings, its color reproductions of every work in the exhibition do a decent job of capturing what makes him so extraordinary as an artist. Especially in a series of detailed close-ups, the book manages to suggest the complex painterly texture of his works and even something of their uncanny luminosity.
The book contains brief but helpful essays on Harris, as well as a chronology of his life and a bibliography of writings about him. It also includes some remarkable photographs Harris took in the Canadian arctic, which together with his preliminary sketches document how he worked to transform the real world into his visionary paintings. Cynthia Burlingham's essay on the role of Harris's drawings in his creative process is especially illuminating. Martin's contribution is brief, but he holds his own with the certified art experts, particularly in an insightful comparison of Harris to Edward Hopper. The book thus serves as a solid introduction to Harris for the many Americans who have never heard of him. But even longtime Harris fans will want this volume, because it offers by far the best reproductions of his paintings I have ever seen in print.
Lawren Stewart Harris (1885-1970) does not fit the stereotype of the starving artist so beloved by the public. As an heir to the Massey-Harris farm machinery fortune, he could finance not only his own painting career but also an entire artistic movement. He helped found and fund the Group of Seven, joined originally by Franklin Carmichael, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley. Largely educated in Europe—Harris studied in Berlin—these painters set out to apply the new artistic developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—chiefly Impressionism and Post-Impressionism—to distinctively Canadian subject matter, especially landscapes. Think: Monet meets the Canadian Rockies.
By choosing to paint their native land, the Group of Seven were able to overcome a potentially debilitating sense of being hopelessly derivative from their European models. Creating a new art for the New World, they could offer subjects no European had ever depicted and, at the same time, usher Canadian painting into the 20th century. In particular, in trying to commit to canvas the distinctive Canadian landscape, Harris and his associates had to develop new pictorial techniques. Imagine being the first to reproduce in paint the riot of fall colors in the Algonquin. In a Canadian forest, Fauvism becomes realism.
Or ask yourself: How do you paint a glacier or an iceberg? To answer that question, Harris made several journeys to remote regions of Canada to study firsthand the exotic landscapes and to learn how to reproduce them in paint. Above all, he painstakingly noted the eerie effects of light in the North—the way sunlight breaks through clouds or reflects off ice. The Idea of North appropriately concentrates on Harris's northern landscapes, his paintings of the north shore of Lake Superior, of the Canadian Rockies, and of the eastern arctic in Canada. Everyone agrees that these works constitute the pinnacle of Harris's achievement as a painter.
Harris was, of course, hardly the first person to paint mountains, even snow-capped mountains. Consider, for example, the German-born American artist Albert Bierstadt, who did for the Swiss Alps and American Rockies what Harris did for the Canadian. In the 19th century, Bierstadt was the gold standard of the alpine sublime. But Harris's mountain landscapes have an elemental power that even Bierstadt's grandest paintings lack. (For the record, the American artist who most resembles Harris is Rockwell Kent.)
Harris reduces mountains to their bare essentials in his paintings, and I do mean "bare." His mountains are all rock, snow, and ice, basically emptied of any signs of living vegetation. The only trees in Harris's northern landscapes are dead stumps, seemingly defying the desolation that surrounds them but obviously fighting a losing battle. Given Harris's stark and forbidding images, Bierstadt's vision of the American Rockies looks positively cozy and lived-in by comparison. Bierstadt paints lush forests and often includes signs of human habitation in his alpine scenes.
Martin perceptively writes of Harris's development as a northern landscape painter: "But these new scenes, devoid of life except for the occasional mossy plain, are not dead. The absence of organic things in the mountains, lakes, and icebergs he now painted created a paradoxical effect: the pictures came to life." As Martin argues, even as Harris dwells on the sheer materiality of his mountains, he reveals a deep spirituality emanating from the natural world. Influenced by the odd pairing of American Transcendentalism and Theosophy, Harris looked through the world of nature to some kind of world beyond.
Indeed, by abstracting from picturesque details and emphasizing the sheer geometrical form of his mountains, Harris strives to convey the Platonic idea of a mountain. In an August 2015 interview in Border Crossings, Martin betrays his undergraduate philosophy major when he says of Harris: "You get the feeling he has distilled the effects of nature: here are the sunrays, here is the light on the water, and here is the island. In a strange way he has condensed them into Platonic ideals."
An excellent example in the exhibition of the effects Martin describes is Pic Island (1924), one of my two favorite Harris paintings (the other, Miners' Houses, Glace Bay, is not in the exhibition, but is reproduced in miniature in the book). At first glance, in Pic Island Harris seems to be depicting an inert nature, just a squat lump of land, protruding from Lake Superior. But if one steps back to allow the painting to work its magic, it comes alive and one begins to see a crouching beast at its center—perhaps some kind of cat or (as I like to think) a sphinx. Even though Harris seems to be painting a landscape empty of life, he gives a biomorphic character to his dead subjects. Call me a wild and crazy guy, but sometimes I think I can hear Harris's Pic Island purring.
Incidentally, if you do go to the exhibition, be sure to stand as far away from the paintings as you can. They are truly impressionistic and achieve their full effect only at a distance. Up close, Harris's paintings may seem flat and merely beautiful, but they take on depth and become sublime from far away, as their rough, painterly textures dissolve into shimmering shafts of light, moody clouds, and brooding horizons.
I hope that this exhibition and this book will introduce Harris to a much wider American audience and help him to achieve the fame he deserves in the United States. In Canada, he has, of course, long been celebrated; but maybe Canadians need to be reminded of what a great painter Harris truly was. Like all the Group of Seven painters, Harris has become a victim of his success. Initially scorned and rejected as too modern, the Group of Seven artists achieved iconic status in Canada, with their paintings viewed as national treasures. In 1995, 10 of their paintings were even enshrined on Canadian postage stamps. But as often happens in the art world, familiarity breeds contempt, and the Group of Seven, once viewed as avant-garde, are now often dismissed as old-fashioned in Canada.
We can sense that reaction in the essay by Andrew Hunter, the one Canadian co-curator in The Idea of North: "For Martin, Harris was a new and bold discovery. I cannot remember Harris ever being that new to me." At times, Hunter seems almost apologetic about foisting Harris's passé paintings off on an unsophisticated American audience, as if to suggest that Canadians have long since moved beyond this alpine kitsch. Perhaps Steve Martin can open Andrew Hunter's eyes to what is genuinely and perennially revelatory in Harris's northern landscapes. It would be ironic if it took an American comedian and wannabe magician to reawaken the magic of Lawren Harris in Canadian eyes.