Lawren Harris

This article is about the Canadian artist and member of the Group of Seven. For his artist son, see Lawren P. Harris.

Lawren Harris CC
Harris in 1926, photographed by M. O. Hammond
Born	Lawren Stewart Harris October 23, 1885 Brantford, Ontario, Canada
Died	Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Resting place	Kleinburg, Ontario, Canada
Notable work	North Shore, Lake Superior, 1926
Movement	Group of Seven

Lawren Stewart Harris CC (October 23, 1885 – January 29, 1970) was a Canadian painter, born in Brantford, Ontario. He is best known as a member of the Group of Seven who asserted a distinct national identity combined with a common heritage stemming from early modernism in Europe in the early twentieth century. A. Y. Jackson has been quoted as saying that Harris provided the stimulus for the Group of Seven. During the 1920s, Harris' works became more abstract and simplified, especially his stark landscapes of the Canadian north and Arctic. In the 1930s, He stopped signing, titling and dating his works so that people would judge his works on their own merit and not by the artist or when they were painted.

Early years

Lawren Stewart Harris was born on October 23, 1885 in Brantford, Ontario. He was the son of Thomas Morgan Harris and Anna Stewart. His father was secretary to the firm of A. Harris, Sons & Company Ltd., merchants of farm machinery, which merged with the Massey firm in 1891, forming the Massey-Harris Company, later known as Massey-Ferguson. Lawren Harris` share of the fortune that resulted made him free from financial cares the rest of his life. Although born to wealth, he was an individual who made his own path in his own individual way. In 1894, his father died and the family moved to Toronto. In 1899, he began to board at St. Andrews College, which was located in Rosedale in Toronto at the time, then in 1903 attended University College at the University of Toronto. From 1904 to 1908 he studied in Berlin, where he obtained a solid academic training and a knowledge of modern art through public and private exhibitions he saw there. Among these exhibitions were several of the Berlin Secession and a comprehensive review of 19th century German art.

Career

File:Lawren Harris in his Vancouver Studio.jpg

Lawren Harris in his Vancouver studio, circa 1944.

In Toronto, to which he returned in 1908, Harris found friends through the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto which he helped found along with his friend Roy Mitchell (1884-1944). In 1911, he met and became friends with J. E. H. MacDonald who was exhibiting sketches at the Club. Around 1913 or 1914, he became interested in philosophy and Eastern thought, likely through Mitchell, and later, he became absorbed by Theosophy (although it was not until 1924 that he formally joined the Toronto Lodge of the International Theosophical Society).

In 1914, Harris began to take the steps that would cement a group of like-minded artists together in Canadian art. That year, he and his friend Dr. James MacCallum, financed the construction of a Studio Building in Toronto which provided artists, among them Tom Thomson, with an inexpensive space to work. (In 1915, Harris fixed up a shack behind the Studio Building for Thomson). In 1918 and 1919, Harris financed boxcar trips for the artists of the later Group of Seven to the Algoma region, travelling along the Algoma Central Railway and painting in areas such as the Montreal River and Agawa Canyon.

Group of seven artists: Frederick Varley, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Barker Fairley, Frank Johnston (artist), Arthur Lismer, and J. E. H. MacDonald

In May 1920, Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley, formed the Group of Seven. In the fall of 1921, Harris ventured beyond Algoma to Lake Superior's North Shore, where he would return annually for the next seven years. While his urban and Algoma paintings of the late 1910s and early 1920s were characterized by rich, bright colours and decorative compositional motifs, the discovery of Lake Superior as a source of subject material meant the depiction of what Jackson called a "sublime order". Harris conveyed the spiritual side to the scene through a more austere, simplified style, with a limited palette. In 1924, a sketching trip with A.Y. Jackson to Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies marked the beginning of Harris' mountain subjects, which he continued to explore with annual sketching trips until 1928, exploring areas around Banff National Park, Yoho National Park and Mount Robson Provincial Park. In 1930, Harris went on his last extended sketching trip, travelling to Greenland, the Canadian Arctic and Labrador aboard the supply ship SS. Beothic for two months, during which time he completed over 50 sketches. The resulting Arctic canvases that he developed from the oil panels marked the end of his landscape period.

In 1934, he painted his first abstract pictures, which depended partly on his desire to express ideas of the spirit, partly on his earlier landscapes of Lake Superior, the Rocky Mountains and the Arctic. After a period of experimentation, from 1936 on, Harris enthusiastically embraced abstract painting. In these years, he moved to Hanover, New Hampshire in 1934, then Sante Fe, New Mexico in 1938 and finally, Vancouver in 1940. In time, he left all reference to landscape behind, and his work underwent changes towards a more organic form. In the mid and late 1950s, it became abstract expressionist. In 1954, always an idealist, he wrote:

...(in abstract art), we have a creative adventure in harmony with the highest aspiration and search for truth, beauty and expressive evocation and communication in our own day".

Memberships in Art Organizations

In May 1920, Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley, formed the Group of Seven. After the disbanding of the Group of Seven in 1933, Harris and the other surviving members, were instrumental in forming its successor, the larger national group, the Canadian Group of Painters. Harris served as its first president. In 1938, he helped organize the Transcendental Group of Painters in the United States. In 1941, he was a founder of the Federation of Canadian Artists, founded in Toronto and President (1944-1947).

Honours

In 1926, his work won a gold medal at Sesquicentennial International Exposition of Philadelphia. In 1931, he won the Baltimore Museum of Art prize in the first Baltimore Pan-American Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings. In 1946, Harris was awarded an honorary degree from the University of British Columbia. He received an L.L.D. from the University of Toronto in 1951. In 1953, he received an L.L.D. from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. In 1961, he received the Canada Council medal for 1961. In 1970, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, conferred posthumously.

Personal life

On January 20, 1910, Harris married Beatrice (Trixie) Phillips. The couple had three children: Lawren P. Harris, Margaret Anne Harris, Howard K. Harris, all born in the first decade of their marriage. Harris later fell in love with Bess, the wife of his school-time friend, F.B. Housser, but divorce was seen at the time as causing an outrage, particularly for a man as socially prominent as Harris.

Harris eventually left his wife of 24 years, Trixie, and his three children, and married Bess Housser in 1934. He was threatened with charges of bigamy by Trixie’s family because of his actions. Later that year he and Bess left their home and moved to the United States. In 1940 they moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. Bess died in 1969. Lawren Stewart Harris died in Vancouver in 1970. His ashes and those of Bess are buried on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg.

Media

In 2016 a film about Harris's life, Where the Universe Sings, was produced by TV Ontario. It was created by filmmaker Peter Raymont and directed by Nancy Lang.

Record sale prices

In 1981, South Shore, Baffin Island was sold for $240,000, a record price for a Canadian painting. On May 29, 2001, Harris's Baffin Island painting was sold for a record of $2.2 million (record up to that time). Before the auction, experts predicted the painting done by one of the original Group of Seven would top $1 million, but no one expected it to fetch more than twice that amount. The painting, which has always been in private hands, depicts icy white mountains with a dramatic blue sky. In 2005, Harris's painting, Algoma Hill, was sold at a Sotheby's auction for $1.38 million. It had been stored in a backroom closet of a Toronto hospital for years and was almost forgotten about until cleaning staff found it.

On May 23, 2007, Pine Tree and Red House, Winter, City Painting II by Harris came up for auction by Heffel Gallery in Vancouver, BC. The painting was a stunning canvas from 1924 that was estimated to sell between $800,000 and $1,200,000. The painting sold for a record-breaking $2,875,000 (premium included). On November 24, 2008, Harris's Nerke, Greenland painting sold at a Toronto auction for $2 million (four times the pre-sale estimate).

On November 26, 2009, Harris's oil sketch, The Old Stump, sold for $3.51 million at an auction in Toronto. In May 2010, Harris's painting, Bylot Island I, sold for $2.8 million at a Heffel Gallery auction in Vancouver, British Columbia. On November 26, 2015, his painting Mountain and Glacier was auctioned for $3.9 million at a Heffel Fine Art Auction House auction in Toronto, breaking the previous record for the sale of one of Harris's works. Another piece, Winter Landscape, sold for a hammer price of $3.1 million in the same auction. On November 23, 2016, Mountain Forms, estimated at $3-5 million, sold for $11.2 million at the Heffel Auction, the present high.

See also

• The Studio Building
• The Indian Church
• Alexandra Biriukova, architect who designed his residence

Further reading

Primary sources

• , reproduced in

Exhibition catalogues

• (Chronology by Peter Larisey)

External links

• CBC Digital Archives - The Group of Seven: Painters in the Wilderness
• McMichael Canadian Art Collection - Group of Seven - Lawren Harris
• Detailed Biography of Lawren Harris and Artworks, retrieved on May 25, 2007.
• The Canadian Encyclopedia, Lawren Stewart Harris
• Lawren Harris Collection at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.