[URBAN NOTE] Toronto Life on Lawren Harris

[rfmcdonald]

Jason McBride's Toronto Life article "The Mystic" takes a look at the life of Lawren Harris, the Toronto-born Group of Seven painter currently the subject of a show at the AGO.

Lawren Harris, the Group of Seven’s flamboyant front man, was dashing, oracular, ambitious and enigmatic. Imagine a mix of Merlin, Gauguin and Batman, his utility belt stocked with oil paints, hovering perpetually between high society and artistic outer space. The scion of one of Canada’s wealthiest families, Harris could have been a Photoplay cover boy—squint and you might see Charlie Chaplin, squint tighter and maybe Clark Gable. His buddies were bank presidents, doctors and industrialists, and he built elegant, expensive houses for his family. Still, he always felt more at home in the deep bush.

Lots of rich people collect art, but very few set out to make it, and even fewer with the obsessiveness that Harris did. From his late teens, he painted incessantly, searching for ever more transcendent subjects. He used his mansion at 63 Queen’s Park Crescent as the Group’s headquarters, had a special boxcar outfitted so they could venture, in relative comfort, deep into the wilderness of northern Ontario, and earnestly promoted his radical ideas about art in magazines, lecture halls and private clubs. Harris was a breathless devotee of theosophy—a tricked-out mash-up of Eastern philosophy and self-help—and became convinced that artists were superior beings attuned to a higher reality. He wore his studio smock like a vestment and believed his art could shape the country’s identity. “There is a holiness about them,” Harris’s confidante Emily Carr said of his paintings in 1927. “Something you can’t describe but just feel.”

During Harris’s lifetime, the Group was fêted and fawned and fought over. They became the subject of dozens of reverential coffee table books, biographies, documentaries, novels, postage stamps, calendars and coffee mugs. By the turn of the 20th century, their work was fetching millions at auction, and Harris had become one of Canada’s most collected artists. Last November, his painting “Mountain and Glacier” sold to an anonymous buyer for $4.6 million at a Heffel auction—the highest auction price ever for a Canadian painting.

But nothing confers status quite like Hollywood. The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris is an exhibition of 73 Harris paintings, co-curated by the comedian and art collector Steve Martin alongside the AGO’s Andrew Hunter and Cynthia Burlingham of the Hammer Museum in L.A. It opened at the Hammer last October and arrives at the AGO this month. In the show’s catalogue, Martin compares Harris to Edward Hopper, calling them both auteurs of isolation. If Hopper portrayed a familiar urban alienation, Harris’s subject was a shimmering astral plane. He didn’t want to just depict the sublime; he wanted people to enter it through his pictures. Accomplishing that would cost him a lot more than money.