Patrician Bohemianism

There is a revealing photograph on the back cover of James King’s Inward Journey: The Life of Lawren Harris, por- traying the unofficial leader of the Ontario-based Group of Seven. Dressed in a smartly tailored three-piece suit, sporting a fashionable moustache and with immaculately coiffed hair, Lawren Harris does not conform to our perception of the strug- gling artist. If the paint brush, the easel and canvas, and the table displaying the somber colours of his low-keyed palette were removed, Harris might be mistaken for a board member of the Massey-Harris farm machinery firm of which he was one of the principal heirs.

I am not suggesting that the possession of ample means is a hindrance to artistic success. Money certainly helped in giving Lawren Harris a good education. After the family moved from Brantford, Ontario, where he was born in 1885, to Toronto ten years later, the boy was enrolled in St. Andrew’s College in the city’s long-established residential district of Rosedale. This is where Harris formed a long-lasting relationship with F.B. Housser, whose 1926 book, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven, was to be a cogent defence of the group. It was likewise where Harris met Vincent Massey, Canada’s first Canadian- born governor general and chair of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, which led to the formation of the Canada Council for the Arts. Following an unsuccessful attempt to earn a degree at the University of Toronto, Harris was financially free to relocate in 1904 to Germany, where the young man rubbed shoulders with artists associated with the Berlin Secession. Their social realism and late 19th-century German Romanticism were to infuse Harris’s later work. During the summer months he hiked in the Austrian Alps with likeminded friends who introduced him to the popular esoteric belief of theosophy. And in 1907–08 he travelled from his European base to Damascus and on to Cairo by camel. During the two-month trek Harris produced 59 illustrations that accompanied the articles and books of the popular Canadian writer Norman Duncan.

Harris’s patrician upbringing gave him the con- fidence to make a connection with Eric Brown of the National Gallery of Canada, who was committed to building a national collection of Canadian art. Social connections allowed Harris to frater- nize with the country’s leading art collectors and patrons. One was the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Sir Edmund Walker, who was instrumental in establishing the Art Museum of Toronto—today’s Art Gallery of Ontario. Money enabled Harris to finance the construction, in 1914, of a building in the Rosedale ravine of downtown Toronto housing six art studios. It was at the Studio Building that Harris gathered artists who shared his belief that the “whole country” held unlimited “creative and expressive possibilities in painting” for the artist.

Money also made it easier for the artist to cut loose from his marriage of more than 20 years with Trixie Phillips and abandon his children. When Harris fled Toronto in 1934, moreover, it was with the wife of his old friend and supporter, F.B. Housser. Yet the carefree Lawren and Bess went on to live in style, as King’s illustrations of their various houses show. The couple decamped first to Hanover, New Hampshire, where Harris had a studio at Dartmouth College; then to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the artist developed his abstract ten- dencies through his association with the members of the Transcendental Painting Group. More sig- nificantly, in 1941 they moved to Vancouver, where Harris became a prominent figure in the art com- munity through his membership on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s council as British Columbia repre- sentative of the Federation of Canadian Artists, and executor, along with Ira Dilworth, of Emily Carr’s estate.

Harris’s youth was not uniformly gilded. He suf- fered a nervous breakdown during the First World War when his brother Howard was killed in France. He grieved too when his fellow artist Tom Thomson died on Canoe Lake in northern Ontario in 1917. Nor did his wealth guarantee Harris favourable newspaper reviews. To many reviewers his land- scape paintings seemed cold, austere and artifi- cial constructions that resembled stage settings. Moreover, though Harris may have initially been the leader of the Group of Seven, King is surely right to suggest that “he was certainly not its strongest artist.”

Even so, by the time the Group of Seven dis- banded in 1931, and morphed in 1933 into the much larger Canadian Group of Painters, Harris’s stark images of northern Ontario, the Canadian Rockies and the Arctic were known throughout the art community. Indeed, the extent to which many artists, particularly in Central Canada, viewed the landscape through Harris’s eyes was borne out when Yvonne McKague Housser and her compan- ion Rody Kenny Courtrice went on a sketching trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior in the early 1930s. Bored and unable to find suitable material to sketch, the two women constructed a com- pletely synthetic but wholly characteristic Lawren Harris landscape. “We dragged a dead, bare small tree trunk and some branches onto a bare rock,” McKague Housser recalled in the Northward Journal in 1980, “and propped them up with logs and rocks that were lying near us.” The two art- ists then proceeded to make “bogus sketches.” These were transformed into finished works in their studios in Toronto. When they put them on show, much to their surprise, their canvases found enthusiastic buyers.

The author of Inward Journey tells us that this is the first biography of Lawren Harris. Much, however, has been written since the artist’s death in 1970. Not only Peter Larisey’s Light for a Cold Land: Lawren Harris’s Work and Life, but also Roald Nasgaard’s The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890–1940 and Ann Davis’s The Logic of Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting, 1920–1940 laid the groundwork for King’s exploration of Harris’s spirituality. Exhibitions and accompanying cata- logues have dealt with Harris’s urban scenes, land- scape paintings or abstract expressionist works. And Harris’s life and work within the context of the Group of Seven has been exhaustively examined in Dennis Reid’s The Group of Seven, in Charles Hill’s The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation and, more recently, in Ross King’s Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven.

Inward Journey now attempts to go beyond such studies in several ways. It seeks to expand our knowledge of the role that graphic design played in the stylistic evolution of the painters associ- ated with the Group of Seven. King offers detailed descriptions of a wide range of Harris’s work and of the many other artists who came within his visual ambit. And, especially by devoting a chapter to Harris’s years in Germany and Austria, the author seeks to locate the source of Harris’s spiritual and artistic beliefs. King is likewise determined to sig- nal all of the international influences that Harris encountered after returning to Canada from his years in Europe.

In the process, the author peppers his text with cut-and-paste biographies and with lengthy quota- tions—be it a newspaper description of turn of the 20th-century Berlin, letters to and from Harris or the writings of spiritual leaders. And we are continually reminded, from the beginning of King’s story, with a nudge here and a wink there, of how Harris’s life will unfold. Thus we are told that, at age ten, Harris “remained a deeply vulnerable person throughout his life,” that he carried the “burdens associated with noblesse oblige,” that he was “friendly, charm- ing and erudite,” and that he was “fated to spend the rest of his life questioning the values of the world and learning to find solace within.”

It has to be said that there are some disadvanta- ges in King’s approach. His detailed descriptions of works that are not illustrated in the book will make for tedious reading for anyone not already familiar with Harris’s oeuvre. The lengthy quotations might advantageously have been integrated into the nar- rative. And it would have been helpful if he had provided references for the numerous newspaper quotations.

More importantly, the search for international artistic influences often precludes the author mak- ing obvious connections with those artists nearer home who had an impact on Harris’s work. For example, in seeking to find Harris’s inspiration for Above Lake Superior, King looks to specific paint- ings with which Harris may—or may not—have been familiar by American artist Rockwell Kent and German Romanticist painter Caspar David Friedrich. Yet the author might instead have con- sidered the influence on Harris’s work produced during the First World War by Canadian and British war artists. Harris wrote to his colleague J.E.H. MacDonald in 1918 that he found the work of British war artist Paul Nash’s canvas “terribly pene- trating and big.” And he could hardly have been unaffected by A.Y. Jackson’s wish to paint “things that had been smashed up” when he accompan- ied the former war artist to northern Ontario after Jackson had returned from painting the war-torn landscape in France.1 King’s determination to link Harris with international artists and movements means that he ignores Canadian women painters such as Kathleen Munn, Florence McGillivray and Henrietta Shore, who were not only earlier fol- lowers of Modernism but had, in some cases, dis- covered the aesthetic possibilities of the northern Ontario landscape long before the Group of Seven.

King should certainly correct the location of Harris’s Vancouver house: Point Grey where Harris lived is not “high above English Bay” as he suggests. Nor was Algonquin Park Canada’s first wilderness park; Banff beat it by almost a decade. King might also wish to revise his otherwise insightful discus- sion of Harris’s relationship with Emily Carr. While it is true, as King suggests, that the British Columbia artist initially disliked Harris’s abstract paintings, she wrote to a friend in 1941: “I went through all his abstracts again a real joy & treat, I love them.”

In the end, perhaps, Harris’s wealth and influ- ence did make a difference. In 1941 the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted an exhibition of his work. Six years later he was touching up earlier paintings for a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Toronto. In 1963, just before his devastating heart attack, the National Gallery of Canada, of which he was a board member from 1950 to 1961, held a retro- spective of his work. No other member of the Group of Seven enjoyed this level of patronage.

Harris’s life as much as his work benefits from the sort of scrutiny that only a biography can give. Inward Journey has done enough to show that its subject remains well worth writing about.