A Man of Our Time

Is there more to say about Lawren Harris? One can be forgiven for saying no, as Harris has for decades been a steady source of lore for lovers of Canadian art: the pipe-smoking, tweed-clad scion of the crusty Harris clan (made rich through farm machinery manufacturing), majordomo of Toronto’s all-male Arts & Letters Club, patron of the Studio Building (a modernist artist commune of sorts that he commissioned and erected in Rosedale, of all places), the pioneering producer and purveyor of the new national imagery of the Group of Seven, his bearing erect at the easel, his hair stiff as a toilet brush (not my joke, alas, but source not for attribution). I could go on.

A steady stream of affirmations had begun unfolding even before his death in Vancouver in 1970 at the age of 85: a full survey in 1963 (under the direction of Ian McNair); Lawren S. Harris: Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes 1906–1930 by Jeremy Adamson at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1978...