THE IDEA OF THE NORTH: THE PAINTINGS OF LAWREN HARRIS at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas West), to September 18. $25, srs $21.50, stu $16.50. 416-979-6648. See listing. Win tickets and dinner at the AGO here!
I admit it: I have a Group of Seven problem. Despite my degree in art history, I’d never heard of them when I immigrated here from the U.S. Years later, having spent time in Algonquin Park and the Yukon, I know a little more about windblown trees clinging to rocky outcrops and snow-capped mountains.
But the Group’s landscapes have always seemed conservative compared with the game-changing Cézannes, Monets and Van Goghs I grew up with in New York.
So I need a pep talk about Lawren Harris from Andrew Hunter, the AGO’s affable curator of Canadian art.
With the celebrity endorsement of Steve Martin, Harris’s work is cresting a wave of British and American interest in early 20th-century Canadian painting. The Idea Of North, co-curated by Martin, Hunter and the Hammer Museum’s Cynthia Burlingham, has its final iteration here after exhibits in L.A. and Boston that introduced Harris to Americans.
Hunter’s prologue and epilogue, which the AGO’s added to the core of northern paintings shown in the States, perhaps say more about museums’ current commitment to engaging minority communities than about Harris.
The prologue augments the artist’s early streetscapes of the Ward, the slum that once abutted Old City Hall, with Arthur Goss’s photographs of its tiny shacks, homes to African-American, Irish, Jewish and Chinese immigrants. In one of four commissioned projects by contemporary artists, Anique Jordan comments powerfully on Black history in the district, and the epilogue documents its razing to build Viljo Revell’s flying saucer.
“Because the show’s here, we should come back to Toronto and think about the legacy and the consequences,” says Hunter, “not so much as a critique of Harris, but of Canadians for continuing to embrace a kind of fiction” of the scenic, empty Great White North.
“We use the city and the Ward to talk about cultural diversity and the fact that cities, industry and the urban are defining parts of Canada just as much as nature. By investing so heavily in a certain interpretation, we’ve ignored or erased so much of a more complex history.”
Harris, the scion of industrialists who owned Massey-Harris, though involved with a Protestant social justice movement, was no great social conscience. People rarely appear in his paintings.
Hunter says despair over poverty and World War I led Harris “to look outside of the urban for a different path, to see nature as the subject matter that’s going to be Canada.” Of course, he had the means to simply turn away from disturbing social problems.
I’ve often dismissed the streamlined mountain and iceberg paintings as art deco artifacts, but I have to concede that seen all together in one room, the originals make quite an impact.
“Harris’s strength,” says Hunter, “which at times becomes his weakness, is his design sensibility. In the northern paintings he balances it very well,” unlike in his late theosophical abstractions, which The Idea Of North avoids. (A show of them is coming to McMichael.)
Hunter thinks artists like Harris who choose a flat, simplified style get a bad rap as too illustrative or lacking passion.
“His technique is unusual within the Canadian context, compared to Tom Thomson or Emily Carr, who are very gestural and expressive. He has a certain affinity with American painters like Charles Sheeler or Grant Wood in his landscapes that are very smooth and austere,” perhaps one reason Martin was drawn to them.
“Harris was an intellectual. He thought a lot about ideas and how he could bring them into art. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the art is overpowered by the ideas.”
art@nowtoronto.com | @franschechter
