Lawren Stewart Harris (1885-1970)

Aliases: Lawren S. Harris; Lawren Steward Harris

Professions: Landscape painter; Genre Painter; Painter

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  Lawren Stewart Harris 1885 - 1970 Canadian oil on

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  LAWREN STEWART HARRIS ALGONQUIN PARK

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  LAWREN STEWART HARRIS ALGOMA

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  LAWREN STEWART HARRIS (1885-1970)

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Lawren Stewart Harris Biography

(b. Ontario, Canada 1885; d. British Columbia, Canada 1970). Canadian painter. Lawren Stewart Harris was one of the founding members of the Group of Seven, a movement that sought to create a distinctly Canadian painting style. The Group of Seven was named for an exhibition in May of 1920, held in Toronto. This exhibition brought together seven influential Canadian landscape artists: Lawren S. Harris, Frank Carmichael, A. Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald and Fred Varley. The group expanded, and eventually disbanded in 1933, but the term continued to be applied to the works of these original members. Harris originally worked in a style similar to the French impressionists; his early paintings are airy and lack detail. During World War I Harris joined the Canadian Army. His time in the army may have played a role in changing his artistic style. His work became more introspective and less derivative of the impressionists. In 1918, Harris became a member of the Theosophical Society; a group which emphasized the search for a spiritual truth. During this period he was painting a number of orderly, solid landscapes composed of simple forms and minimal color with an emphasis on the interaction of shapes. His work was still explicitly based on the Canadian wilderness but Harris molded nature into an orderly schema. Using the influences of Abstract artists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, Harris began to focus on nature as a reflection of ordering the human spirit. When he was younger he studied in Berlin for a few years, but he spent the majority of his career in Canada; gaining inspiration from the mountains, along with other increasingly wild landscapes for which he searched. In his later pieces he focuses on the ‘mountain experience’ a moment when realism fades away and merges into abstraction; to the point where it’s no longer the depiction of a particular mountain and instead become a ‘mountain experience’*. In 1938, he moved to New Mexico for two years, working with members of the Transcendental Movement. When he returned to Canada he began to paint purely in abstractions. He died in Vancouver in 1970. (Credit: * Heffel, Vancouver, Fall 2008 Live Auction, November 19, 2008, lot 176)

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