This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A leading Canadian impressionist* and symbolist*, Lawren Harris is credited as being a major influence among early 20th-century painters in Canada. In 1913, he put up most of the money to build the Studio Building* of Canadian Art in Toronto. This facility became the center of the Group of Seven*, painters initially dedicated to expressing the character and spirit of Canada in an impressionistic style that was airy and un-detailed. However, World War I disrupted their aesthetic efforts, and Harris became a member of the Canadian army. His war experiences changed the direction of his painting, and caused him to re-think his artistic expression. He became much more introspective and seeking of spiritual enlightenment.
In 1918, he joined the Theosophical Society founded by Madame Blavatsky in 1875 in her search for universal enlightenment by taking elements of both eastern and western religions. Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky were major influences in this movement, and their ideas influenced Harris, as well as many other artists, to depict nature as a reflection of ordering the human spirit. In other words, painting became a combining of symbols to express mystical truth. In the 1930s, Harris lectured extensively on principles of the Theosophical Society.
As a young man he had studied in Berlin and while in Europe, was influenced by Gustaf Fjaestad, a painter of symbolism*. Returning to Canada, Harris became a friend and fellow painter with landscapist J.W.G. (Jock) Macdonald (1897-1960). In Buffalo, New York, they saw Scandinavian art, which reinforced Harris' interest in simplification of form.
Harris also painted with Dr. James MacCallum, and they spent much time in the Algoma region of northern Ontario. Although Harris successfully encouraged other members of the Group of Seven to paint there, he did not complete many paintings of this wilderness area.
Following World War I, he turned from impressionist landscape painting to more symbolic pieces as well as portraiture and modernist urban landscapes, especially working class areas such as slum housing in Halifax. His work changed from having rich, painterly*, surface density to forms of simplicity and minimal color with the emphasis on the interaction of shapes and these colors.
In 1934, Harris divorced his wife and married Bess Housser, former wife of Fred Housser, a prominent writer and supporter of the Group of Seven. These events were scandalous in Toronto, and the couple moved first to New Hampshire and in 1938 to Santa Fe, New Mexico where Harris became a member of the Transcendental Painting Group*--artists who defined spirit in terms of nature and emphasized intuition over perception and fact.
In 1940, the Harrises moved back to Canada with Lawren citing economic necessity for living in Canada during the War. The couple settled in Vancouver, where for the next thirty years, he produced abstract* paintings. From 1950 to 1961, he served on the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery in Toronto.
Source:
David Burnett, Masterpieces of Canadian Art
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information about these terms and others, see AskART.com Glossary
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Biography from Mayberry Fine Art:
| Lawren Harris was born in Brantford, Ontario. At the age of 19, he went overseas to Berlin for academic training. Upon returning to Ontario he met J.E.H. MacDonald, who shared his vision of a new and distinctive way of depicting the Canadian landscape. Harris became the driving force behind the Group of Seven*. A.Y. Jackson claimed, "Without Harris there would have been no Group of Seven. He provided the stimulus; it was he who encouraged us always to take the bolder course, to find new trails."
By 1918 Harris had traveled to the Algoma region on the west side of Lake Michigan in the company of MacDonald and Johnston. Harris made his first trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior in 1921. His search for a deeper spiritual meaning eventually took him to the stark landscapes of the far north. By the late 1920s, the artist's work strove to capture the spiritual essence of the bold landforms of the Rockies and the Arctic.
Throughout the ensuing decade Harris continued to simplify and abstract his landscapes until his subjects became non-representational. Harris worked as a member of the Transcendental Group of Painters 8 in Santa Fe, New Mexico for two years, returning to Canada in 1940 and settling in Vancouver for the remainder of his lifetime.
* For more in-depth
information about these terms and others, see AskART.com Glossary
http://www.askart.com/AskART/lists/Art_Definition.aspx
|
Biography from National Gallery of Canada (With Library/Archives):
| "We are on the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, its
loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, tis call
and answer, its cleansing rhythms. It seems that the top of the
continent is a source of spiritual flow that will ever shed clarity
into the growing race of America.”
(Lawren S. Harris, 1926)
Lawren Stewart Harris was a leading landscape painter, imbuing his
paintings with a spiritual dimension. An inspirer of other
artists, he was a key figure in the Group of Seven and gave new vision
to representations of the northern Canadian landscape.
Harris spent three years studying in Germany (1904–07), where he became
interested in theosophy, a mystical branch of religious philosophy that
would inform his later painting. Coming from a wealthy family he
was able to devote himself entirely to his art.
At the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto Harris met other artists with
similar nationalist concerns. In 1920 Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald, Frank
Johnston, Franklin Carmichael, A.Y. Jackson, F.H. Varley, and Arthur
Lismer formed the Group of Seven. These artists would
collectively create a range of new representations of the Canadian
landscape, particularly the North.
Over the course of his career, Harris’s painting evolved from
Impressionist-influenced, decorative landscapes to stark images of the
northern landscape to geometric abstractions. He painted in the Algoma
region from 1918 to 1924, on the north shore of Lake Superior from 1921
to 1928, in the Rocky Mountains from 1924, and in the Arctic in
1930. For Harris art was to express spiritual values as well as
to represent the visible world. North Shore, Lake Superior
(1926), an image of a solitary weathered tree stump surrounded by an
expanse of dramatically lit sky, effectively evokes the tension between
the terrestrial and spiritual.
From 1934 to 1937, Harris lived in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he
painted his first abstract works, a direction he would continue for the
rest of his life. In 1938 he moved to Sante Fe, New Mexico, and
helped found the Transcendental Painting Group, an organization of
artists who advocated a spiritual form of abstraction.
Harris settled in Vancouver in 1940, where he continued to paint and
involve himself with arts organizations, playing an important role in
this milieu until his death.
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada - http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/bio_e.jsp?iartistid=2326 |
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Lawren Harris is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Impressionists Pre 1940
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