Lawren Stewart Harris 1885 - 1970

Dominion Gallery, Montréal
Private Collection, Hamilton
Private Collection

Harris was the only member of the Group of Seven (and one of the few people in Canada) who was in touch with contemporary art movements and those involved with advanced art theories and practices elsewhere in the world. He knew about the Société Anonyme that Katherine Drier had founded in New York, with Marcel Duchamp as its resident guru, and arranged to have her lecture on modern art at the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1927. Whether she made any impact at all is difficult to know, since Canadian art continued along its path without swerving until after the Second World War.

But Harris was paying attention to events and ideas elsewhere and after his Arctic trip in 1930 finally acknowledged the fact that painting was taking him into abstraction and forms of imagery that were far from landscape. Like Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Cézanne or David Milne, Harris developed and grew as an artist throughout his entire life.

The intimations of this shift in thinking can be seen in this painting. Its bold depiction of two stark pines sticking out of a bald hump of granite set almost incongruously in the midst of a large patch of tall grasses and backed by a distant forest, is verging on the surreal. The same impulse manifests itself in some of the landscapes Harris did of islands and trees in  Algoma in the early 1920s. This harbinger of things to come has a mysterious and elusive character that gives it a special place in Harris’s works.