Lawren Harris, a founding member of the Group of Seven and a lifelong advocate for Canadian art, was a rich man who mistrusted materialism and a private man who became a public figure. In his comprehensive account of Harris’s art and life, novelist and biographer James King teases out the artist’s “strangely compounded temperament,” as one critic called it, with empathy and insight.
Harris was born in 1885 in Brantford, Ontario, to devout Baptist parents. According to King, a distinguished professor at McMaster University, Harris’s religious piety never quite left him, though ultimately it broadened into a restless spiritual yearning. In his twenties, Harris became an adherent of theosophy, a catch-all of Eastern thought, esoteric beliefs, and self-help led by the charismatic Helena Blavatsky. Harris would be independently wealthy all his life — his family was the Harris of the Massey-Harris farm machinery company — but along with his fortune he inherited a passion for social justice.
At Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club, Harris encountered other the painters who with him would form the core of the Group of Seven. From the beginning, Harris was a shrewd propagandist for the group’s mission to create a new national art, one that would reflect the rawness and reach of the Canadian landscape.
Ross King’s Defiant Spirits (2010), which chronicled the formation of the Group of Seven, has covered much of this ground. James King reminds us that, for Harris, the group years were a brief period in a much longer creative life. Harris’s loyalty to the group would always be in tension with his preference for abstracted forms and universal truths. His chilly, simplified Arctic pictures reflect his notion that Canada’s northern territory was a pristine, silent source of “spiritual flow.” Emily Carr considered these paintings “dead and lifeless.” King views them as emblematic of the artist’s mystic beliefs. Either way, they suggest Harris’s increasing impulse toward abstraction.
The decisive break, which would affect both Harris’s life and art, came in 1934. Harris had been a dutiful husband to his wife, Trixie, and an affectionate father to their three children. For years, he had carefully balanced his life of privilege and polite conformity with his work as an artist. (Harris preferred to paint in a suit and tie, eschewing bohemian affectations.) In 1934, their respectable, socially sanctioned marriage was dissolved amid the beginnings of Harris’s relationship with Bess Housser, the wife of Harris’s supporter, friend, and fellow theosophist Fred Housser.
While the transition was complicated — Fred had fallen in love with painter Yvonne McKague, and it appears that all four of them lived for a brief time in one house — it was also rather quaint (especially in comparison to the louche standards stereotypically ascribed to the European avant-garde). Harris insisted that his love for Bess was a spiritual kinship, and King supports the idea that their subsequent marriage remained celibate. “There’ll be none of that,” Harris told a friend at the time.
The scandal forced the new couple to leave Toronto. They settled first in New Hampshire and later in a New Mexico enclave of artists, transcendentalists, freethinkers, astrologists, and yoga enthusiasts — “rather swell folks,” Harris wrote. Under the Santa Fe sun, Harris finally felt free to follow the lure of complete spiritual abstraction. King carefully distinguishes between Harris’s beliefs and his practice, suggesting theosophy influenced his work but didn’t determine it. “Madame Blavatsky did not paint my pictures,” Harris once said.
Harris’s final decades were spent in Vancouver, where he was imperious but also generous to younger artists like Jock MacDonald and Gordon Smith. King writes persuasively about Harris’s influence on the development of Canadian modernism in the 1950s and 1960s, though he is perhaps too generous in his assessment of Harris’s own modernist paintings, which often feel like arid exercises.
As the first full-length biography of Lawren Harris, Inward Journey needs to cover a lot of ground. Arranged chronologically and densely detailed, the book is thorough but occasionally dry. King, who has also written five novels, has previously specialized in biographies of writers, including Virginia Woolf, Farley Mowat, and Margaret Laurence.
Writers tend to leave traces of their interior lives behind in words, but Harris’s paintings are harder to parse. King begins each chapter with an italicized section in which he allows himself to speculate about Harris’s state of mind. It’s a clever way of distinguishing between educated supposition and biographical fact, but it only goes so far. Harris’s Upper Canadian reticence is hard to crack, and he remains an opaque subject.
Fortunately, Harris’s art is very visible here. This abundantly illustrated book is heavy — literally heavy — with thick glossy pages that give the colour reproductions clarity and depth. In his preface, King acknowledges that, while much of Harris’s search for meaning and fulfilment was hidden, “he found a way, in a series of extraordinary paintings, to dramatize and externalize those struggles.” Perhaps it’s apt that the pictures in Inward Journey seem to have the final word.
— Alison Gillmor (Read bio)
Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg journalist and art historian.