Lawren Harris: Canadian Visionary
At the Vancouver Art Gallery until May 4

Ghostly tree trunks rising out of a tamarack swamp. Drifting icebergs baptized in godly light. Precisionist circles and triangles overlaid with translucent planes of colour. The big Lawren Harris show at the Vancouver Art Gallery impresses in many ways. Drawn mostly from the VAG’s extensive holdings, with a few smart loans from public and private collections, it reveals some of the gallery’s historic strengths. The 137 paintings, drawings, and oil sketches on view also articulate Harris’s long and varied creative journey, from the small, realistic street scenes made between 1904 and 1907, while he was a student in Berlin, through to the large, amorphous abstractions produced in Vancouver during the 1960s, the last decade of his life.

In between are many fine examples of Harris’s brilliantly hued and impressionistically treated images of Toronto house fronts, streets, and gardens; his increasingly reductive landscapes of northern Ontario, the Rocky Mountains, and the Canadian Arctic; and his complex geometric abstractions, initiated in New Hampshire and New Mexico in the 1930s and further developed after he settled on this rainy coast in 1940. Lawren Harris: Canadian Visionary demonstrates, too, the wide knowledge and acute vision of its organizer, VAG senior curator Ian Thom.

It’s interesting that the work Harris is most identified with—his powerful and “iconic” depictions of the Canadian wilderness, painted mostly during the 1920s, while he was the intellectual leader of the Group of Seven—forms only one aspect of his creative output. Examples of this period include the handsomely composed First Snow, North Shore of Lake Superior, from 1923, and the chilly and mysterious Mount Thule, Bylot Island, produced after a trip to the Arctic in 1930. However, a good half of Harris’s life, as the VAG show reflects, was dedicated to his abstractions, which he felt more closely realized his aesthetic and spiritual aspirations, especially his commitment to Theosophy.

While Harris’s early, fluent landscape paintings and his energetic oil sketches of trees, lakes, mountains, and rocky outcroppings are easy to like, many of his later works are not as (immediately) gratifying. The geometric abstractions often feel overthought, overdetermined, their forms and colours too prescrip­tive, while the colour-field-like later paintings appear unresolved. A number of his more organic abstractions of the late 1950s attempt to incorporate too many formal influences and modernist ideas. Lyric Theme, however, is lovely—reminiscent of Paul Klee’s delicate play of colour and line, and of Wassily Kandinsky’s equating abstract painting with music.

One of Harris’s most puzzling paintings (it is untitled—no clues there) from the mid 1960s reads as an attempt to articulate either a near-death experience (he suffered a heart attack in 1958) or a vision of God—or both. The problem here is that the artist has bestowed the large white ovoid, which hovers in a vibrating yellow field, with eyes and eyebrows, rendering the image trite rather than profound. Harris struggles to express the inexpressible while addressing his own mortality. Still, passages of the late paintings—the lower-left quadrant of Atma Buddhi Manas, the upper third of Abstraction (R)—really do achieve a luminous feeling of transcendence. As Thom declared on a recent media tour, Harris’s late works are evidence of his coura­geous willingness to evolve and change—to explore new creative pathways, and, indeed, to capture in paint the philosophical and spiritual beliefs that motivated him to the end of his life.