A large Lawren Harris canvas entitled Baffin Island was sold at auction in 2001 for $2.2 million. At the time, it was the highest price ever paid for a Canadian art work at auction.
The Lawren Harris sketch “The Old Stump, Lake Superior” was the previous Harris record holder, selling for $3.5 million in 2009. A very small but exceptional work, some pegged it pre-auction to best the all-time Canadian record of $5 million, paid in 2002 for a Paul Kane portrait.
Lawren Harris’s “Pine Tree and Red House, Winter, City Painting II,” which sold at auction in 2007 for $2.9 million. At the time, it was a record for the artist’s work.
Going up: Lawren Harris (right) and Ira Dilworth hiking near Mount Temple, Canadian Rockies. A new record for price at auction for a Harris painting was set this week when his 1930 work Mountain and Glacier sold for $4.6 mln.
You’d be tempted to call it the Steve Martin effect: the glow a celebrity face can lend to anything, in this case Lawren Harris, whose good, but not great, painting Mountain and Glacier steamrolled the previous record price for his work at auction Thursday in Toronto when it sold to an anonymous buyer for $4.6 million.
The very happy auctioneer at Heffel Fine Art Auction House seemed to declare as much in the aftermath.
David Heffel proclaimed The Idea of North, an exhibition of Harris’s works curated by the comic turned curator at Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, had generated “a lot of attention” for the Group of Seven icon.
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The Harris canvas, which some art dealers say isnowhere near his best, easily topped the previous auction record for his work The Old Stump, a small but exceptional Harris sketch sold in 2009 for $3.5 million.
And it blew past Heffel’s own pre-auction estimate that the piece would sell for a maximum of $1.5 million.
A large Lawren Harris canvas entitled Baffin Island was sold at auction in 2001 for $2.2 million. At the time, it was the highest price ever paid for a Canadian art work at auction.
CP
How?
Set aside any lift in profile or price that Martin generated for the Group of Seven painter.
Toronto dealers who buy and sell works by Harris and his contemporaries say it’s a simple equation.
“Our market is absolutely starved for quality,” says Alan Loch, a prominent dealer of Canadian historical art based in Toronto.
“You don’t know for sure until you see it happen, but Harris is an icon. When you have sketches selling for $3 million or more, it’s hard to be too surprised.”
The Lawren Harris sketch “The Old Stump, Lake Superior” was the previous Harris record holder, selling for $3.5 million in 2009. A very small but exceptional work, some pegged it pre-auction to best the all-time Canadian record of $5 million, paid in 2002 for a Paul Kane portrait.
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The majority of Harris’s iconic paintings are in museum collections, which makes his canvases the white whale of the Canadian auction world: Rarely seen, and never onthe marketfor long.
The last, Pine Tree and Red House, sold at auction for $2.9 million in 2007.
Almost a decade later, with Harris work still scarce, the bigger question may not be how Mountain and Glacier sold for more than triple its estimate, but why it was pegged so low in the first place.
It’s gamesmanship, says Michel Bigue of Canadian Fine Arts, a Yorkville gallery. “(Auctioneers) love to underestimate,” he says, “so that the next day, in all the papers they look like heroes.”
Lawren Harris’s “Pine Tree and Red House, Winter, City Painting II,” which sold at auction in 2007 for $2.9 million. At the time, it was a record for the artist’s work.
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Loch agrees. “Heffel likes to come in notoriously low,” he said, to help stimulate interest. (Heffel, in response, said that it “maintains a policy of conservative estimates.”)
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A live auction can also help to stoke competitive fires. “You have a bunch of people all chasing after the same thing, they’re going to knock heads,” Loch said.
And, for Bigue, the stronger painting sold for less on Thursday night. He preferred Winter Landscape, which went for a cool $3.1 million. “(Mountain and Glacier) doesn’t really reach that next level that Harris’s best works did. It has no depth. It’s not among his 10 best — far from it.”
So what does this record really mean?
“That there are very few Harris canvases available, and many more people that want to buy them,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It could be a decade before we see another one.”
Going up: Lawren Harris (right) and Ira Dilworth hiking near Mount Temple, Canadian Rockies. A new record for price at auction for a Harris painting was set this week when his 1930 work Mountain and Glacier sold for $4.6 mln.
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