Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris’s painting style evolved throughout his career, but he is best known for his stark and minimalist landscape paintings imbued with a spiritual dimension.[1] North Shore, Lake Superior (1922-1923) is an exemplary representation of this artistic style. Lake Superior is the most prominent subject depicted in his artworks. “This North of ours is a source of spiritual flow” he said in his memoir Lawren Harris (1969).[2] It is “a flow of beneficent informing cosmic powers behind the bleakness and barrenness and austerity… of the land.”[3] Harris studied in Germany from 1904 -1907 and upon his return to Toronto, was instrumental in gathering like-minded artists that were dedicated to establishing a distinctly Canadian artistic identity.[4] Following the First World War, he became interested in theosophy, a mystical branch of religious philosophy that increasingly came to influence his paintings from the 1920s onward.[5]  Later in his career, Harris became part of the Transcendental Painting Group which promoted a pure abstract painting style, and so his paintings became increasingly geometric and abstract as demonstrated in Abstraction (1938-1942).[6]

 

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Click here to read more about Harris' sketch for North Shore, Lake Superior, 1922-1923.

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Notes:

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[1] “Lawren S. Harris,” National Gallery of Canada, accessed March 28, 2024, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/lawren-s-harris.

[2] Priscilla B. Reimer, “Mountain Experience: Lawren Harris and the Spiritual in Art,” University of Manitoba, September 8, 1997, 4.

[3] Reimer, 4.

[4] “Lawren S. Harris.”

[5] “Lawren S. Harris.”

[6] “An Introduction to the Transcendental Painting Group,” Swann Galleries News (blog), June 12, 2020, https://www.swanngalleries.com/news/modern-post-war-art/2020/06/an-introduction-to-the-transcendental-painting-group/.