A Problematization of Harris’s Spiritual and Anti-Modernist Exploration of Lake Superior
By Bhavya Tandon
Lawren Harris, North Shore, Lake Superior, 1922-23
North Shore, Lake Superior (1922-23) by Lawren Harris is a vivid painting of the coastal landscape that generates a spiritual, otherworldly feel through its emphasis on light and shadow and the manner in which Harris captures and simplifies the forms of the scenery. The body of work created by Harris and other members of the Group of Seven is undoubtedly important to national art history. It would be remiss, however, to discuss Harris’s work without delving into certain critical frameworks such as postcolonial theory and ecocriticism. This becomes especially clear when Harris’s work beckons such questions through its religious imagery and purification of a complex landscape under the custodianship of the Indigenous peoples of Canada.
The stylistic aspects and composition of the painting are in line with other work that Harris produced through his visits to Lake Superior. Prior to his sketching trips to this area to capture wilderness landscapes with fellow artists like A.Y. Jackson, the artist had painted numerous pieces inspired by excursions to the Algoma Region. In this series, he was already demonstrating a newfound tendency towards distant views and simplified forms. In his Lake Superior works, he began to incorporate even smoother forms based on the different shapes of this particular terrain, in part due to the forest fires that had occurred fifteen years prior, exaggerating the organic contours of the hills of the landscape.[1] As art historian Peter Larisey writes in Light for a Cold Land Lawren Harris’s Work and Life– an Interpretation, even the style of Harris’s sketches changed between the Algoma sketches and the Lake Superior sketches from animated, broken brushstrokes to more organic looking oil sketches as he developed a concern with the simplification of nature to “its fundamental and purest form.”[2] As Larisey argues, Harris created a unique artistic style that combined nature with spiritual and universal elements to transcend depictions of the landscape itself. He also began to use sketch books during this time in which he made hundreds of pencil drawings of the landscape, indicating how inspired he was by the North Shore. As such, the Harris painting in the Faculty Club can be contextualized among his other Lake Superior works.
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Harris, like the other artists belonging to the Group of Seven, is deeply embedded in the Canadian artistic canon and has had great influence on broader national art traditions. Just like other canonized Canadian landscape painters, however, Harris has also faced a degree of arguably justified criticism. Examining his work through a critical lens that is cognizant of postcolonial theory is revealing of his representations of the wilderness as assertions of colonial superiority that overlook interactions with the landscape and the legitimacy of Indigenous peoples relationships with it.
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For example, in reference to Harris’s work, art historian Dr. Isabelle Gapp emphasizes an ecocritical understanding of the Group of Seven’s landscape depictions particularly with respect to the coastal identity of Lake Superior. Gapp highlights the tendency of such paintings to overlook ecological and Indigenous perspectives in depicting an idealized, untouched wilderness. According to Gapp, the fur trade, fishing, and lumber industries have altered the coastal landscape drastically, demystifying it in the process:
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“That the environment of the north shore of Lake Superior was primordial, waiting to be discovered and conquered, only seeks to ratify the landscape as a colonial space…it was a supposed wilderness that had a defined history…tamed by growing industry and infrastructure.”[4]
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She also points out that unprecedented anthropogenic climate change raises the stakes in terms of the urgency of recontextualizing these paintings in current scholarship.[5] It is inarguably significant and important to accept ownership of the ramifications of reckless colonial, capitalist interaction with the landscape in the face of climate change as well as to recognize the relationships and histories of Indigenous peoples with the land.
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To continue, Harris imbued his abstracted representations of the wilderness with spiritual meaning. He experimented with light and shadow, colours evocative of spiritual purity such as white and gold, and used geometric abstraction in order to achieve this effect. Unfortunately, there are rather problematic implications of projecting spiritual themes onto a colonized landscape. Professor of Spirituality and Philosophy of Religion Michael Stoeber focuses on Harris's work within the context of his spiritual beliefs, influenced by the artist’s personal interpretations of Theosophy. Harris was devoted to this school of thought—a cross between spirituality and philosophy—for much of his adult life:
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“He probably came into contact with theosophy in 1909, at about the age of twenty-five. He became associated with the Theosophical Society in around 1920, at the age of about thirty-five, and became a formal member of the Toronto Lodge of the International Theosophical Society in 1924.”[6]
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Harris mobilized his beliefs not only through his artistic practice but in his writings and in his involvement with groups like the Transcendental Painting Group. In 1949, he wrote about the power of abstract art to represent inner ideas and perceptions and extricate “art from imitation or representation of nature”, utilizing it in a self-contained manner to transcend to the higher spiritual world.[7]
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However, should a representation of a landscape so loaded with coloniality, violence, and imperialism be “self-contained”? Is it even possible to remove art from the context of a racialized geography? Andrew Baldwin asserts that the artist’s portrayal of spiritual themes in a colonial context serves the dualistic function of perpetuating notions of white superiority while erasing Indigenous perspectives. Giants of national artistic identity such as Harris must be objectively criticized as the influence of any important figure cannot be left unchecked. Baldwin shines a light Harris’s overtly racist conceptions of anti-modernism and the wilderness by invoking an excerpt of an article he published in The Canadian Theosophist while working on his paintings of Lake Superior:
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“We are in the fringe of the great north and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, its call and answer— its cleansing rhythms. It seems that the top of the continent is a source of spiritual flow that will ever shed clarity in the growing race of America, and we Canadians being closest to this source seem destined to produce an art somewhat different from our Southern fellows— an art more spacious, of greater living quiet, perhaps of a more certain conviction of eternal values.”[8]
Harris celebrates the Canadian North as a pure, white wilderness existing beyond racialized urban centres, including even the population of its southern neighbors. Baldwin argues that such colonial attitudes towards the wilderness turn it into a space where the forces of modernity and multiculturalism can be ignored. A space where white individuals can escape from racial diversity and reaffirm their whiteness in an idealized, mystified natural realm.[9]
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With a critical postcolonial lens in mind, the need for a more inclusive canon in national Canadian art is all the more apparent. To begin, we might look to Indigenous artist Kent Monkman's series of watercolours from 2001. These paintings reinterpret well-known landscape paintings by the Group of Seven such as the famous North Shore, Lake Superior (1926), another Harris painting inspired by Lake Superior. In this iteration, there stands a phallic tree stump—representative of a sex organ, especially in Monkman’s interpretation—in the centre of the composition. In the foreground of Monkman’s paintings is a cowboy on all fours being mounted by an Indigenous man. With titles like Prick Island and Big Wood, it’s safe to assume that they depict a sex act. Monkman also overlays the paintings with text featuring racist and violent language fetishizing Indigenous men in order to literally layer the colonial power, eroticism, morality, and xenophobia embedded in the Group of Seven’s legacy and the Canadian identity at large. As Liss writes, Monkman “makes us aware of the damaging effects of marginalization and oppression, and of the multiplicity of stories and truths that need to be acknowledged and included in the dialogue.”[10]
To conclude, it is invaluable to acknowledge the duality that lies in the relevance of the Group of Seven’s work to Canadian art history and identity at large as well as the ongoing need to engage with postcolonial frameworks while viewing such work. As transportative as Harris’s work is, imbued with religiosity, grounding his influential paintings in the greater process of unlearning what we think we know about the Canadian wilderness might just be the best way to enjoy it in a modern context.
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Notes:
[1] Peter Larisey, “Wilderness Landscapes and the Regionalist Tradition II: The North Shore of Lake Superior.” In Light for a Cold Land Lawren Harris’s Work and Life-- an Interpretation (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1993), 89.
[2] Larisey, “Wilderness Landscapes,” 89.
[3] Larisey, “Wilderness Landscapes,” 92.
[4] Isabelle Gapp, “Water in the Wilderness: The Group of Seven and the Coastal Identity of Lake Superior,” Journal of Canadian Studies 55, no. 3 (2021): 594-595.
[5] Gapp, “Water in the Wilderness,” 614-615.
[6] Michael Stoeber, “Theosophical Influences on the Painting and Writing of Lawren Harris: Re-Imagining Theosophy through Canadian Art,” Toronto Journal of Theology 28, no. 1 (2012): 82.
[7] Stoeber, “Theosophical Influences,” 86.
[8] Andrew Baldwin, “The White Geography of Lawren Stewart Harris: Whiteness and the Performative Coupling of Wilderness and Multiculturalism in Canada.” Environment and Planning 41, no. 3 (2009): 535.
[9] Baldwin, “The White Geography of Lawren Stewart Harris,” 532.
[10] David Liss, "KENT MONKMAN Miss Chief’s Return," Canadian Art 22, no.3 (1984): 82.
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