Lawren Harris: An Introduction to His Life and Art

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

Joan Murray, a prolific author, has written many books on Canadian art,
Tom Thomson, and the Group of Seven. At only 64 pages, this book is
accurately described by the subtitle as “an introduction” to the
life and art of Lawren Harris, perhaps the Group’s most prominent
artist, and the most complex personality among its founding members.

Despite of its brevity, the book provides an intriguing account of the
shaping of Harris’s character and development of his art. Murray
identifies three stages of that development. In the first, she explores
the influence of the privileged background that allowed Harris to
indulge his intellectual and artistic bent, the years studying art and
travelling abroad, the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto with its kindred
spirits, and the return from Europe that prompted his seeing the
Canadian light and landscape with fresh eyes. The years 1913 to 1918 are
considered the formative years when he discovered contemporary
Scandinavian art and the North American art movement known as
synchronism. But it was also in 1918 that he had a nervous breakdown in
reaction to the deaths of Tom Thomson in a canoe accident and of his
brother in the Great War. What Murray calls his “classic” landscape
period are the dozen years beginning in 1918 that are marked by
sketching trips to Algoma with painter friends like J.E.H. MacDonald,
the founding of the Group of Seven in 1920, and the conversion to
theosophy. It was the latter that motivated Harris to increased
abstraction in attempts to capture the spiritual in art. Throughout,
Murray links her narrative to specific paintings that illustrate her
thesis.

The text is supplemented by an extensive chronology, a very brief list
of selected sources, a list of some 30 works reproduced full-page and in
full colour, and an index. Succinct but penetrating, this is an
excellent first book for those not already familiar with the art of
Lawren Harris or the Group of Seven.