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Lawren Stewart Harris

A leading Canadian impressionist and symbolist, Lawren Harris is credited as being a major influence among early 20th-century painters in Canada. In 1913, he put up most of the money to build the Studio Building of Canadian art in Toronto. This facility became the center of the Group of Seven, painters initially dedicated to expressing the character and spirit of Canada in an impressionistic style that was airy and un detailed. However, World War I disrupted their aesthetic efforts, and Harris became a member of the Canadian army. His war experiences changed the direction of his painting and caused him to rethink his artistic expression. He became much more introspective and seeking of spiritual enlightenment.

In 1918, he joined the Theosophical Society, founded by Madame Blavatsky in 1875 in her search for universal enlightenment by taking elements of both eastern and western religions. Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky were major influences in this movement, and their ideas influenced Harris, as well as many other artists, to depict nature as a reflection of ordering the human spirit. In other words, painting became a combining of symbols to express mystical truth. In the 1930s, Harris lectured extensively on principles of the Theosophical Society.

As a young man he had studied in Berlin and while in Europe, was influenced by Gustaf Fjaestad, a symbolist painter. Returning to Canada, Harris became a friend and fellow painter with landscapist J.W.G. (Jock) Macdonald (1897-1960). In Buffalo, New York, they saw Scandinavian art that reinforced Harris' interest in simplification of form.

Harris also painted with Dr. James MacCallum, and they spent much time in the Algoma region of northern Ontario. Although Harris successfully encouraged other members of the Group of Seven to paint there, he did not complete many paintings of this wilderness area.

Following World War I, he turned from impressionist landscape painting to more symbolic pieces as well as portraiture and modernist urban landscapes, especially working class areas such as slum housing in Halifax. His work changed from having rich, painterly, surface density to forms of simplicity and minimal color with the emphasis on the interaction of shapes and these colors.

In 1934, Harris divorced his wife and married Bess Housser, former wife of Fred Housser, another member of the Group of Seven. These events were scandalous in Toronto, and the Harrises moved to New Hampshire and then in 1938 to Santa Fe, New Mexico where Harris became a member of the Transcendental Painting Movement--artists who defined spirit in terms of nature and emphasized intuition over perception and fact.

In 1940, the Harrises moved back to Canada and settled in Vancouver, where for the next thirty years, he produced abstract paintings. From 1950 to 1961, he served on the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery in Toronto.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

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