Sold for: $121,250

PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
LSH Holdings Ltd., Vancouver
Estate of the Artist
By descent to a Private Collection, Vancouver
Fine Canadian Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 7, 1996, lot 213, titled as Mountain Form
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Winnipeg

LITERATURE
Joan Murray and Robert Fulford, The Beginning of Vision: The Drawings of Lawren S. Harris, 1982, related graphite studies of wood grain reproduced on pages 163, 165, 167, 183 and 185
Dennis Reid, Atma Buddhi Manas: The Later Work of Lawren S. Harris, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1985, related works reproduced pages 82 and 83
Peter Larisey, Light for a Cold Land: Lawren Harris's Work and Life—An Interpretation, 1993, reproduced page 160

Lawren S. Harris was a constantly evolving artist, and his catalogue demonstrates regular periods of reinvigoration as his work underwent shifts in subject and in style throughout his long career. This painting, LSH 12, comes from his most significant and important transition, when he moved from painting representational landscapes to fully embracing non-objective paintings and the exploration of abstract forms in the 1930s. Such a dramatic and bold evolution in his art was not a simple process. Though Harris had long been engaged with and interested in abstract art, after his first experiments with it in 1928, it was years before he was able to find a way into the practice himself. By 1936, he finally began to settle into his own approach and gained an enthusiasm for painting abstractions that was sustained for the remainder of his career.

Leading up to this transition, sketching trips to Lake Superior, the Rocky Mountains and the Arctic had played a critical role, honing Harris’s ability to translate grand vistas into powerful and harmonious spiritual representations. Not surprisingly, this composition exhibits a strong sense of landscape, as Harris actively and purposefully experimented with how to express the same universal ideas he was always drawn to in this new format. When asked in 1937 by Emily Carr to describe his recent work, Harris wrote: “Well, they are all different and yet alike—some more abstract than others—some verging on the representational—one never knows where the specific work in hand will lead. I try always to keep away from the representational however—for it seems the further I can keep away and into abstract idiom the more expressive the things become—yet one has in mind and heart the informing spirit of great Nature.”[1]

The arrangement of forms in LSH 12 clearly echoes the structure of Harris’s late landscape works, with cloud forms and deep blue sky seemingly hovering over complex and dramatic structures, including a tall, slender form reminiscent of the bleached tree trunks of Lake Superior, all bathed in a light radiating from the top. Yet this work also draws from the organic shapes and patterns of nature at a much more personal scale, and the central design originates from a series of wood grain studies that he drew in New Hampshire in the mid-1930s, based off of doors. For this abstract work, bringing together these elements was new and exciting for Harris; the marriage and interplay of the grand and the intimate, the ethereal and the concrete demonstrate the opportunity that he revelled in with abstraction. It provided opportunities to reconcile, combine and synthesize disparate elements of the world that were not possible in landscape painting.

In writing to Carr, Harris’s enthusiasm for his art and its potential, which had sunk to a significant low point just a few years earlier, is blazingly evident by this period: “I must say that I become more and more convinced that non-representational painting contains the possibility of expressing everything. It takes the expression away from the specific, the incidental and can lift it into another place, where the experience is enhanced, clarified—and its great fun—there is so very much of adventure in it and an intensity of concentration that I like.”[2]

LSH 12 is Harris’s first known oil painting expression of this wood grain motif, but he went on to further explore the composition in at least five other paintings, including LSH 90 (private collection), which is a direct enlargement of this work, and Abstract Painting No. 20 (circa 1943), a massive canvas 60 x 60 inches square, in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada (a gift from the artist in 1960, and its largest work by the artist). As with many of his favourite abstract ideas, he would work through iterations of the compositions, adding intensifying elements, but also remaining true to the underlying spirit of his inspiration. In this work, the radiant celebration of nature’s forms, formalized through the same volumetric and design-based expression he had honed in his landscape representations, is a celebration of Harris’s new-found freedom in abstraction, and a wonderfully evocative and dramatic exploration of this practice.

We thank Alec Blair, Director/Lead Researcher, Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for contributing the above essay.

1. Harris to Carr, April 15, 1937, Emily Carr Papers, MS-2181, box 2, folder 3, BC Archives, Victoria.

2. Ibid.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars