The Canadian art industry has long hoped that some way some day at least one of the country's certifiably great artists from the pre-Second World War era could experience the big wet kiss of international recognition. Yes, Emily Carr, Lawren Harris, David Milne, Tom Thomson and J.W. Morrice have been embraced by non-Canadians over the decades but their numbers have been small, their impact on the global art world correspondingly so.
While Harris, Carr et al. have long been stars in Canada – indeed, interest in both the Group of Seven founder and Carr has, if anything, increased here in the past five years – in foreign climes none has enjoyed that synchronicity of widespread critical acclaim, institutional approbation, public popularity, gallerist tub-thumping, auction fizz and the other fortuitous elements that seem necessary to raise high the artist's roof beam. Can this even be done so long after the fact?
Right now the big hope of the Great White North is Lawren Harris, 46 years dead as of Jan. 29, 2016. He's the subject of a largely acclaimed one-man show running since early October at the influential Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Once The Idea of North finishes there, on Jan. 24 next year, its 30-plus paintings and sketches, done in the1920s and early 30s, travel to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1.13-million visitors in 2014) for a three-month stand starting March 12. Impressive, certainly, but what makes its images of Dairy Queen sundae-like mountains, blasted trees and cold barren islands, um … cool is that they've been curated by Steve Martin (with assists from Andrew Hunter, Canadian art curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Cynthia Burlingham, the Hammer's deputy director, curatorial affairs). Martin, we've learned, has been a Harrishead for at least 15 years, to the point of owning three (!) of the man's paintings as part of an esteemed, if not especially large, collection of Eric Fischls, Picassos, de Koonings and Hoppers, among others. In short, the sort of company an artist could benefit from keeping.
The theory here is that if an American A-list celebrity/respected art collector such as Martin thinks Harris is terrific and if a prestigious showcase such as the Hammer in America's second-largest metropolis cares enough to indulge his taste and if thousands of Angelenos and turistas arte make the drive down Wilshire Blvd. and like what they see, well, it's just a hop, skip and a high jump to the production of … Lawren Harris, Superstar.
Harris has enjoyed foreign attention previously, even recently. The Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London, for example, included many of his paintings in its well-received Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven exhibition of 2010-11. In 2000, Hunter curated a concise retrospective of Harris's complete oeuvre at the Americas Society in Manhattan,which then went the next year to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection northwest of Toronto. But the attention has been more sporadic than sustained.
It was estimated Lawren Harris’s Mountain and Glacier (1930) would sell for $1-million to $1.5-million at the Heffel auction on Thursday.
Heffel Auction House
Here, of course, Harris is unavoidable and without equal. Just this Thursday evening in Toronto three of his oils sold at live auction for a staggering total of almost $9.5-million. One of the works, Mountain and Glacier, set a record for a Harris at Canadian auction by going for $4.602-million. The Vancouver Art Gallery, which hosted a major survey of the man in spring 2014, has 82 Harrises in its permanent collection, the AGO 207; as one long-time observer of the national scene remarked recently: "You'd be hard-pressed to say Lawren Harris is not well-represented in museums across Canada." Harris paintings, oil sketches and drawings sold at auction here, in the meantime, have grossed a total of $110-million, the highest of any Canuck artist, living or dead. Six years ago, Toronto collector/dealer/scholar Ash Prakash dropped almost $9-million at one auction to win four Harris oils, including $3.51-million for a small 1926 preparatory sketch, The Old Stump, Lake Superior, a previous record-setter.Today works by the artist occupy 13 positions in the Top 25 Canadian paintings sold at auction; of the 13 paintings, nine have been sold since 2009.
By contrast, Harris's presence in U.S. institutions and private collections is "minimal," according to Vancouverite David Heffel, whose eponymous auction house has knocked down eight of those 13 MVP Harrises, two of them on Thursday. How minimal is hard to determine since Harris has yet to benefit from a catalogue raisonné.
It's known there are two fine Harris landscapes at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, N.H., one abstract painting from 1934-37 in the Yale University Art Gallery, another abstract, painted from 1936-40, at Manchester, N.H.'s Currier Museum. (Harris and his second wife, Bess, lived in New Hampshire and New Mexico from 1934 to 1940.) Heffel confirms he and brother Robert have sold "several" Harrises, even a "major" one on occasion, to U.S. collectors as well as to connoisseurs outside North America, including England. "More recently, we have seen an increase in inquiries about Harris masterpieces, major canvases and the like [from U.S. art lovers]." Still, Harris holdings south of the border are neither ample nor, it seems, of major heft: Indeed, in the current Hammer show, 90 per cent of its exhibits are from institutional or corporate lenders, all Canadian. A mere four are from private collectors. (None of Martin's holdings is exhibited.)
So … are we then on the cusp of great things for Lawren Stewart Harris outside our dominion? Perhaps the best answer is a firm maybe. Two of the three Harrises auctioned Thursday went to telephone bidders, raising the spectre of a possible foreign buyer. Moreover, the record-setting Mountain and Glacier is a scene very much in the style and theme of what Steve Martin has chosen to present, right down to the year in which it was painted, 1930. Only last month David Heffel told a Los Angeles Times reporter he believes the Hammer show "could prove a watershed moment for Harris." That same reporter also wondered aloud to Heffel if the exhibition might help create a situation wherein "a great Harris comes up for auction [and] it gets sold in New York rather Toronto or Vancouver. 'Are [you] working against your own futures?' " (Heffel: "I think the great Harrises will always be aggressively sought after by Canadians who prefer to pay in Canadian dollars rather than U.S. dollars.")
Of course, we all know feelings can be based as much on wishful thinking and hype as informed conjecture and sober prognostication. Remember the excitement in Canada when the 2012 instalment of Germany's dOCUMENTA presented several paintings by Carr, the first Canadian ever to be exhibited posthumously there? Ditto the arrival of the Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own exhibition at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts and Washington's National Museum of Women in Art in 2001-02. "Who is this genius Emily? Roll over, Georgia and Frida, and tell Tamara de Lempicka the news!" Alas, these moments, finally, seemed to intensify and magnify appreciation here more than there.
Moreover, as Linda Rodeck, senior Canadian art specialist at Waddington's, another large Canadian auction house, notes, the participation of non-Canadians in auctions in Canada has been small even as records have tumbled like dice. Based on recent registrations of bidders for the two large live sales of Canadian fine art Waddington's hosts each year, only 4 per cent have been non-Canadian. "So even if a show like the Lawren Harris doubles the interest, it's still not going to be a significant demographic for us."
Where Rodeck has seen an increase in action from foreigners is on the consigning front. Today she estimates 20 per cent of what she receives for bidding is from the U.S. or overseas sources. "I don't know what to attribute it to. Maybe it is an effect of shows like the Dulwich and Steve Martin's …"
Whatever the explanation, the result is works by Canadian artists being repatriated home for sale to Canadian buyers, rather than Brand Canada being extended overseas! One firm measure of a Harris uptick internationally will be two rises – one in the number of foreign buyers (attracted, in part, by the soft Canadian dollar) participating at auction here or striking private-treaty sales, the other in the prices paid for prime Harrises. How many of those are out there still in private hands? Again, the lack of a catalogue raisonné hinders that assessment.
Fifteen years ago there was talk that pretty much all the masterpieces of the Group of Seven and their associates had been spoken for. Henceforth, the reasoning went, buyers at auction would have to look to Montreal's Beaver Hall Group or Toronto's Painters Eleven for their art fix. Yet every year, as Heffel's Thursday sale demonstrated, some pricey pictures by the country's bluest-chip artists find their way to auction.
One hurdle any foreign buyer of Harris will face (and has) is the Canadian Cultural Property Export and Import Act. Drafted in 1977, it requires the non-Canadian purchaser of, say, a painting 50 years of age or older with a "fair market value" of more than $15,000 to obtain an export permit. If the painting is determined to be significant to "national heritage," the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board can delay its departure anywhere from three months to two years. The intention is to give a "Canadian collecting institution" – if an interested one exists – the opportunity to purchase the painting from the owner. There are other rules. But suffice to say, the relatively few Harris paintings that have made it to foreign shores have done so without being ensnared by CPERB. This scenario likely should continue – unless, perhaps, a mania for the man grips art lovers in Boston, Qatar and/or Hong Kong ("Icebergs, I must have icebergs!") and suddenly Canadian owners of Harrises decide to meet the demand.
Waddington's Rodeck sounds a cautionary note here. "Sometimes what happens, the unintended consequence, is that many things by the artist come up on the market and you have what is essentially a glut … and so prices actually get a little soft. Another thing an important show like the Martin does – and is meant to do – is to expose an audience to 'the best of the best,' the most interesting Harrises or Jack Bushes or Carrs … And what you may find is that those things coming on the market as a result, because people are speculating that this is a great opportunity, seem to be wanting. They're not museum-quality pieces."
Robert Heffel chooses to be more bullish. Shows like the Hammer Harris and the Dulwich Carr are "the tip of the iceberg," part of a rising tide of appreciation "for our art and culture. And I'm not just talking the market aspect, I'm talking about the whole cultural/museum/art publication/art book ecosystem."
Chimes in his brother: "Three years ago you wouldn't have sold the second most-expensive painting in the world to a mainland Chinese art collector let alone 15 years ago" – a reference to billionaire businessman Li Yiqian's Nov. 9 purchase of Modigliani's Reclining Nude for $170-million (U.S.). Maybe these are the days of miracles and wonders.