Lawren Harris paintings have been exhibited in the United States on several occasions over the decades. And, lest we forget, the Group of Seven founder actually lived and made art in the States from 1936 to 1940, mostly in New Hampshire and New Mexico. Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz were acquaintances.
Still, it's safe to say that Harris, who died in Vancouver at 84 in 1970, is little known among the general public and the art cognoscenti south of the border. But a change just might be coming, beginning this Sunday, in fact, when the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles opens an exhibition of 31 spectacular Harris canvases and sketches from the early 1920s and 30s. Prime Harris, in other words, in all his iceberg-ish, snowy, mountainous, light-sabre glory.
The Hammer's a prestige venue, famous for its holdings of work by Picasso, van Gogh, Sargent, Durer and many others, so attention will be paid to Harris as a matter of course. What's going to heighten the attention, celebritize and internationalize it even, is that the exhibition, called The Idea of North, has been curated by Steve Martin – yes, that Steve Martin – in association with the Hammer's deputy director of curatorial affairs, Cynthia Burlingham, and Andrew Hunter, Canadian art curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Indeed, the AGO is the single largest lender to the show, with 10 works, followed by the National Gallery in Ottawa (with six) and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (five).
Martin, 70, has been an inquisitive, acquisitive art connoisseur for more than 40 years, building a collection now stocked with Picassos, Fischls, de Koonings, Bacons, Cindy Shermans and Hoppers. He’s been keen on Harris for at least 15 years, having first encountered the artist while flipping through a Canadian auction catalogue and mistakenly attributing one of the pictures to a favourite American peintre, Rockwell Kent. Since then he’s purchased three Harrises, one of which was hanging in his Santa Barbara mansion the evening in mid-2013 when Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer, came to dinner. Lore has it that Philbin was so impressed by what she saw that in short order, she was inviting Martin to become a curator for a Harris one-man show. How to describe what followed? Writing in an essay in the exhibition catalogue, Martin said he felt it necessary to “reinvigorate” a word that’s become “tired and debased,” and the word is … awesome.
The fruits of Martin’s labour will be at the Hammer through Jan. 24, 2016. They then travel to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where the Group of Seven had one of its first U.S. showcases, in 1920, and where Matthew Teitelbaum, its current director, earlier played a key role in realizing the Martin project when he was head of the AGO. The Toronto gallery is the last stop on the tour, with a two-month run starting July 2, 2016.