| Lawren Stewart Harris was born in Brantford, Ontario in 1885 and died in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1970. During the first half of his artistic career (1904-30) he was a landscape painter. He studied painting in Berlin between 1904 and 1907 where he received an academic training and experienced his first attraction to modern art and to mystical thinking. The main traditions that he brought back from Germany were an urban-oriented Realism, which he had acquired from his teacher Franz Skarbina (1849-1910) and from Skarbina's friend Max Liebermann (1947-1935); and a wilderness-oriented regionalism which he had derived from his Heimatkunstler models, his teacher Fritz von Wille (1860-1941), Paul Thiem (1858-1922), Walter Leistikow (1865-1908) and others.;In Part I of the dissertation, which is chronologically organized, I study Harris's transformations of both these traditions into brightly colored, thickly pointed decorative modes during his first decade as a Canadian painter. Then, in 1918, Harris had a nervous breakdown which was a crucial turning point for his life and for his art. He emerged from this crisis with a decisive orientation toward mysticism. In Part II of the dissertation, which is arranged thematically, I study his later transformations of these painting traditions and his published and unpublished writing as he moved from realism and regionalism in his art and his thinking toward a universalizing idealism. He gradually abandoned the urban landscapes and concentrated on austere treatments of the more northern wilderness areas of Canada, culminating in a trip to the high Arctic in 1930. Important for an understanding of Harris's painting was his interest in mystical theories about life, nationalism and art, about which he wrote at some length. For his ideas he drew on transcendentalist, theosophical and other sources. Between 1930 and 1934, Harris passed through a second, though milder, crisis during which he stopped painting. When he began painting again he would be away from Canada, and he would paint not urban landscapes nor even simplified, spiritual renderings of wilderness landscapes, but abstractions. |
