Why Steve Martin borrowed a Lawren Harris from the University of Toronto's art collection
Published: October 21, 2015
“Thank you, University of Toronto, for lending the US Harris's wonderful Isolation Peak.”
This was not an official dispatch from an American government agency but a recent tweet from the comedian, art collector and curator Steve Martin.
Like many American art enthusiasts, Martin grew up with no awareness of the Group of Seven or Lawren Harris, arguably its most distinctive member. After spotting a canvas in an auction catalogue in the 1990s, Martin became a fan.
He also became a collector. When the director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles – equally unfamiliar with the Group of Seven – saw a Harris canvas in Martin’s home, the plan to mount an exhibition was hatched. Martin is credited as co-curator of The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, which runs until Jan. 24 before moving on to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Isolation Peak, Rocky Mountains, which is part of the Hart House permanent collection, will join more than 30 oils by Harris portraying characteristic Canadian landscapes.
“The goal of the exhibition is to present, in a focused way, a distinctive painter who should be considered a leading artist of his time beyond Canada,” reads the description provided by the Hammer Museum. “Harris was not a provincial echo but an innovator on par with the likes of Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keeffe.”
Martin has praised Harris’s originality in several interviews and characterized the neglect of his work in the United States as regrettable. The comic owns three Harrises, none of which will be part of the exhibition.
"We are thrilled for the recognition of Lawren Harris in the United States and for someone of the stature and visibility of Steve Martin to take such interest in his work," said Barbara Fischer, executive director and chief curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery/University of Toronto Art Centre. “It is our pleasure to draw from one of the strengths of the Hart House collection and to participate as lenders to such a significant exhibition.”
This is not the first time Isolation Peak has been seen south of the border. The painting was seen last year as part of Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012, at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Wash.
The name of the mountain is generic. It is in fact a distant view of Mont des Poilus in Alberta’s Yoho National Park. Martin counts it among his favourites. In an interview with The New York Times, he called the work “an incredible, solitary, Hopperesque painting.”
“I love standing in front of paintings,” he tweeted last January, along with a selfie including Isolation Peak. “Especially this beauty by Lawren Harris.”
Isolation Peak is one of many acclaimed holdings of the Hart House Permanent Collection. It was purchased by the Hart House art committee in 1946 with income from the Harold and Murray Wrong Memorial Fund, a resource of $5,000 that was also used to buy Tom Thomson’s Birches.
Harris paintings now sell in seven figures. The $3.51 million paid by an anonymous philanthropist in 2009 for The Old Stump, an oil sketch for the familiar North Shore, Lake Superior, represented a record for a Group of Seven painting. There has been speculation that the Los Angeles exhibition and Martin’s endorsement will add market value to Harris’s work.
A scion of the Massey-Harris family of industrialists, Harris studied at οfor less than a year before shifting his education to art and Europe. Some of his earliest work was at Hart House, designing sets for a theatre production in 1921.
The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris includes paintings from the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Thomson Collection at the AGO, the National Gallery of Canada, the McMichael Collection and other sources. The exhibition will end its tour at the AGO in the summer of 2016.
The title, as the Hammer Museum website acknowledges, is doubly Canadian. “The Idea of North” is derived from the best known of the documentary broadcasts of the late pianist Glenn Gould.
News of the show is spreading across social media, with Martin's thank-you tweets to U of T, Saskatoon and other art lenders retweeted by followers such as Joyce Carol Oates.
