Lawren Harris

Lawren Stewart Harris (October 23, 1885 – January 29, 1970) was a Canadian painter, best known as a leading member of the Group of Seven. He played a key role as a catalyst in Canadian art and as a visionary in Canadian landscape art. Harris's artistic career was one of constant exploration. He was the only member of the Group of Seven to align himself with European and American forms of Modernism. He always had been deeply interested in developments in modern art. In 1926, he represented Canada in the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by the Société Anonyme (of which he was a member) and shown at the Brooklyn Museum in New York - he helped bring the show to Toronto in 1927. In 1934, he painted his first abstract pictures, which depended partly on his desire to express ideas of the spirit, partly on his earlier landscapes of Lake Superior, the Rocky Mountains and the Arctic. After a period of experimentation, from 1936 on, Harris enthusiastically embraced abstract painting. In these years, he moved to Hanover, New Hampshire in 1934, then Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1938 and finally, Vancouver in 1940. In time, he left all reference to landscape behind, and his work underwent changes towards a more organic form. He wrote about the path an abstract artist took from representation to abstraction to become fully abstract in an Essay on Abstract Painting published in 1949. In the 1950s, he painted his version of abstract expressionism. In 1954, in a separate publication that developed from his earlier essay on abstraction, he praised abstraction, writing: “...(in abstract art), we have a creative adventure in harmony with the highest aspiration and search for truth, beauty and expressive evocation and communication in our own day".