LOVE OF ART NO JOKE

Steve Martin passionate about Canuck painter

These days, discovering yet another facet to the multi-faceted Steve Martin seems almost old hat.

It’s no longer a novelty to point out that the former wild-and-crazy standup comedian has proven to be impressively accomplished in less-zany domains, whether it be dramatic acting, banjo-playing or playwriting.

But on the phone from Los Angeles, Martin admits he was a little surprised to learn that he is expected to talk about art, and Canadian art in particular, on Saturday when he is the main attraction at the Look2016 fundraiser for Contemporary Calgary. Among other events, the evening will feature Martin in conversation with his friend, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik.

“We usually range all over the place,” says Martin. “So we’re happy to talk about art, especially Canadian art and Adam is Canadian. So that may be where we begin. But we usually stray a bit.”

Art appreciation may not be the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about Martin, whose half-century career has taken him from the standup stage to starring roles in iconic films such as The Jerk, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, All of Me and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. But his love of art, particularly the work of Group of Seven founder Lawren Harris, has received a lot of ink lately.

He co-curated The Idea of North, an exhibit dedicated to Harris that showed in galleries in Los Angeles and Boston. While it also travelled to Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, the initial idea was to introduce Harris to American art lovers. It was a tantalizing hook for Canadian media: the famous Hollywood comedian championing a Canadian icon who seems woefully underappreciated in the rest of the world. When news spread a few months later that Calgary-based Imperial Oil was set to auction Harris’s little-seen, 1926 large-scale painting Mountain Forms, some headlines referred to it as a work featured in the “Steve Martin exhibit.”

Through it all, Martin said he didn’t consider himself an expert on Harris or art in general. But it’s clear he put a herculean effort into organizing the exhibits, travelling across Canada alongside co-curators Andrew Hunter of the AGO and Cynthia Burlingham of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to make selections.

“I’ve had the experience as a collector that you really have to see paintings in person, you can’t just look at an image in a book or in a transparency or in an auction catalogue,” he says. “I just applied that to curating this. And also, it was fun to go everywhere and see all the Lawren Harrises. There is virtually none in America."

While Martin may be modest about his own expertise in art, it’s obvious from talking to him that

it has been a long-held passion. He has three of Harris’s works in his own eclectic collection and suggests Mountain Forms could fetch $10 million in auction this November, which is higher than the $3-million to $5-million estimate Canadian experts have been predicting.

While there has been some minor controversy about whether Imperial Oil should have donated the piece to a museum, Martin says there is no reason to assume it will disappear into a private collection.

“You don’t really know where that picture is going to end up,” he says. “My guess is it’s going to end up in a museum. Or maybe they could start a fund to buy it.”

As for Martin’s own immersion into art, it certainly wasn’t a case of a suddenly rich celebrity deciding to dabble in collecting. His interest began in the early- to mid-1960s when he was a college student.

“The art world was exploding,” he said. “It had just come out of abstract expressionism and pop art had just begun with Lichtenstein and Warhol. It was an exciting time in art and there were a lot of headlines about it and I became curious about it. I got interested in 19th-century American painting and I was on my way. It was just a great hobby.”

He became a fan of Lawren Harris after being introduced to the work in Toronto in the 1990s. He mistook the first Harris painting he saw for a Rockwell Kent.

“Comically, I thought I had discovered Lawren Harris, not knowing he was already a very big deal in Canada,” Martin says with a laugh.

So while there are plenty of conversations Martin and Gopnik could have about Canadian art Saturday, the actor says the two rarely put parameters on their talks.

Martin, after all, does have that multi-faceted career to discuss.

The 71-year-old is now father to a four-year-old daughter, which means he has considerably less time to dedicate to his film career these days. But he is excited about his supporting role in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, an upcoming drama directed by Ang Lee about young soldiers who survive a battle in Iraq and embark on a promotional tour across the U.S. after being heralded as heroes by the Department of Defense. Martin plays a billionaire owner of a Dallas football team.

“Movies are harder for me now because they require travel,” he says. “They don’t really shoot in your home anymore. Now that I have a four-year-old, I don’t really want to leave town for three months. My movie career is compromised now.”

Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t been busy. His play, Meteor Shower, opened this summer in San Diego and moved to Connecticut earlier this month. He also tours extensively with his friend Martin Short, where they perform comedy, reminisce about their Hollywood careers and showcase their respective musical talents.

As for Saturday’s fundraising efforts, Martin is clearly on board with the idea behind Contemporary Calgary, even if he hasn’t seen specific details about the $24.5-million plan to turn the Centennial Planetarium into a large-scale facility dedicated to contemporary art.

“I’m not an expert on this, but in the cities I’ve visited that have established contemporary arts museums, there’s a new life around the museum,” he said. “It attracts a lot of young people and I think they are a great benefit for cities. They become an artistic centre and inspire the communities. I think it’s a great thing. It happened in San Francisco and it happened in Milwaukee. They become a great force in the community.”

Comically, I thought I had discovered Lawren Harris, not knowing he was already a very big deal in Canada.