Steve Martin champions work of Lawren Harris
No longer is he so wild and crazy, comic champions Canadian 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 find himself talking about art and Canadian art in particular — as he did recently at a fundraiser for the Contemporary Calgary gallery. Among other events, the evening featured Martin in conversation with his friend and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.
“We usually range all over the place,” Martin says. “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 such films as The Jerk, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, All of Me and Planes, Trains & 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 this summer, the initial idea was to introduce Harris to U.S. 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.
Even when news spread a few months later that Calgary-based Imperial Oil was set to auction Harris’ 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 (of his art) 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 Harris 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 simply 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 (Roy) Lichtenstein and (Andy) 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 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.
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 Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, an upcoming drama about young soldiers who survive a battle in Iraq and embark on a promotional tour across the U.S. after being heralded as heroes. 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.”