Martin’s love of art gives him a new role

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 iconic films.

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.

Martin said he didn’t consider himself an expert on Harris or art, 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 that it has been a long-held passion. He has three Harris works in his own eclectic collection.

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 Harris after being introduced to his 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.

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