Southern exposure
Canadians have long been enamoured of Lawren Harris, the pioneering painter and core member of the Group of Seven. But now Harris is being championed south of the border by an unlikely cheerleader: Steve Martin.
“Being an American, I thought he was an unknown artist,” the comedian and actor told Maclean’s magazine last year. “Little did I know that he was Canada’s greatest painter.”
On Sunday, an exhibition of Harris’s work co-curated by Martin will open at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum. His stated goal: To get Americans to love Harris, too.
‘‘It takes work for an artist to get known, and when you look at the work, you think it’s odd that he hasn’t been known in America because it’s so striking,’’ he told the Los Angeles Times this week.
The more you know about Martin, the less unlikely it seems that he would be a fan of Harris. The one-time SNL star and longtime banjo player has collected art for decades, focusing mainly on 20th century masters (his collection includes works by Picasso).
He first encountered Harris’s work in the early ’90s in an auction catalogue, and was immediately struck by the painter’s rendering of landscapes, as Martin described to Maclean’s, “a non-European way.”
Martin began buying books about the Group of Seven, and collecting Harris’s works — he now owns three — but had no intention of going public with it until Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, came over for dinner and spotted one of Harris’s works on the wall. “It was a view of trees with a lake behind it, an ordinary subject, but it had a very animated presence, very stylized, almost cartoonish, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way,” she told the Hamilton Spectator this week. “It was fantastic, so I asked who did it. Steve said Lawren Harris, and I said, ‘Who’s that?’ ”
Philbin shortly thereafter asked Martin to co-curate an exhibition.
“My initial reaction was, ‘Of course not,’ ” Martin told the Hamilton Spectator. But he came around to i t. “It didn’t feel like dilettantism to me,” he told the paper. “I’ve loved the work for so long. And a loving curator is an asset to an artist, probably.”
The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, which is a co-production of the Hammer and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Martin worked with AGO curator Andrew Hunter and Ham- mer curator Cynthia Burlingham), will run until Jan. 24, 2016. (The AGO will host a 2016 exhibit as well.)
Martin has popped in and out of Canada intermittently over the past few years — though he’s been visiting since the 1970s, he told the L.A. Times this week — in preparation for the Hammer exhibition. In December, 2013, he visited Hamilton to check out the collection of Harris’s work held at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, spending around 13 hours in the vaults and eventually requesting the loan of The Ice House, one of Harris’s most popular works, in The Idea of the North. Martin also visited the now-shuttered Mendel Art Gallery, in Saskatoon, to request the loan of a Harris (and tweeted his thanks for the loan on Wednesday).
All in all, he made an effort “to see every single painting in the show in person,” Philbin told the Spectator.
In January of this year he hosted an evening at the Art Gallery of Ontario called The Idea of the North, at which he discussed Harris’s paintings with writer Adam Gopnik. Martin had previously told Maclean’s Gopnik was “the only person I’ve met in America who knows about Lawren Harris.”
“And he’s Canadian,” Martin continued. “This is a real hole in America’s artistic knowledge.”
Indeed, the actor has made it a gentle mandate to not just show audiences a collection of beautiful paintings, but to educate them about an artist that, in Martin’s view,
I thought he was an unknown artist. Little did I know that he was Canada’s greatest painter
is woefully under-represented south of the border.
“I would call them powerful, emotional landscapes,” he told the Spectator. “You can marvel at a 19th-century American landscape painting because you can’t believe you can see every leaf on every tree. But here there are no leaves and no trees, or nothing that looks like a living tree, and the response is much more emotional, I think.”
Harris is the only artist he could imagine himself curating, Martin told the L.A. Times.
“Curating is best left to real scholars,” he told the paper, “but I know a lot about this artist and there was a reason to do the show, which is to introduce him to art lovers everywhere. I felt it was valid that my name might attract some attention to this artist, whereas another artist doesn’t need it. Harris was ver y successful and well known in Canada, but I felt there was a gap here.”