Harris painting might be Canadian art’s new peak
Lawren Harris has long been an icon of Canadian art, the leading light of the Group of Seven. But the popular and critical success of a recent Harris exhibition in Los Angeles, Boston and Toronto has raised his international profile to new heights.
The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris was co-curated by actor Steve Martin, who owns several Harris paintings. It was something of a greatest hits show, concentrating on his paintings of the Rocky Mountains and Lake Superior in the 1920s and ’30s. One of the key works in the show was Mountain Forms, a striking painting of Mount Ishbel in the Sawback mountain range near Lake Louise. It’s so striking, in fact, it was used on the back catalogue of the exhibition catalogue.
Most Harris paintings like this are in art galleries or museums. But Mountain Forms is owned by Imperial Oil, and on Nov. 23, it will go up for sale at the Heffel Auction of Fine Canadian Art in Toronto.
The pre-auction estimate is $3 million to $5 million, the highest estimate ever given by Vancouver’s Heffel gallery.
“We feel it’s optimum timing,” said David Heffel, who runs the auction with his brother Robert. “The moons are aligned.”
Heffel set the record for a Harris painting last fall when it sold the 1930 painting Mountain and Glacier for $4.6 million, the second-highest price ever paid for a Canadian work of art at auction. It had been estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million.
The top Canadian artwork sold at auction is Paul Kane’s Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy, which sold for $5.062 million in 2002.
The Heffels tend to keep their estimates conservative. But clearly Mountain Forms could become the most expensive Canadian painting ever sold on Nov. 23.
“It’s the pinnacle of his evolution,” Heffel said. “Something very singular and powerful, monumental.”
It is also very large, literally double the size of the Harris painting that sold for $4.6 million last year.
“It is a massive painting,” Heffel said. “It’s nearly five feet tall and six feet wide.”
The painting is a classic example of Harris’ abstract realism, where he took a landscape and sculpted it into something all his own.
The painting was once owned by the Heffel brothers’ late father Ken, who sold it for $264,000 at a Sotheby’s Canada auction in 1981. In 1984, it was sold to Imperial Oil by the Walter Klinkhoff Gallery for an undisclosed sum.
Imperial Oil’s headquarters have moved from Toronto to Calgary, and the company has been selling off part of its collection.
“They’re selling it primarily as a result of their migration out of downtown Toronto to their new complex in Quarry Park (in Calgary),” Heffel said.
“It’s an open office concept with few walls, so their opportunity to hang paintings on wall space has been greatly reduced.”
Mountain Forms will be on display to Vancouverites at a preview at the Heffel Gallery at 2247 Granville from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1.
There are three parts to the Nov. 23 auction: postwar and contemporary art, fine Canadian art, and the Peter and Joanne Brown collection.
The Brown part of the sale features 90 works collected by Peter Brown, the 75-year-old founder of investment dealer Canaccord Genuity.
The Brown collection looks like a museum show all by itself. It includes works by all seven members of the Group of Seven, plus the three painters who later joined the group.
It also features two paintings by Emily Carr, three sculptures by Bill Reid and 10 works by E.J. Hughes. The gem of the collection might be Tom Thomson’s Sleet Storm, a 1914 sketch for a bigger canvas now in the Art Gallery of Ontario. The Thomson sketch carries the highest estimate in the Brown collection, $1 million to $1.5 million.