Tribute to Canada’s Most Famous Artist at MFA

Pic Island, about 1924, oil on canvas, by Lawren Harris. Image courtesy of McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © Family of Lawren S. Harris

Although long considered by fellow countrymen to be Canada’s best-known 20th-century painter, Lawren Harris remains largely unknown to people outside of Canada. Now, a dazzling jewel-box of a show at the Museum of Fine Arts should help to rectify that oversight.

Titled The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, the exhibition comprises approximately 30 paintings by the pioneering modernist, most completed between 1920 and 1930, considered the apex of his career.

The intimate show, on view at the MFA through June 12, includes Harris’ iconic landscapes of the Canadian North, a vast expanse of mountains, tundra, lakes, and glaciers, and is broken down by subject matter: Lake Superior, the Arctic, and the Rocky Mountains. Many of the paintings are monumental in scale, rendered in a stunning palette of blues, whites, golds, and purples. The artist’s mastery of light and color is striking.

Harris (1885-1970) first traveled to the shores of Lake Superior in the early 1920s, making sketches and oil studies on site, in preparation for larger-scale canvases he completed in his Toronto studio. He returned each autumn for the next several years to capture the rugged landscape. In paintings like Pic Island and North Shore, Lake Superior, he imbues the landscape with a spiritual quality, a reflection of his deep belief in nature’s divinity. There is a sense of tranquility in Pic Island, the clouds’ shadows reflected on a calm sea. The landscape in North Shore, Lake Superior, is suffused in a golden light.

In 1930, the artist made his first and only trip to the Arctic, with friend and fellow artist A. Y. Jackson. They traveled aboard a government supply ship, the S.S. Boethic, making drawings from their room, the only light coming through the porthole window. Several of the Arctic paintings on view offer a tantalizing glimpse into how Harris refined his work. Two oils sketches of Mount Lefroy, a mountain in Banff National Park, appear alongside his finished oil, Mt. Lefroy, 1930. The mountain’s surface becomes more pronounced, the mountain peak more sharply rendered, in each iteration. And most notably, the clouds in the first study have been replaced by a flat, purplish-gray sky in the later study and reappear in the final painting, encircling the peak and drawing the eye upwards to the top of the canvas.

Harris began climbing the Canadian Rockies in 1924 and some of the show’s most sublime paintings resulted from these trips. Isolation Peak, Rocky Mountains, 1930, is an excellent illustration of the way he mixed real and invented elements in creating his landscapes. He was at ease adding a peak here or there, turning a river into a lake, and rearranging mountains for dramatic effect. The finished painting appears alongside an earlier oil study, Isolation Peak, about 1929, another striking example of how Harris refined his work as he went along. In the study, the sky is rendered in bands of light, but in the final canvas by a flat, deep twilight-blue sky.

Walking through the two galleries, visitors can’t help but be struck by the similarity in style between Harris and his better-known American contemporary Georgia O’Keeffe.

One of the exhibition curators is the comedian, actor, and banjo player Steve Martin (who happens to be a knowledgeable art collector), and the show was previously on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA. For the MFA exhibition, Martin helped put together work by several of Harris’ better known American contemporaries, including Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and O’Keeffe, in an adjacent gallery. These pieces, culled from the MFA’s collection, help put Harris’ contribution to 20th-century painting in context.

The exhibition, on the top floor of the museum’s Art of the Americas wing, can be viewed in under an hour. It closes June 12, so plan to see it soon.

The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston, through June 12. Find hours and admission prices here (free to BU students with ID). Find directions here.