Additional Images

Provenance:

Collection of Bess Harris, Vancouver, BC
Jerrold Morris International Gallery Limited, Toronto, ON
Loranger Gallery, Toronto, ON
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Literature:

Joan Murray and Robert Fulford, The Beginning of Vision: The Drawings of Lawren S. Harris (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1982) nos. 58-60 for comparable works.

Note:

Lawren Harris’ Design for a Panel is a captivating and intriguing work, representing an important moment in the career of Lawren S. Harris. In its engaging, layered forms, one finds naturalistic references combined with abstract shapes, capturing a clear link between the landscape works of the 1920s and the geometric and transcendental non-objective works that followed in later decades. Coming from a period of transition in the mid-1930s, when Harris was entirely redefining himself as an artist, this panel is one of several intriguing works that truly straddle the two major bodies of work.

After a period of intense productivity and artistic inspiration in the late 1920s, Harris found himself in an artistic crisis in the early 1930s. This was so significant that the local Toronto paper printed a story in 1932 stating that “Lawren Harris, the animator of the Group of Seven, has closed his studio and is taking a six month holiday away from his painting. This man, whose mind has embraced all the aesthetic possibilities of Canadian art, has entered a phase of pathetic stillness.”[1] For Harris, the eventual path out of this downturn involved major life changes including moving out of Canada and settling in New Hampshire in 1934 with his second wife, Bess Larkin Housser Harris. Here, he returned to painting but after only a few new landscape works, this mostly involved the exploration of abstract ideas that he had first experimented with in 1928. By 1936, he finally began to settle into his own approach and gained an enthusiasm for painting abstractions that was sustained for the remainder of his career.

Abstractions from Harris’ time in New Hampshire (1934 to 1938) are varied in their subject matter and approach in line with the experimental position in which the artist found himself. When asked in 1937 by Emily Carr to describe his recent work, Harris wrote: “Well they are all different and yet alike – some more abstract than others – some verging on the representational – one never knows where the specific work in hand will lead. I try always to keep away from the representational however – for it seems the further I can keep away and into abstract idiom the more expressive the things become – yet one has in mind and heart the informing spirit of great Nature.”[2] This painting is one of several works with strong suggestions of natural elements, including trees and cloud forms. As an artist who developed ideas through iteration, including the practice of creating several versions of the same subject with minor variations, it is not surprising to find related works in pencil drawings and oil paintings of this period, including the nearly identical Autumn, Design for a Panel in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. This was a time of critical development for Harris and the works that emerged from it, including this fine panel, are important representations of his persistent drive for new forms of creative expression.

This essay was contributed by Alec Blair. Blair is the director of the Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, working with the estate of the artist to put together a catalogue of the artist’s works. He is based in Vancouver, BC.

[1] Undated newspaper clipping in Bess Larking Housser Harris’ scrapbook, Collection of the Family of Lawren S. Harris.
[2] Harris to Carr - April 15, 1937, Emily Carr Paper, MS-2181, box 2, folder 3, BC Archives, Victoria.

Related Work:
Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Acc. no. 68.20. Autumn: Design for Panel, oil on paperboard, 38.3 x 30.5 cm.