Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  PIONEERING MOVEMENTS WERE well under way in the German art world by the time Lawren Harris arrived in Berlin in 1905. The previous decade had been a period of rapid intellectual and technological innovation. Radical new proofs were emerging about the nature of both the self and the visible world. The realm of dreams, somnambulism, hypnotism and hallucinations was being explored and described by the new discipline of psychology. French scientists were studying the effects of shapes and colours on the nervous system and unconscious mind. Physics was demonstrating a series of dynamic processes—invisible waves, force fields, electrically charged particles. X-rays were discovered in 1896, and in the following year a British physicist destroyed the concept of the atom as an indivisible unity by demonstrating the electron to be a subatomic particle.

  New forms of artistic expression developed as the European art world responded to these discoveries. Conventions established and perfected in the Renaissance were replaced by more personal strategies of representation. Tradition and parochialism came under assault as young painters, believing a breach with the past necessary for art to move forward, seceded from official art academies. Manifestos flew and new journals were founded. In 1898 the architect August Endell, a Berliner, had prophetically declared, “To those with understanding . . . we are not only at the beginning of a new stylistic phase, but at the same time on the threshold of the development of a completely new Art.” 6

  Berlin had been in the vanguard of the new approach to art for more than a decade. By the early 1890s the city was home to an avant-garde led by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and the Swedish writer August Strindberg. Munch was one of the great bellwethers of European modernism. In 1892, then twenty-nine and known in his native Norway as “Bizzarro,” he was invited by the Society of Berlin Artists, a private association, to exhibit fifty-five of his paintings and etchings at their autumn exhibition at the Architektenhaus. Bitter controversy ensued over Munch’s obsessive meditations on love, sex, melancholia and death: a Frankfurt newspaper called on “true believers” to rise up and condemn “that Nordic dauber and poisoner of Art.” 7 The members of Berlin’s Academy of Arts, a more conservative body of professional artists, ordered the show to be closed down after only a week—an edict that prompted Munch to mock his enemies as “a lot of terrible old painters who are beside themselves at the new trend.” 8

  One of Munch’s strongest supporters proved to be Franz Skarbina, then forty-three. A Berlin native, Skarbina had taught anatomical drawing and the science of perspective at the Academy of Arts but resigned his post in protest against Munch’s treatment. With a number of other disgruntled artists he founded the Gruppe der Elf (Group of Eleven), a collective that staged independent exhibitions and tried to foster a more understanding public for modern art. Its members were accused by Emperor Wilhelm ii—an arch-conservative when it came to matters artistic—of “poisoning the soul of the German nation.” 9 In 1896, however, a critic for the avant-garde journal Pan declared that the Group of Eleven had “helped the cause of modern art more than anything else that has been done to introduce modernity to Berlin—no small achievement, considering the lazy and stupid trust in the conventional that resists anything new, young and forceful.” 10

  Two years later, in 1898, the Group of Eleven expanded to become the Berlin Secession, a revitalizing force in German art that attracted many young painters into the city and staged controversial exhibitions. Over the next few years the Secession introduced Berliners to the work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky and Vincent Van Gogh. In 1902 Munch joined the Secession and exhibited, for the first time, the entirety of his Frieze of Life.

  Harris was undoubtedly aware of developments within the Continental avant-garde thanks to his studies with Munch’s champion Skarbina, who served on the executive committee of the Berlin Secession. He also saw their works, since by his own account he “went the rounds of the public and dealers’ galleries.” 11 During Harris’s time in Berlin, Munch would exhibit five times with the Berlin Secession and another six in private galleries around the city, and seventy-two works by Van Gogh were shown in Berlin between 1904 and 1907.12

  Harris did not entirely comprehend these new currents in European art. His small acquaintance with Canadian art had little prepared him for the galleries of Europe. “Modern paintings interested me most,” he wrote later of his years in Berlin. “I remember, however, while I was strongly attracted to them I did not understand Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne.” 13 This same baffled fascination would be experienced a few years later by another young Canadian art student, Emily Carr, who arrived in Paris in the summer of 1910. “Something in it stirred me,” she later wrote of the art she saw, “but I could not at first make head or tail of what it was about.” 14

  What neither Harris nor Carr understood at first was how these painters were exploring new visual modes. Many younger European painters were abandoning the techniques taught in the academies: the varnished surfaces, delicate brushwork and modulated tones of the Old Masters. They renounced efforts to create convincing illusions of three-dimensional space through shading, modelling and perspective; they emphasized instead the flatness of the picture plane and the sensuous manipulation of their materials. Brush marks and even the weave of the canvases were often left visible. Colours became more strident, and the more experimental added their pigments in small, separate touches. Gauguin worked with flat planes of bright colour thickly outlined in black, and Van Gogh sometimes applied paint in an impasto so thick that he might have been (and sometimes was) squeezing pigment onto his canvas straight from the tube. Such experimental and individualistic styles were sharply at odds with the tried-and-true modus operandi of the art academies.

  IF HE HAD little comprehension of these ideas and techniques at this early point in his career, Harris did absorb one aspect of modern art passed on to him by Franz Skarbina. An English writer described Berlin as a modern city that showed “the most complete application of science, order and method . . . to public life.” 15 But Skarbina did not see the city, least of all Berlin, as a utopia. He was among the German artists and intellectuals who deplored the poverty and inhumanity of the modern metropolis. A number of prominent European thinkers—Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel—were writing about the alienating effects of the urban environment. Tönnies distinguished between the Gemeinschaft (a community based on personal ties and fellow feeling) and the Gesellschaft (the rootlessness and impersonality of modern industrial society). Durkheim believed rural life was characterized by a unity of values, beliefs and sentiments that produced what he called “collective consciousness”—a cohesiveness that he believed could not exist in a large city.16

  Skarbina specialized in depictions of this rootlessness, showing downtrodden workers against the background of soot-and-steam cityscapes. He won a reputation for showing the poor and industrial areas unknown to the German middle classes and for rendering them in a style combining Realism with an Impressionist concern for light and atmosphere (he was widely praised by the critics for his ability to paint artificial light). One of his best-known works, The Matthiasstrasse in Hamburg (1891), featured a woman clutching a baby in a claustrophobic and ramshackle alley in the middle of a slum. In 1895 he exhibited Gleisanlage des Güterbahnhofs Weißensee (known as Railway Tracks in North Berlin) depicting an exhausted couple crossing the steam-filled rail yards outside Berlin’s Anhalter Station. Such works saw him celebrated as “Ein Berliner Realist.” 17

  Influenced by Skarbina’s choice of subject, as well as by his Impressionist technique and view of the metropolis as a place of poverty and despair, Harris sketched and painted a number of urban scenes in Berlin. He concentrated on the houses beside the River Spree and the shabby, sunless alleys that attracted Skarbina. In one of his watercolours, Buildings on the River Spree, a cart horse stands before the facades of riverside buildings whose picturesque details—shutters, dormer windows and steeply
pitched, snow-covered roofs—are offset by the grey sky and an air of desertion. The work shows obvious parallels with Skarbina’s Hof im Schnee (Courtyard in the Snow), painted in 1905 and undoubtedly seen by Harris in Skarbina’s studio. Like Skarbina, he painted his houses in a vertical rather than a horizontal format, exploring the effects of snow and failing light on the warm brown tones of the buildings.

  Dissatisfaction with the ugly and overcrowded metropolis led many German intellectuals to escape into the countryside to experience what one Berlin city planner extolled as “the incomparable joys of Mother Nature.” 18 The beauty of the German landscape was the subject of a loose group of artists known as Heimatkunstlers, or regional painters. Among them was one of Harris’s other teachers, Fritz von Wille, who concentrated his efforts on the Eifel region of Germany, portraying what one critic called “Nature with her vastness and grandeur.” 19 Harris was to discover this vastness and grandeur first-hand in the summer of 1906, when he went on a hiking holiday in the Austrian Alps, and then again the following summer in Bavaria, with his third instructor, Adolf Gustav Schlabitz. Harris found Schlabitz, then in his early fifties, “an interesting character” (Schlabitz played the flute as they hiked).20 He was, however, less adventurous as a painter than Skarbina. A member of neither the Group of Eleven nor the Berlin Secession, he painted mainly placid mountain landscapes of sunbathed, flora-covered alpine meadows.

  In Bavaria, Schlabitz introduced Harris to the German poet and landscapist Paul Thiem, whose unorthodox religious views (he was probably a theosophist) the young Canadian found “shocking and stirring.” 21 Thiem’s outrageous opinions were offset by his rather docile landscapes. Providing a counterpoint to the gritty urban subjects favoured by Skarbina, he painted the German countryside in a style intended to evoke what a review of one of his Berlin exhibitions called a “quiet German Heimatgefühl,” or sense of home.22 Thiem and other landscapists believed this sense of place and belonging, drastically eroded in a metropolis such as Berlin, could still be experienced among Germany’s forests and mountains.

  Many of these painters were influenced by the work of the great German landscapist Caspar David Friedrich. Forgotten for many decades, Friedrich was dramatically rediscovered in 1890, fifty years after his death, when a Norwegian art historian found many of his canvases gathering dust in a Dresden warehouse; in 1906 thirty-two of them went on show at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, a landmark exhibition that Harris almost certainly would have seen.23 Friedrich’s paintings typically projected a sense of the divine onto both natural and man-made phenomena—mountains, sunsets, ruined abbeys, solitary pine trees—in haunting and often austere landscapes. The fact that these remarkable canvases, with their lonely alpine peaks, Gothic churches and bleak Baltic shorelines, were seen as characteristically German (Friedrich was an ardent patriot who conveyed political symbolism through his landscapes) meant he was quickly celebrated as the foremost exponent of a national tradition: one critic called him “the most German of Germany’s painters.” 24

  Much later, Harris would claim that when he returned to Toronto from Germany, “my whole interest was in the Canadian scene. It was, in truth, as though I had never been to Europe. Any paintings, drawings or sketches I saw with a Canadian tang excited me more than anything I had seen in Europe.” 25 To a friend he later wrote that he “forgot the indoor studio-learning of Europe” virtually as soon as he returned to Canadian shores.26 Years after the fact he would claim that MacDonald’s little display of works in the Arts and Letters Club affected him more than “any paintings I had seen in Europe.” 27

  These were retrospective constructions that greatly overstated the case. Harris was eager, later in his career, to shake the dust of Europe from his shoes, to cover his artistic tracks and present himself as a wholly indigenous talent who was (as his letter put it) “simply dictated to by the environment and life I was born and brought up in.” 28 He would make no public acknowledgement of his debt to the modern styles and movements, or important teachers such as Skarbina, to which his years in Berlin had exposed him.

  But Harris took away from Berlin, when he finished his studies there in 1907, considerably more than his arduously acquired techniques in drawing and painting. He was exposed, in particular, to the contrast between the urban alienation painted by Skarbina and the more sacred life of the countryside, where both a stronger sense of belonging and (as Friedrich had shown) an idea of the supernatural could be discovered and cultivated. His two years in Berlin had also revealed to him the bitter rivalry between the “new, young and forceful” artists—exemplified by Skarbina’s Group of Eleven—and the “lazy and stupid trust in the conventional” that so many young German artists wished to overturn. They were lessons that, acknowledged or not, he would carry forth in the years ahead.

  BY THE END of 1911, when he first met J.E.H. MacDonald, Harris had been back in Toronto for three years. By this time he too was a family man struggling to earn a reputation as a painter. In 1910 he married an heiress named Trixie Phillips (“a nice, gay little thing,” according to a friend).29 Their son, also named Lawren, was born within the year. Determined to make his way as an artist, he was renting a studio above a grocery store at Yonge and Cumberland.

  Harris went on sketching expeditions to the Laurentians, the Haliburton Highlands and Lac Memphrémagog in Quebec. But his true passion after he returned from Berlin was cityscapes—images of urban poverty of the sort painted by Franz Skarbina. Toronto certainly had plenty of scenes of ugliness and destitution. Residents and visitors alike deplored the unsightly appearance of its poorer neighbourhoods. The lack of parks and the ill-favoured streets and buildings, together with the winter slush and summer dust, made Toronto, according to various observers, “squalid” and “contemptible.” The English-born landscapist F.M. Bell-Smith called it “third-rate” and “quite out of the race of modern cities.” 30

  Bell-Smith, ironically, had done one of the few compelling Toronto cityscapes. Better known as a painter of the Rockies, in 1894 he created his marvellous Lights of a City Street, a snapshot of the rain-slicked and newsboy-clamouring corner of King and Yonge. First shown to high acclaim in 1897, it was purchased by Simpsons and placed on display in the Palm Room of their department store at Queen and Yonge. For the most part, however, Toronto scenes were rare. Visitors to the city’s art exhibitions could feel they had closed the door behind them on their mundane urban world and entered a pleasingly rural wonderland of Muskoka shorelines, English cottages and Quebec sugar camps.

  Harris found artistic inspiration in the “squalid” and “contemptible” parts of Toronto. Although he was raised in a stately late-Victorian mansion on St. George Street, and although Toronto’s finest architect, Eden Smith, was building a large and comfortable Arts and Crafts house for him on Clarendon Avenue, it was districts such as the Ward, a notoriously poor enclave immediately south of Queen’s Park, that held a special fascination for him.

  The Ward was home to many Jewish and Italian immigrants who ran small businesses or worked in the sweatshops along Spadina Avenue. It was bounded on the east by Yonge Street and on the south by City Hall. In 1909 Augustus Bridle called it “the most cosmopolitan part of Toronto,” with “rows of blinking little modern shops” and “everywhere the shuffling, gabbling crowd.” A report in the Toronto Daily Star described it less appealingly as a place of “filth and disorder.” 31 Another writer remarked that it was “generally regarded by the respectable citizens of Toronto as a strange and fearful place into which it is unwise to enter even in daylight.” 32 The neighbourhood had long attracted the attention of social reformers—though never before that of an artist.

  In a reprise of his Berlin experiments, Harris made pencil sketches and paintings in the Ward. Urban painters such as The Eight, a group of American artists who specialized in gritty New York street scenes, used plunging perspectives and strong diagonals to emphasize the speed and vitality of the large modern metro
polis. Harris, however, approached his subject differently. He depicted Toronto’s terraces of houses flat to the picture plane, with no swirling crowds and no slashing perspectives. Toronto certainly possessed little of the dash and vitality of either New York or European capitals, and Harris was interested in offering a more intimate, meditative view of streets all but empty of traffic and inhabitants. The shuffling crowd mentioned by Bridle was absent, along with any social comment it might have broached. His interest, at least at this stage, was primarily aesthetic. In a work such as A Row of Houses, Wellington Street, he was merely attempting, he explained, “to depict the clear, hard sunlight of a Canadian noon in winter.” 33

  THE RENDERING OF the transient effects of these impalpable phenomena such as sunlight and shadows, together with their “Canadian tang,” was what had apparently attracted Harris to MacDonald’s paintings at the Arts and Letters Club. Harris was greatly exaggerating when he claimed that MacDonald’s works at this point showed “something new in painting in Canada.” For the past two decades, many Canadian artists (especially those who spent time in Paris) had been sketching out of doors and depicting the Canadian landscape in an Impressionistic style.34 But his admiration for MacDonald clearly extended to the personal level, and the two men quickly became friends. They already had a number of mutual acquaintances, since Harris knew Grip employees such as Fergus Kyle and J.W. “Bill” Beatty. Harris had previously gone on sketching expeditions with both Kyle and Beatty, and so it was natural that he and MacDonald should likewise begin working together.

  The two men’s first expedition, sometime early in 1912, appears to have been one to the Toronto waterfront near the foot of Bathurst Street, near Fort York. This industrial zone, bisected by the railway and its sidings, was home to a silver-plate company and a stove foundry. Nearby, on land where Lake Ontario had been infilled, were lumberyards, a cattle market and the premises of Consumers Gas Company, with its two gasometers. These great cylindrical monoliths distilled and stored coal gas.