Daily Art Fixx

visual arts blog, painting, drawing, sculpture, illustration and more!

René Magritte: 1898-1967

By

magritteBorn on November 21, 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, René François Ghislain Magritte was a major figure in the Surrealist movement and is considered by many to be the greatest Belgian artist of the 20th century. From 1916 to 1918, Magritte studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels under Constant Montald and his early paintings were Impressionistic in style. Between 1919 and 1924, Magritte was influenced by Futurism and abstraction under the influence of Cubo-Futurism. He was particularly impressed by the work of Giorgio de Chirico. However, “his doubts about abstract art led him to reintroduce more overt imagery into his work.”

By 1921, Magritte had completed his service in the Belgian infantry after which he worked as a draughtsman for a wallpaper factory and a poster and advertisement designer. In 1922, he married Georgette Berger whom he had known since childhood. In 1926, Magritte gained a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels which enabled him to paint full-time. He had his first solo exhibition there in 1927. From 1927 to 1930, Magritte lived in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, near Paris, where he associated with Surrealists including Jean Arp, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard, and Joan Miró. From the 1920s, Magritte also experimented with black-and-white still photography, “borrowing subjects from his paintings in order to record unconventional staged situations.”

“Magritte played an important role in the foundation of the primarily literary Belgian Surrealist group in 1926. He was also active in the formation of the group’s theories, which were developed independently from those of the French Surrealists. While the French strove for a transcendent experience of reality through the expression of the unconscious, Magritte tried to reach the same goal by consciously disrupting conventions for representing reality. In order to express his views about mysterious and inexplicable levels of experience beyond surface appearances, he changed the conventional order of objects, altered form, created new objects and redefined the relationship of words to images.”

Magritte is known for his “standardized human types” especially the man in the bowler hat who makes numerous appearances in his paintings. “Words and texts also began to play an important part in the paintings as a way of provoking an analysis of conventional assumptions as in the Treachery of Images (1929), in which a precise image of a pipe is accompanied by an inscription, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, that draws our attention to the essential difference between an actual object and its representation in two dimensions.”

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Magritte and his brother Paul opened Studio Dongo in Brussels where they produced work for advertising and publicity including stands, displays, posters, advertising texts, drawings, and photo-montages. Magritte exhibited only twice at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels during this time. In 1938, his friend E. L. T. Mesens purchased the stock of Galerie la Centaure and moved to London, where he became director of the London Gallery. Through this action, Magritte gained greater recognition in Great Britain.

In reaction to WWII, Magritte adopted a more colourful, “painterly” style. “From 1943 even making use of a parody of Impressionism with lighter colours, while maintaining the Surrealist character of the imagery. Although he was consciously mocking Impressionism, such works were strongly criticized in Surrealist circles.” Following this, Magritte created a whimsical body of oil paintings and gouaches which he exhibited in his first solo show in Paris at the Galerie du Faubourg. The style of these works were somewhat related to Fauvism and were partly a way of “attacking what he considered the superficiality of the French public.”

In 1948, Magritte, already having considerable recognition as a part of the Surrealist group, became internationally famous when he signed a contract with New York Dealer Alexandre Iolas. From 1953, he exhibited often at the galleries of Alexander Iolas in New York, Paris and Geneva. Retrospectives were held in 1954 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and in 1960 at the Museum for Contemporary Arts, Dallas, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. From 1956, Magritte also produced a series of short and often humorous Surrealist films, using friends as directors and actors. Magritte’s critical and popular recognition continued to grow during and after the 1960s. In 1965, Magritte traveled to New York for the first time for his retrospective at Museum of Modern Art.

René Magritte died from cancer of the pancreas on August 15, 1967. His work has influenced generations of artists, including Pop, minimalist, and conceptual art.

Sources: MoMA, Wikipedia, Guggenheim

Jean Paul Lemieux: 1904 – 1990

By

Jean Paul LemieuxJean Paul Lemieux (1904-1990), painter, illustrator, teacher and art critic is one of Canada’s, and Quebec’s, most heralded international artists. Recognized for his painting of the landscape and cities of Quebec, Lemieux was received as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1966. The following year he received the Canada Council Medal, and in 1968 he became a Companion of the Order of Canada. His paintings are in high demand and have demanded multi-million dollar bids to obtain them.

Family and Education

Jean Paul Lemieux was born into a well-to-do family on November 18, 1904. His father, Joseph Flavien, was a Greenshields Ltd agent, and was often away on business. Lemieux and his sister, Marguerite and brother, Henri were raised primarily by their mother, Corinne Blouin, and grew up with all of the privileges of the affluent English- and French-speaking communities in Quebec city. While they wintered in the city, long happy summers were spent at a countryside resort. Inspired by a visiting artist and the waterfall by their summer abode, Lemiuex painted his first watercolour in 1914.

In 1916, Corinne and the children moved to Berkeley, California due to the health issues of Marguerite. The family moved back to Montreal the following year however, where Jean Paul attended College Mont-Saint-Louis and then Loyola College, all the while taking watercolour lessons. In 1925, Lemieux apprenticed in the studio of Marc-Aurele de Foy Suzor-Cote. In 1926, Lemieux enrolled at École des beaux-arts de Montréal where he won several awards and distinctions, but he had his own mind about painting and only one of his teachers, Edwin Holgate, was to make a lasting impact on him. Both Holgate, who taught engraving, and Lemieux were particularly interested in illustration, and Lemieux illustrated two novels, La Pension Leblanc by Robert Choquette (1927) and Le Manoir Hanté by Régis Roy (1928).

Upon graduating in 1929, Lemieux went to Paris for a year to study illustration and life drawing at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Colarossi. On his return to Montreal, he and his friends launched JANSS, a commercial and advertising art company, but it was only to operate for six months in the tough post-crash economy. After a brief visit, to his sister who was now married and living in California, and to museums and art galleries in New York and Chicago, Lemieux returned to Canada to earn his teaching diploma at the École des beaux-arts in Montreal.

While studying, Lemieux continued to paint and he began to exhibit his work of portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes. His style was “influenced by the aesthetic of the Group of Seven and by the regionalist principles of American Social Realism; from Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) he assimilated a rigorous approach, and from Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), the use of symbolism”.

The Artist, the Teacher and the Critic

In 1935, upon graduation, Lemieux was hired as an assistant teacher of drawing and design at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. In 1936, he joined the staff of École du meuble, which included Maurice Gagnon and Marcel Parizeau. He moved again the following year to the École des beaux-arts de Québec, in Quebec City. In June of 1937, Lemieux married Madeleine Des Rosiers, a fellow artist, and former classmate.

The couple successfully exhibited together, each selling one painting to the Musée de la province de Québec (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec), but Madeleine gave up her career for her husband’s which was already gaining attention. In its critique of a 1938 show, La Presse described Lemieux as “the most impressive painter of the younger generation.”

Along with teaching and painting, Lemieux also worked as an art critic from 1935 until 1945, writing for magazine and newspapers including Le Jour, Regards, Maritime Art, and Canadian Art. Writing gave him a broader public voice to share his support of “the transition to modernity in art, the necessity of openness to contemporary European and North American trends and the democratization of art”.

By the mid-1940s, Lemieux had rejected the direction of Canadian painting which was “moving farther away from the figurative”. He was creating works that satirized urban and rural life, and that drew from the Italian primitives and naïve art. The years from 1940 to 1946 would become known as his primitivist period. Despite his nonconformist style at the time, he was considered “an artist in the first rank of young Canadian painters”, and his work was included in a UNESCO show, with work from 25 other countries, taking Lemieux to an international level as a painter.

Lemieux and his wife supported the retention of Quebec culture and in the social-realist vein of the time, Lemieux lampooned the English bourgeois. However, he began to feel afraid of appearing reactionary, and as a result Lemieux was publicly quiet from 1947 to 1951, only producing studio works and some oil landscape paintings. His return in 1951 marked a new personal vision for landscapes that no longer reflected the Group of Seven or the American Social Realist painters. His more classic and formal landscapes with haunting, rigid figures were further developed during his sabbatical in France from 1954 to 1955, supported by a grant from the Royal Society of Canada.

A Growing Reputation

Lemieux’s reputation in Canada and internationally grew significantly over the next ten years with solo exhibitions in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City, participation in biennial exhibitions organized by the National Gallery of Canada and in exhibitions at the Bienal of São Paulo, the Brussels International Exposition, the Pittsburgh International Exposition, and the Venice Biennale. His work was also included in exhibitions of Canadian painting in Warsaw, at MoMA in New York, at the Tate Gallery in London, and at the Musée Galliera in Paris.

In 1965, after 30 years of teaching and inspiring young painters of Canada, Jean Paul Lemieux retired from the École des beaux-arts de Québec to focus solely to painting.

In 1967, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts toured a retrospective of his work, to the Musée du Québec (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec) and the National Gallery of Canada, in celebration of Canada’s Centennial. The same year, Lemieux was commissioned to paint a mural in the Charlottetown Confederation Centre and ten years later, the official portrait of the then Governor General of Canada, Jules Léger, and his wife. Lemieux was only the second Canadian artist commissioned to paint an official portrait of a reigning monarch. The unveiling was met with some surprise due to the painting’s relative casualness, but Lemieux described it as “a Canadian painting, nothing to do with the formal English representations of the Queen”.

A Return and a Transformation

In the 1970s and 80s Lemieux returned to illustration with Gabrielle Roy’s, La Petite Poule D’eau (1971), Louis Hémon’s, Maria Chapdelaine (1981), and in 1985, Canada-Canada, a collection of writings by prominent Canadian authors.

In 1974, The Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs organized an exhibition of Lemieux’s work in Moscow, Leningrad, Prague and Paris.

The 70s and 80s would see a dark transformation in Lemieux’s work, and though the works were shown in Quebec and Montreal, they were largely ignored by the public and the critics. “The serenity and nostalgia of his classic period (1956–1970) gave way to a new, tragic Expressionist period (1970–1990)…with works [that] communicated his existential distress about the future of humanity.” “The haunting silence and sense of unease of his paintings [of the 50s and 60s] became, in the 1970s, horrific visions of ruined cities, annihilated by nuclear attacks.”

Despite this shift, his entire body of work, and his national and international reputation would earn him honorary degrees from Universite Laval (1969), Bishop’s University (1970), the Universite of Montreal (1980) and Concordia University (1985).

Jean Paul Lemieux died in Quebec City on December 7, 1990, at the age of 86, shortly before the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

Sources: gallery.ca, mcmichael.com, aci-iac.ca, mnbaq.org

 

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 180

By

Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary art and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Aurora Robson, DZIA, Adonna Khare, Emilia Dubicki, Hiroshi Watanabe, Nicole Dextras, Darryl Cox, Jr., Lorraine Roy and a video by Istanbul-based new media agency Ouchhh. Inspired by the iconic work of Buckminster Fuller, AVA_V2 / Particle Physics_Scientific_Installation was created by using projection mapping on a hemisphere structure made of semi transparent fabric, requiring the installation to have six projectors. We developed our own technology which enabled the mapping to be projected in all 360 degrees. This installation and its structure were designed with assembly/disassembly in mind, thus allowing the installation to be re-performed anywhere in same conditions.

Claude Monet: 1840 – 1926

By

Claude MonetBorn on November 14, 1840, in Paris, France, Oscar Claude Monet was a founder and leader of the Impressionist art movement in France. The name Impressionism is derived from his 1873 painting Impression, Sunrise. Monet grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast. His mother died in 1857 and it was his aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, who supported his desire to become an artist.

From 1862 to 1864, Monet studied art intermittently in Paris under Charles Gleyre where he met fellow students Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley. Also during this time, he developed a friendship with the painter Johann Barthold Jongkind that influenced his direction as a landscape painter. In these early years, Monet became known for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for a small fee. In 1856 or 1857, he met the artist Eugène Boudin who introduced Monet to plein-air painting.

Monet gained some recognition in 1865, when two of his works were exhibited at the Salon. The latter half of the 1860s was a period of experimentation for Monet. He pursued his interested in contemporary subject matter and “he further explored the nature of Realism as embodied in plein-air painting.” However, Monet’s financial difficulties led him to return to Le Havre, leaving his pregnant companion, Camille-Léonie Doncieux, in Paris. She gave birth to their first son, Jean in 1867, and their second son Michel in 1868. The couple married in 1870.

In the summer of 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke out and Monet fled with his family to London  that autumn to avoid conscription. Monet remained in London for about nine months, and he painted numerous views of the Thames River. He reconnected with Camille Pissarro and met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his first dealer.  After spending the summer painting in Holland in 1871, Monet returned to Argenteuil, an industrial town and boating centre on the Seine, west of Paris. He remained here until 1878.

Monet joined with other artists in the formation of the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs etc, which held its first exhibition in April 1874. Monet showed his painting Impression, Sunrise and the group emerged from the exhibition with the name “the Impressionists” dubbed by the critic Louis Leroy.

In 1878, Monet’s financial troubles and his wife’s illness led the family to enter a household arrangement in Vétheuil with the family of former patron Ernest Hoschedé. After Camille’s death in 1879, Monet and Alice Hoschedé continued to live together, waiting until Ernest Hoschedé died before marrying in 1892.

Monet exhibited with the Impressionists intermittently and showed his work at the Salon in 1880.  He had a solo exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1883, and at several of Georges Petit’s Expositions Internationales de Peinture. In 1889, Galerie Georges Petit held a major retrospective of his work, showing 145 paintings. In 1891, Durand-Ruel had an exhibition of Monet’s first series paintings, Grainstacks, which were met with great critical acclaim.

“By 1890 Monet was financially secure enough to purchase a house at Giverny, later adding adjacent land and installing both the water-lily garden and Japanese bridge, which he would later famously paint in series. Over the next decade he completed more series studies of the lily garden at Giverny, which he continued to enlarge.”

“From 1903 to 1908 Monet concentrated on the enlarged pond with its floating pads and blossoms set in orderly clusters against the reflections of trees and sky within its depths. The results were seen in the largest and most unified series to date, a suite of 48 canvases known as Waterlilies, a Series of Waterscapes shown at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in May 1909.”

After the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and subsequent death of his son Jean in 1914, Monet began work on an expansive new garden studio, in which he would fabricate his Grandes-Décorations, the large-scale water-lily series that he worked on until his death. He continued his work despite suffering increasingly from cataracts, for which he had three operations on his right eye in 1923.

In 1918 Monet announced that he would donate Grandes-Décorations to the State. The Orangerie at the far end of the Tuileries Gardens from the Musée du Louvre was decided as the location for the murals.

Claude Monet died on December 5, 1926 of lung cancer at the age of 86. He is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. On May 16. 1927, five months after Monet’s death, Grandes-Décorations opened to the public for the first time. The Musée Claude Monet, his house and gardens at Giverny, was refurbished and opened to the public in 1981.

For a full biography of Claude Monet, visit the source links below.

Sources: MoMA, Guggenheim, Wikipedia, Artcyclopedia

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 179

By

Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary art and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Lisa Occhipinti, Aaron Kinnane, Claudio Fuente, Diane Cooper, Henrik Uldalen, Michal Lukasiewi, Crystal Wagner, and Felipe Foncueva.

 

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 178

By

Your Weekly Mixx! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of contemporary art and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. This week, we feature the work of Claudio Fuente, Coista Magarakis, Pastel, Hector Frank,  Jaqueline Rush Lee, Aida Muluneh, Monique Orsini, Stéphane Halleux, and a video featuring the three-dimensional art objects of  Chie Hitotsuyama whose works use the material of old newspapers that stopped serving their role as an information medium. She breathes artistic life and value into those newspapers and repurposes them into new shapes. (via Vimeo)

Francis Bacon: 1909-1992

By

Francis BaconBorn on October 28th, 1909, in Dublin, Ireland, Francis Bacon was one of the most innovative, powerful and disturbing artists of the period following World War II. At a time when art was dominated by abstract styles, he painted the human figure and was one of the first artists to depict overtly homosexual themes.

Bacon had very little formal education, partly due to chronic asthma that he suffered with his entire life. Leaving home in 1926, Bacon traveled to London and Berlin, and then Paris where he lived for a year and a half, and where his interest in painting began.

In 1929, Bacon returned to London and became an interior decorator and furniture designer, and experimented with drawing and watercolour painting. His furniture was primarily Art Deco in style using mainly stainless steel and glass. Despite some success, Bacon found it difficult to make a living from his design or his paintings. Although one of his earliest oil paintings, Crucifixion was reproduced in Herbert Read’s book Art Now, by 1934 Bacon was discouraged and did  little painting in the late 1930s. He supported himself instead with odd jobs including operating an illegal casino. Very few of Bacon’s early paintings survived as he destroyed many of his early works that he thought to be unsatisfactory.

During World War II, Bacon was unfit for military service and turned to painting full time in 1943. In 1944, he completed his first major canvas, a triptych entitled “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.” In this and the works that followed,  “Bacon combined horrific imagery with traditional religious or literary sources, depicting crucifixions, screaming popes, and tortured bodies as he transcribed the brutality and isolation of those pushed to the limits of endurance. In doing so, he expanded the figurative tradition of Western painting.” (Hishorn)

From 1948 on, Bacon preferred painting on the reverse (unprimed) side of his canvas which suited his technique. He found the surface more absorbent and liked the matt effect of paint sinking into the weave of the canvas. He discovered this method by chance after he had run out of materials and was compelled to use the back of an already painted canvas.

From the mid-1940s to the 1950s, Bacon’s work was influenced by Surrealism. The human figure remained Bacon’s principal subject, however in the 1950s he made several paintings of animals and a small series of African landscapes and animals. These were partly inspired by two visits to South Africa and Cairo from 1950–52. From 1953 on, Bacon began to develop a less distorted style that was more directly based on images of contemporary life and sometimes on specific friends or acquaintances. Most of the works from this period until 1957 were painted on dark inky blue backgrounds with contrasts of thick and thin paint, with the flesh colours delicately smeared and smudged onto a stained background.

Bacon’s work in the late 1950s and early 1960s was partly influenced by his decision to paint a series of variations of van Gogh’s picture “Painter on the Road to Tarascon”. Initially the paintings were very dark in tone, but in 1957 he created six versions that are filled with light and colour.

Bacon’s first solo exhibition outside England was held in 1953 at Durlacher Brothers, New York. In 1954, his work was featured in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and his first retrospective was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1955. Bacon was given a solo show at the São Paulo Bienal in 1959. In 1962, the Tate Gallery, London, organized a Bacon retrospective, a modified version of which traveled to Mannheim, Turin, Zurich, and Amsterdam.

In 1964, Bacon began a relationship with 39-year-old Eastender George Dyer, a petty criminal with a prison record. Dyer was said to be insecure, an alcoholic, appearance-obsessed and never really fitting in Francis’ circle. The relationship was stormy and in 1971, on the eve of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Paris Grand Palais, Dyer was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates.  In 1974, Bacon met John Edwards with whom he formed a lasting friendship.

Other important exhibitions of his work were held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1963 and the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971; paintings from 1968 to 1974 were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1975.

Bacon spent considerable periods of time in Paris during the 1970s, and his biography on his life and work was first published in 1975. From 1977-89, solo exhibitions and retrospectives of Bacon’s work were held around the world including Madrid, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto and Nagoya, and Washington D.C. In 1985, the Tate Gallery, London again held a major retrospective with 125 works and the director’s statement that the artist was the ‘greatest living painter’. In 1988, a retrospective of 22 works was held in the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It was the first show by a major Western artist to be mounted in the Soviet Union.

During the 1980s, Bacon’s simplified his pictorial language. His palette ranged between paintings with vibrant red/orange backgrounds and those with greys, creams and pale blues.

Francis Bacon died of a heart attack on April 28, 1992 while vacationing in Spain. He bequeathed his entire estate to John Edwards who in turn, donated the contents of Bacon’s studio to the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin. The studio contents were moved and the studio reconstructed in the gallery.

Sources: Hishorn Museum, MoMA, Francis-Bacon.com, Wikipedia

Roy Lichtenstein: 1923-1997

By

Roy Lichtenstein, Left: In the Car - 1963 | Middle: Woman with Flowered Hat, 1963 | Right: Nurse, 1964 All images © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Roy LichtensteinRoy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is primarily identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery lifted from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s, he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention. (from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation) For in-depth information about Lichtenstein’s life and works, visit the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation website.

The nine-minute video below, Roy Lichtenstein: Diagram of an Artist, from the TATE  brings together archival footage of Lichtenstein. at home and at work in his studio, as well as interviews with his wife Dorothy and friend Frederic Tuten, to create an intimate portrait of the artist.

Image credit: Roy Lichtenstein, Left: In the Car – 1963 | Middle: Woman with Flowered Hat, 1963 | Right: Nurse, 1964  All images © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Lawren Harris: 1885-1970

By

Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris, April 25, 1926, photographed by M.O. Hammond

Lawren Stewart Harris (1885–1970), one of Canada’s most important and influential painters, was also the driving force behind the famous Group of Seven, and the founding member and first president of the Canadian Group of Painters. Through his life and work, he inspired three generations of artists to paint unbridled by convention, and along with his contemporaries, changed the art of a nation.

A Child of Privilege
Lawren Harris was born on October 23, 1885 in Brantford, Ontario, into a well-to-do and well-connected family. “The unusual name Lawren was the consequence of parental compromise: his mother wanted to call him Lawrence; his father preferred Lorne.” His grandfather had founded a farm machinery business which merged in 1891 with a rival company and become the giant manufacturer Massey-Harris Co. Ltd. His father, Thomas Morgan, worked as the secretary of the business and his mother Annie was a minister’s daughter. The family was Baptist and Lawren’s childhood was spent in an affluent and religious household.

When Lawren was just nine, his father died of kidney failure and the family moved to Toronto. Lawren attended St. Andrew’s College, a private boy’s school, Central Technical School and the University of Toronto. From his early years he had a penchant for art and during his teenage years, and on, he painted incessantly, searching for his own style and meaning in art. In 1904, he travelled to Berlin, Germany to further his art studies. Over the next four years he took advantage of his liberty to pursue whatever attracted him and he took up the violin, sketched on the banks of the Spree, and went hiking in the Alps.

A Wealthy Young Man and Ardent Artist
In 1908, Harris returned to Canada, a young man confronted and grappling with profound juxtapositions.  He belonged to the wealthy establishment and yet railed against convention. He was raised as a Christian but had been introduced to theosophy in Germany. He saw his country as new and modern, and yet the art of the time was a traditional European-style. He was an artist dedicated to his craft, yet he did not have to struggle to survive as did many of his contemporaries. He was a rich man capable of collecting the best art on offer, but he strove to be an artist who could, through art, change the way his countrymen saw and depicted Canada.

For the next two few years, as always unrestricted by financial concerns, he sketched in the Laurentians, in  Haliburton and in Lac-Memphrémagog, Québec, as well as drawing and painting that which he knew well, the houses in Toronto. His Ward paintings became known for their hopeful and colourful depiction of the downtown homes that were in fact quite gray and rundown, many without running water or sewage systems. The area was a stark contrast to Lawren’s own life of luxury. While “working” as an artist, he mingled as a social equal with bankers,  industrialists and doctors, and met his future wife. Beatrice “Trixie” Phillips was a young socialite, the daughter of a millionaire, and the pair wed in 1910 and had three children—Lawren Jr., Margaret and Howard.

Scandinavian art at the Albright Knox Art Gallery 1913One of Lawren’s favourite places was the newly formed Arts and Letters Club, essentially an elite boys’ club for Toronto society. Many of Toronto arts establishments were conceived at the club and it was a magnet for writers and artists. One of those artists was Jim MacDonald, who launched an exhibit of oil sketches of the Canadian North which attracted Harris’s interest. He and MacDonald became fast friends and shared their mutual interest in the American transcendentalists (MacDonald had named his son Thoreau). MacDonald introduced Harris to his illustrator colleagues—Arthur Lismer, Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, Fred Varley and Tom Thomson—names now associated with the Group of Seven. They also included A. Y. Jackson, a Montreal-native and fellow artist, who they met at the club. In January 1913, Harris and MacDonald took a train to the Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox) in Buffalo, to see an exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian art. That one exhibition would inspire them to create a new art for Canada, and influence their work for years to come.

lawren-harris-group-of-seven-studio-building-1913-national-gallery-of-canada-archives

Studio Building (1913) –  National Gallery of Canada Archives

The group met regularly and synthesized around the idea of a new art movement in and for Canada. In their midst was the man who had the means to support this bold and rebellious venture. The first step was providing a place for them to work and to live if necessary. In 1913, Harris hired the architect Eden Smith to build the Studio Building for Canadian Art. The building cost $60,000, and Harris along with his crony James MacCallum, a Toronto ophthalmologist and art collector, foot the bill.

“The work they (the group) produced was visceral, vivid and controversial.”  They became known in the press as the Algonquin School (because of their paintings of the north). Critics were extraordinarily harsh at first saying that they lacked skill and that their paintings were like “a gargle or glob of porridge” and dubbed “The Hot Mush School.” by art critic H. F. Gadsby.

The First Great War
The First World War paused the work of the group. Some became war artists and others saw active duty overseas. Harris’s heart condition kept him in Canada at Camp Borden in Barrie where he taught musketry.

Already deeply saddened by the unexpected death of Tom Thomson in 1917, the death of Harris’s only sibling, Howard, a decorated veteran, in France at just 31 years old, impacted Harris profoundly. On May 1, 1918, Harris was discharged from the Army, suffering from depression, chronic sleeplessness and confusion. He found a way out through the spiritualism that he had first discovered in Germany. He joined the Toronto Theosophical Society, quit drinking and smoking, and gave lectures on theosophy and art.

A Driving Force for Canadian Art

Group of Seven Exhibition Catalogue -1920 Art Gallery of Ontario (Art Museum of Toronto)

Group of Seven Exhibition Catalogue -1920 Art Gallery of Ontario (Art Museum of Toronto)

Within a month of his discharge from the army, Harris with renewed inspiration, organized the first of the “kitted-out boxcar” trips to Algoma, Ontario. Though born a privileged city boy, he loved and felt at home in the wilds of Canada. This love of the untouched landscapes reignited his passion for a new art for Canada. He fiercely believed that art could shape Canada’s identity. And to that end, he bankrolled the first official Group of Seven exhibition in 1920 at the Art Gallery of Toronto.

The last Algoma trip was in 1921, when Harris and A.Y. Jackson travelled to Lake Superior’s North Shore. Harris’s large spiritual paintings of a barren landscape, burned years earlier, became his trademark. “By the early 1920s, Harris had developed into a magnificent landscape painter… he reduced the shapes of mountains, shoreline, trees, lakes and clouds, always parallel to the picture plane, to their essentials for an austere, monumental effect.” And he was not alone in the philosophy and direction of his art. Kandinsky and American Transcendentalist writers such as Emerson and Whitman were inspiring artists internationally. “Harris’s landscapes now grew increasingly non-representational. By the late ’20s, he’d turned away from the style that made him famous and advocated on behalf of abstract art.”

In 1926, Harris joined the newly formed Société Anonyme, an organization founded by Katherine Dreier, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp to promote avant-garde art. In their show, The International Exhibition of Modern Art, Harris’s work hung alongside that of Pablo Picasso and Georgia O’Keefe, and his was the only Canadian work included in the exhibition.

In 1930, in a letter to Emily Carr, a fellow painter, he wrote, “The true artist is outside of social recognition…. Society lives by rule, creed, what is and what isn’t done. The artist lives from within not without.” That same year Harris travelled and produced his famous paintings of the Arctic.

A Personal Scandal and Exodus
In 1934, after 24 years of marriage, Harris left Trixie to marry Bess Housser, a painter who had worked and exhibited with the group, and the wife of a school chum. The decision resulted in Harris never again residing in the place of his youth and great influence. To avoid the fallout of the scandal, the couple left Canada and moved to New Hampshire. Harris joined Dartmouth College as artist-in-residence.

In the spring of 1938 they moved again, this time to Sante Fe, New Mexico where Harris was part of the founding of the Transcendental Painting Group in 1939. In 1940, they returned to Canada, but four provinces away, to Vancouver, British Columbia. Harris visited Toronto in 1948 for a retrospective of his work at the Art Gallery of Toronto, the first ever for a living Canadian artist. Over the next three decades, his work in Vancouver continued to explore abstraction inspired by nature.

Lawren Harris died on January 29, 1970. His body is buried in a small cemetery alongside Bess, who died a few months earlier, and some of the other Group of Seven members, on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario.

A National Legacy
In 1948 and 1963 Harris was the subject of two retrospectives. After his death, the Art Gallery of Ontario produced the exhibition Urban Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes, 1906–1930 in 1978 and in 1982–83, a national travelling exhibition of his drawings. In 2000, the first solo exhibition in the U.S. was at the Americans Society Art Gallery in New York. In 2015, a touring exhibition of Harris’ work, curated by American actor, comedian and writer Steve Martin, opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California. Much of Lawren Harris’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

Harris’s own work and the work done by the Group of Seven, supported and encouraged by Harris, is now considered to be the iconic art of Canada, just as Harris had envisioned. The group’s work is highly sought after by collectors and by the turn of the 20th century was already demanding millions at auction. The love affair with the Group seems to be ongoing. Harris’s 1930 painting “Mountain and Glacier” sold at auction for $4.6 million in 2015.

The film below, Where the Universe Sings, is an intimate portrait of the artist’s life and the expansive landscapes that inspired him. (White Pine Pictures in association with TVO)

The images and videos in this post are for educational use only and may not be reproduced without the owner or copyright holder’s consent.

Sources: gallery.ca, macleans.ca,  50years.mcmichael.com, torontolife.com, mcmichael.com, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca

Robert Rauschenberg: Combines

By

Robert Rauschenberg portraitPainting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.) —Robert Rauschenberg (1959)

Born on October 22, 1925, Robert Rauschenberg was an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer and performance artist. While never fully part of any movement, he acted as an important bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art and can be credited as one of the major influences in the return to favour of representational art in the USA. (via Tate)

In the video below, artist Harry Dodge, USC Professor of Art History, Megan R. Luke and MOCA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth discuss Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines produced in the mid-1950s to early 1960s.  Combine is a term Rauschenberg invented to describe a series of works that combine aspects of painting and sculpture. Virtually eliminating all distinctions between these artistic categories, the Combines either hang on the wall or are freestanding. With the Combine series, Rauschenberg endowed new significance to ordinary objects by placing them in the context of art.

Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008, on Captiva Island, Florida. Learn more and view images of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines on the Rauschenberg Foundation website and at the source links below.

Sources: MOCA, Rauschenberg Foundation, SFMOMA