Art

ART 381 Man may not have created nobly in contemporary times, but he has constructed a body of myth and legend of rare richness. A country built on the last of the world's great gold rushes could not sink into listless mediocrity, at least for a century or two. Mr McCourt pleasantly records many of the numberless tales which are the currency not only of the tourist trade, but, happily, of the Yukoners themselves. The Northwest Territories is not like that. The countryside suffers in the book's comparison, and the human comedy is not as easy to hear. The Northwest Territories has its heroes and villains, often of gigantic proportions, but perhaps it is harder for average Canadians to identify themselves with them, than with those 50,000 who once sought in the farthest reaches of the Yukon the escape from reality that man usually cherishes but rarely seeks. The traveller in search of an itinerary could well be persuaded by this travelogue to go to the Yukon. If he does, he will find The Yukon and Northwest Territories a good companion which will increase his thirst for farther places and more books. He won't be disappOinted in the trip, but he should feel a sense of loss if he misses the chance to go also to the Northwest Territories. The scene is unconventional, sometimes trying, but in its remoteness, in its proportions, it has a mystery, an unexplainable attraction. And above all, the north is a part of Canada. Mr McCourt has done well to bring it closer. (R.A.J. PHILLIPS) ART The flood of art books borne on the tide of national and provincial centennials has dwindled to a mere half-dozen this year. Of those six, three are regional-historical-documentary, and three are concerned with the visual arts more or less directly. Given the cost of prodUCing a fine illustrated book at present-day prices, and given, too, the relatively small market for books of purely Canadian interest, it may seem a little captious to complain that not one of these books is devoted to the work of a living Canadian painter or sculptor. However, I feel strongly enough On the subject to insist on a small squeak of protest, in view of a longheld opinion that the strength of this country, culturally speaking, has for the last decade been overwhelmingly in the visual arts (in which I naturally include all forms of photography and television). Having got that off my chest I have to say that for a few weeks after 382 LETTERS IN CANADA Macmillan produced Lawren Harris (ed. Bess Harris and R.G.P. Colgrove, with introd. by Northrop Frye, Macmillan of Canada, xii, 148, $20.00) the subject of the book was indeed still alive, so that technically my complaint is ill-grounded, but why have we had to wait until the Group of Seven is reduced to one Immortal before we can read well-produced scholarly studies of their lives and works? Of the whole Group that survived into old age only Harris seems to have maintained a connection, however tenuous, with world movements in art. After the death of Thomson he seems, in retrospect, to have emerged as the only painter in that circle whose art developed as he grew in age and experience. His early Teutonic training must have called forth a response that was already there to be evoked, because all his life his art shows a marked affinity with that of northern Europe. (I have heard a dozen European connoisseurs react to their first sight of a Lawren Harris painting with a startled 'Jugendstil!') And this tendency may well have been reinforced by an attraction towards American painters like Demuth and Georgia O'Keeffe, to judge from such works as the National Gallery's 'Light House, Father Point' and the postWorld War II non-objective paintings. This book - the best that I have so far seen devoted to a Canadian artist - does ample justice to the paintings. More than seventy plates, all save a handful of drawings in full and faithful colour, cover nearly sixty years of his working life. It is difficult...