Light for a Cold Land: Lawren Harris's Work and Life – An Interpretation by Peter Larisey, SJ (review)

HUMANITIES 347 subtends it. Students will find it useful. Buffs will find it a convenient compilation of information now available only in scattered form. Filmgoers will gain a salutary lesson about the difference between the creator and the work. If it is not the book I hoped for, in other words, this book was still well worth doing. If only because of the extent to which it provides a much-needed complement to the emerging body of Cronenberg critique, in fact, a less petty person than myself would be grateful that ECW mounted the project - and that Morris carried it off as well as he did. (GAILE MCGREGOR) Peter Larisey, 5J. Light for a Cold Land: Lawren Harris's Work and Life - An Interpretation Dundum Press 1993. xiii, 199 $49.99 cloth This is an ambivalent book, divided in its methodology between art analysis and biography, and in the author's assessment of Lawren Harris's art. This is not to say that the study is unsuccessful. Peter Larisey's research is detailed, the writing clear, and his affection for the artist admirable. The book's illustrations, and particularly the many colour plates, are handsome and well integrated into the critical discussion . No one has recounted this crucial Canadian modernist's whole career in such detail before, nor has any other art historian sustained a discussion of the works of the artist's .whole oeuvre. In the absence of sufficient critical debate about Harris, Larisey showed courage to attempt a short book of this scope and ambition. A problem Lawren Harris poses for a critic is that he was a productive and often changing artist from the 1910s to the 1960s. This long maturity, comparable in span to Matisse, took him, as Larisey measures his career, through two major phases as a Canadian landscape artist (both of them as a founding member of the Group of Seven), and then, after about 1930, two further phases as an abstractionist, first in the United States and then in Vancouver. In all this, Harris was not someone whose works fit into an apparently steady trajectory. According to Larisey, he did not evolve towards abstraction, as many modern artists have, but abruptly seized it after a decade of declaring that art needs natural models. Similarly, Harris was an adamant cultural nationalist, who then left Canada and that critical position for over six years, without, it would seem, a great deal of hesitation. These are sudden turns in an outwardly patrician life that knew financial security and early recognition - both unusual for a modern artist - but that was driven inwardly by a great restlessness. For a man with an ebullient and sociable personality, Harris had a number of sharp psychological and artistic crises - in fact, one roughly every ten years. A 348 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 nervous breakdown at the end of his military service during the First World War transformed him spiritually, for it was then he became a lifelong theosophist. This prepared the way for the Group-of-Seven period of the 1920s. Divorce (after twenty-four years of marriage) a decade later coincided with the celibate liaison with a friend's wife, effective exile from Toronto in 1934, and the sudden movement into abstraction. And the unwanted departure from Sante Fe, which promised a renewal of the kind of community he had known with the Group of Seven, after only two years with the outbreak of the Second World War, pushed Harris back into Canadian art-politics, and towards the last, and comparatively solitary, abstractionist phase of his career. Given these sudden turns, Larisey understandably opts for a periodization of the art linked to biographical episodes, segmenting his book accordingly by time and place. This option affords the reader convenient pairings in a succession of anecdotes and analyses. But, as Larisey shows, Harris was drawn, after his wartime breakdown, to a lifelong engagement with theosophical spirituality. Come what may, within its generous intellectual orbit for half a century, he was actually quite ruthless in the pursuit of his evolution as a painter. For all the external conviviality, the man who forged his communities, including the Group of Seven, out of air (and...