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Nationalist
Aspects of Lawren S. Harris's Aesthetics
by Peter Larisey
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But the "new world on
this continent," although it was emerging "from the
swaddling clothes of Europe," was having problems; Harris
regretted that "so many people in North America" keep
themselves
attached to European attitudes, and thus they viewed
'the strivings and directions of the new, now adolescent race -
their race -
with disdain and misgivings." Harris continued,
"we of the new race...suffer the dying grasp of a Europe
fundamentally alien to US." (46)
Harris saw this struggle with European attitudes as inevitable for
the race of North America. But Canada experienced a particular
problem which Americans did not have; Canadians who wished to be
creative had to contend with the "English attitude in
Canada," which Harris described as:
...a struggle of attitudes occurring throughout the country. It
is the poorer insistent phases of the old land against the growing spirit of a creative
Canada. It is the belittlement of colonialism still fostered among a people
no longer a colony. It
is the English attitude in Canada sick with its own superiority
seeking health where for it there is none....Since our beginnings in
Canada, it has been opposed to everything that is spontaneous or free or
creative, that is,
everything that is in the spirit of the North....All that made this
country Canadian had to fight tooth and nail for its life against
English superiority and self-sufficiency. (47)
Thus in Harris's view, one of the ways in which Canadians differed
from Americans was that Canadians had to combat the English
attitude in Canada. A more important difference was the special role
Canadians were to play in the formation of the new race of North
America: Harris felt that "the very glory of our life" (48)
might well be in giving the North its adequate expression.
Harris's attitude toward the "new race" forming on this
continent continued with little change into his later writings. (49)
This notion of the North American race formed the context within
which we can understand that Harris saw Whitman and Lincoln as
examples for Canadians to follow. This attitude should also be
taken into account when considering Harris's six-year sojourn in
the United States, as well as the fact that on at least two
occasions in 1939 Harris participated in exhibitions in which he
would have been thought of as an American. (50) Harris also felt that
New York City had significance for Canadians:
Thus the newer unreminiscient-of-Europe magnificent structures in New York give us a
strange feeling of some remote grandeur that is yet very close to our
hearts. (51)
Conclusion
Harris's Canadian
nationalism was that of a continentalist. He saw a
role for
Canadians and their art as part of a larger North American racial
and cultural unity. Harris's anti-European stance- part of the
continentalist tradition - was selective; he never mentioned
Germany, some of whose painters had deeply influenced him.
Believing that the Canadian artist and his people and race were, at
their best, deeply united, Harris claimed an avant-garde
role for
the artist in this relationship. In this, he reveals his own roots
within the modern European tradition. Like Kandinsky and Mondrian
before him, Harris articulated this avant-garde role with a
mystical understanding and a spiritual vocabulary drawn from his
contacts with Theosophy and with the works of Oriental religious
writers.
The ideas, images, ambitions, and feelings - at once nationalist and
artistic, religious and social - which Harris had been put ting
together in the twenties and early thirties became an aesthetic
vantage point. On the one hand it can be looked on as the product of
Harris's understanding of his own development as a nationalist
landscape painter, moving "from particular expression and
outward aspect toward universal expression and the spirit that
informs all life." (52) On the other hand, the vantage point
supplied him with an aesthetic basis which made possible his
decision to paint the abstract works capable of expressing the
"ideas insistently forming" which, Harris felt,
"could not be expressed in representational terms," (53) and
which occupied most of his energies for the next three decades.
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