Lawren Stewart Harris

ALC BCSFA CGP FCA G7 OSA RPS TPG
1885 - 1970
Canadian

LSH 8
oil on board
signed and on verso dated 1950 on a label, inscribed "69-23" and "9" and variously and stamped with the Lawren Harris LSH. Holdings Ltd. Stamp #8
12 x 15 in, 30.5 x 38.1 cm

CAD

Preview at: Heffel Vancouver

PROVENANCE
Estate of the Artist
By descent to the present Private Collection

Painted in the early 1950s, LSH 8 is a powerful and exciting abstract work, and a prime example of an important and productive period in Harris' career. After transitioning from a focus on landscape subjects in the mid-1930s, a decade of exploring abstraction resulted in a maturity and boldness embodied in the paintings of the late-1940s and early-1950s. There is a return of familiar references to landscape, synthesized through the geometric forms and line-based, expressionist approaches that Harris had developed in his work. This panel, done at the same scale as his landscape sketches of the late 1920s, contains a similar energy and immediacy to those celebrated works. A simple horizon line found in the centre invites the audience to enter a transcendental space, untethered from physical limitations, yet connected to the universal, underlying truths that Harris felt were beyond expression in any other form.

LSH 8 is one of the work’s selected by Lawren Harris’ wife, Bess, for a never realized “Lawren Harris Collection of Sketches and Drawings” that was to be donated to the National Gallery of Canada. Proposed in the 1960s, this collection was intended to show the full overview of Harris’ long and diverse career, but included no canvases. In her initial 1963 letter to the trustees of the National Gallery of Canada, where she outlined the proposal, Bess Harris stated:

"There are no large canvases. I shall make a selection of the best of the drawings in pencil and ink and of the oil sketches…Perhaps it is more like a painter's diary, or journal - because there is a certain immediacy about sketches and drawings that is not apparent in the considered large canvases."

White it is unclear why this project never came to fruition, the labels and numbers of the back of the 100 selected works demonstrate their significance and their quality, chosen from the expansive collection that Bess and Lawren had at their home. This work was one of 5 selected to represent abstract works from Vancouver, and should be considered among the very best of his small-scale abstractions.

We thank Alec Blair, Director/Lead Researcher, Lawren S. Harris Inventory Project, for contributing the above essay.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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