Lawren Stewart Harris 1885 - 1970

Collection of the artist

By descent in the Harris family

Private Collection, British Columbia

 

Toronto, Lawren Harris, 1910 - 1948, Art Gallery of Toronto, Oct. 1948, no. 72, travelling exhibition to Ottawa

Vancouver, Lawren Harris, Vancouver Art Gallery, May 1955, no. 10

Vancouver, Lawren Harris, University of British Columbia, Oct. 1955, no.22

Vancouver, Art and Artists, 1931 - 1983, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983, Cat no. 5, p. 387

Art Gallery of Ontario Archives, Letter from Harris from 1948 with mention of Intimations

Dennis Reid, Atma Buddhi Manas,  Toronto, 1985, p. 26., see illustrations no's 13 and 15 which are similar to Intimations

Peter Larisey, Light for a Cold Land, Lawren Harris's Work and Life, an Interpretation, Toronto, 1993, reproduced plate 54 with incorrect date

This work has been viewed under UV and it is in excellent condition. Some minor craquellure overall which is stable. The most pronounced craquellure along the right hand side within the yellow and green shapes would benefit from consolidation. We would like to thank "In Restauro Conservart Inc." for examing this painting and their original notes are available upon request to Sotheby's.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The abstract paintings that dominated the latter half of Harris's career began to emerge as early as 1930, after his trip to the Arctic. By that time, he had already pared and formalized his style to forms that were abstract in themselves but were still assembled into recognizable landscapes: mountains, forests, or icebergs.

By the mid-1930s, he had joined the practitioners of geometric abstraction, although one might still find in these paintings echoes of the subjects that had been the staple of his earlier representational work. Intimations probably dates from the late 1930s, and may have been painted either in Hanover, New Hampshire, or in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in about 1938-1940. Harris had already written, in 1928, that "a work in two dimensions may contain an intimation of the third dimension and that a work in three dimensions may contain an intimation of the fourth dimension". Writing about this painting along with four others in 1948, when they were to be shown at a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto, he described it as a kind of abstraction that:

aims at statements of ideas and intimations of a philosophic kind in plastic, aesthetic and emotive terms. For myself, every abstraction I paint has its source in an idea. This idea, whatever it may be, cannot be put into words and at the beginning of the painting is rarely clear. It becomes clear and objective throughout the process or evolution of the painting. The result is an epitome of a long subjective experience which cannot be explained. It can only be experienced and then it should elucidate itself through the language or idiom of the painting.

Harris's geometric precision began to give way to a much looser brushwork in the 1950s and 1960s. The thick, definite, bold handling of pigment, which was such a noticeable feature of his work from 1910 to, say, 1935, was abandoned. In the 1960s, and until his death in 1970, he painted with an even greater range of colour, a brushwork that was looser and seemingly more casual – somewhat like Monet's Waterlilies in application or like Rothko's glowing canvases in intensity, but without Rothko's scale or Monet's narrow range of colour. Harris still created structural elements that were geometric but not neatly chiselled or outlined.

These paintings, taken as a whole, did not get a warm reception when they were painted, nor have they been eagerly sought by private or public collectors until recently, some fifty years and more after they were painted. Despite being admired since they were created by most artists and some curators, they have languished in the marketplace, in media coverage, and in public exhibitions. The power they have, however, is now being acknowledged more widely and, when one as fine as this lot comes to market, the quality of all of the output during the last three decades of Harris's life can be reassessed afresh.

Intimations has the qualities that make it a superlative representative of Harris's later career. It hung over his fireplace in Vancouver and he made sure it was included in a number of exhibitions soon after it was painted and thereafter. What gives it a particular distinction is its compact composition, its precise but subtle shapes and colours, and the great poise that it presents to the viewer. The light within it is luminous and seems to convey the spiritual dimension that Harris always sought to embody in his work, whether abstract or representational. Harris's own dictum about art could be applied to this work:

The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature – a microcosm where there is a perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form rhythmically poised in three dimensions.