Defiant Spirits (5 page)

In Bavaria, Schlabitz introduced Harris to the German poet and landscapist Paul Thiem, whose unorthodox religious views (he was probably a theosophist) the young Canadian found “shocking and stirring.”
21
Thiem's outrageous opinions were offset by his rather docile landscapes. Providing a counterpoint to the gritty urban subjects favoured by Skarbina, he painted the German countryside in a style intended to evoke what a review of one of his Berlin exhibitions called a “quiet German
Heimatgefühl,
” or sense of home.
22
Thiem and other landscapists believed this sense of place and belonging, drastically eroded in a metropolis such as Berlin, could still be experienced among Germany's forests and mountains.

Many of these painters were influenced by the work of the great German landscapist Caspar David Friedrich. Forgotten for many decades, Friedrich was dramatically rediscovered in 1890, fifty years after his death, when a Norwegian art historian found many of his canvases gathering dust in a Dresden warehouse; in 1906 thirty-two of them went on show at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, a landmark exhibition that Harris almost certainly would have seen.
23
Friedrich's paintings typically projected a sense of the divine onto both natural and man-made phenomena—mountains, sunsets, ruined abbeys, solitary pine trees—in haunting and often austere landscapes. The fact that these remarkable canvases, with their lonely alpine peaks, Gothic churches and bleak Baltic shorelines, were seen as characteristically German (Friedrich was an ardent patriot who conveyed political symbolism through his landscapes) meant he was quickly celebrated as the foremost exponent of a national tradition: one critic called him “the most German of Germany's painters.”
24

Much later, Harris would claim that when he returned to Toronto from Germany, “my whole interest was in the Canadian scene. It was, in truth, as though I had never been to Europe. Any paintings, drawings or sketches I saw with a Canadian tang excited me more than anything I had seen in Europe.”
25
To a friend he later wrote that he “forgot the indoor studio-learning of Europe” virtually as soon as he returned to Canadian shores.
26
Years after the fact he would claim that MacDonald's little display of works in the Arts and Letters Club affected him more than “any paintings I had seen in Europe.”
27

These were retrospective constructions that greatly overstated the case. Harris was eager, later in his career, to shake the dust of Europe from his shoes, to cover his artistic tracks and present himself as a wholly indigenous talent who was (as his letter put it) “simply dictated to by the environment and life I was born and brought up in.”
28
He would make no public acknowledgement of his debt to the modern styles and movements, or important teachers such as Skarbina, to which his years in Berlin had exposed him.

But Harris took away from Berlin, when he finished his studies there in 1907, considerably more than his arduously acquired techniques in drawing and painting. He was exposed, in particular, to the contrast between the urban alienation painted by Skarbina and the more sacred life of the countryside, where both a stronger sense of belonging and (as Friedrich had shown) an idea of the supernatural could be discovered and cultivated. His two years in Berlin had also revealed to him the bitter rivalry between the “new, young and forceful” artists—exemplified by Skarbina's Group of Eleven—and the “lazy and stupid trust in the conventional” that so many young German artists wished to overturn. They were lessons that, acknowledged or not, he would carry forth in the years ahead.

BY THE END of 1911, when he first met J.E.H. MacDonald, Harris had been back in Toronto for three years. By this time he too was a family man struggling to earn a reputation as a painter. In 1910 he married an heiress named Trixie Phillips (“a nice, gay little thing,” according to a friend).
29
Their son, also named Lawren, was born within the year. Determined to make his way as an artist, he was renting a studio above a grocery store at Yonge and Cumberland.

Harris went on sketching expeditions to the Laurentians, the Haliburton Highlands and Lac Memphrémagog in Quebec. But his true passion after he returned from Berlin was cityscapes—images of urban poverty of the sort painted by Franz Skarbina. Toronto certainly had plenty of scenes of ugliness and destitution. Residents and visitors alike deplored the unsightly appearance of its poorer neighbourhoods. The lack of parks and the ill-favoured streets and buildings, together with the winter slush and summer dust, made Toronto, according to various observers, “squalid” and “contemptible.” The English-born landscapist F.M. Bell-Smith called it “third-rate” and “quite out of the race of modern cities.”
30

Bell-Smith, ironically, had done one of the few compelling Toronto cityscapes. Better known as a painter of the Rockies, in 1894 he created his marvellous
Lights of a City Street,
a snapshot of the rain-slicked and newsboy-clamouring corner of King and Yonge. First shown to high acclaim in 1897, it was purchased by Simpsons and placed on display in the Palm Room of their department store at Queen and Yonge. For the most part, however, Toronto scenes were rare. Visitors to the city's art exhibitions could feel they had closed the door behind them on their mundane urban world and entered a pleasingly rural wonderland of Muskoka shorelines, English cottages and Quebec sugar camps.

Harris found artistic inspiration in the “squalid” and “contemptible” parts of Toronto. Although he was raised in a stately late-Victorian mansion on St. George Street, and although Toronto's finest architect, Eden Smith, was building a large and comfortable Arts and Crafts house for him on Clarendon Avenue, it was districts such as the Ward, a notoriously poor enclave immediately south of Queen's Park, that held a special fascination for him.

The Ward was home to many Jewish and Italian immigrants who ran small businesses or worked in the sweatshops along Spadina Avenue. It was bounded on the east by Yonge Street and on the south by City Hall. In 1909 Augustus Bridle called it “the most cosmopolitan part of Toronto,” with “rows of blinking little modern shops” and “everywhere the shuffling, gabbling crowd.” A report in the
Toronto Daily Star
described it less appealingly as a place of “filth and disorder.”
31
Another writer remarked that it was “generally regarded by the respectable citizens of Toronto as a strange and fearful place into which it is unwise to enter even in daylight.”
32
The neighbourhood had long attracted the attention of social reformers—though never before that of an artist.

In a reprise of his Berlin experiments, Harris made pencil sketches and paintings in the Ward. Urban painters such as The Eight, a group of American artists who specialized in gritty New York street scenes, used plunging perspectives and strong diagonals to emphasize the speed and vitality of the large modern metropolis. Harris, however, approached his subject differently. He depicted Toronto's terraces of houses flat to the picture plane, with no swirling crowds and no slashing perspectives. Toronto certainly possessed little of the dash and vitality of either New York or European capitals, and Harris was interested in offering a more intimate, meditative view of streets all but empty of traffic and inhabitants. The shuffling crowd mentioned by Bridle was absent, along with any social comment it might have broached. His interest, at least at this stage, was primarily aesthetic. In a work such as
A Row of Houses, Wellington Street,
he was merely attempting, he explained, “to depict the clear, hard sunlight of a Canadian noon in winter.”
33

THE RENDERING OF the transient effects of these impalpable phenomena such as sunlight and shadows, together with their “Canadian tang,” was what had apparently attracted Harris to MacDonald's paintings at the Arts and Letters Club. Harris was greatly exaggerating when he claimed that MacDonald's works at this point showed “something new in painting in Canada.” For the past two decades, many Canadian artists (especially those who spent time in Paris) had been sketching out of doors and depicting the Canadian landscape in an Impressionistic style.
34
But his admiration for MacDonald clearly extended to the personal level, and the two men quickly became friends. They already had a number of mutual acquaintances, since Harris knew Grip employees such as Fergus Kyle and J.W. “Bill” Beatty. Harris had previously gone on sketching expeditions with both Kyle and Beatty, and so it was natural that he and MacDonald should likewise begin working together.

The two men's first expedition, sometime early in 1912, appears to have been one to the Toronto waterfront near the foot of Bathurst Street, near Fort York. This industrial zone, bisected by the railway and its sidings, was home to a silver-plate company and a stove foundry. Nearby, on land where Lake Ontario had been infilled, were lumberyards, a cattle market and the premises of Consumers Gas Company, with its two gasometers. These great cylindrical monoliths distilled and stored coal gas.

MacDonald had no real enthusiasm for urban scenes, least of all ones of Toronto, which he disparaged as “this grey town.”
35
The choice of location was almost certainly Harris's. The subject matter was probably inspired by Skarbina's twilight masterpiece
Railway Tracks in North Berlin,
an industrial landscape featuring a gasometer flanked by chimney stacks in a haze of smoke and steam. Harris was no doubt also aware of cries of modernists such as the English poet and art critic Laurence Binyon, who wanted artists to turn away from “subjects from the past” and instead paint images of modern life. “We are to celebrate the sublime geometry of gasworks,” Binyon wrote in 1910, “the hubbub of arsenals, the intoxicating swiftness of aeroplanes.”
36
What better way for Harris and MacDonald to proclaim themselves modernists than by depicting icons of the contemporary industrial city such as smokestacks, locomotives and gasometers?

There might have also been another motive for choosing this location. Toronto industrialized around the time of Confederation, after which its steam-powered factories and foundries became sources of local pride. The first few decades after Confederation were the heroic age of factories and machines—of locomotives puffing through Crowsnest Pass and Massey-Harris reapers fanning out across the Prairies. Indeed, one of the first films ever shot in Canada, by the Edison Company in 1898, starred a new Massey-Harris binder. The pages of the
Canadian Illustrated News
were filled with inspiring engravings of Toronto's busy factories, and a nineteenth-century catalogue for Hart Massey's farm implements proudly featured an illustration of a factory blackening the sky with smoke.
37
Steam and smoke meant jobs and signalled prosperity. As late as 1912 a new Toronto subdivision called the Silverthorn Park Addition hoped to lure homebuyers with a newspaper advertisement that showed smoke-belching factories. It proudly declared Silverthorn to be “right in the heart of the factory district.”
38

Canadian industry was prominent in the news in the months before MacDonald and Harris took themselves down to the waterfront. Toronto's industries had vigorously expanded over the previous decade,
39
and a good deal of MacDonald's professional career had been spent producing images of Canadian commercial prosperity (including, in 1911, a poster for Canadian Northern Steamships showing black smoke billowing from a steamer's funnels).
40
But in 1911 all of that prosperity had been threatened. The country had just fought an election on the issue of free trade with the United States. The reciprocity proposals called for free exchange in both natural resources and a wide variety of manufactured goods: everything from pocket knives and surgical gauze, to musical instruments, motor vehicles and urinals. Reciprocity was popular in the resource-rich West but bitterly opposed by Ontario's captains of industry. Arguments about the national interest were rolled out to defend the owners of private fortunes. “Canadian nationality is now threatened with a more serious blow than any it has heretofore met with,” declared the manifesto of a group of protectionist magnates known as the Toronto Eighteen. The Conservative leader, Robert Borden, wrote a letter in a Toronto newspaper claiming the treaty would cause “the disintegration of Canada.”
41
Anti-American sentiment was unleashed in pamphlets and cartoons; the Stars and Stripes was even censored in Ontario cinemas. On September 21, 1911, Borden's Conservatives won the election by 132 seats to Laurier's 85.

It seems too much of a coincidence that Harris should have been drawn to Toronto's industrial zone at such a time. Already stirred by nationalist sentiments, he must have noticed how the treaty had provided for the importing of American harvesters, reapers and threshing machines. He would also have known that Sir Lyman Melvin-Jones, president and general manager of Massey-Harris, though personally loyal to the Liberals, opposed the deal, which would have seen farmers in the West able to buy more affordable farm machinery.

If MacDonald's work for Grip Limited involved him in the design of publicity for steamship lines and ambitious new Toronto subdivisions, Harris had already done his own hymn to industrial endeavour and commercial abundance. In 1911 he painted
The Eaton Manufacturing Building.
This twelve-storey factory on Queen Street West was built two years earlier, the latest addition to the handful of skyscrapers on the urban landscape and a glass-and-steel testimony to Toronto's prosperity and modernity. Harris produced a remarkable picture in which the Eaton building looms like an apparition over the Ward's nondescript houses and sheds. Chimney smoke, shadows and industrial steam are set off by an ethereal sunset shimmering in the monolith's windows.