Defiant Spirits by Ross King Read Free Book Online

outside Berlin’s Anhalter Station. Such works saw him celebrated as “Ein Berliner Realist.” 17
    Influenced by Skarbina’s choice of subject, as well as by his Impressionist technique and view of the metropolis as a place of poverty and despair, Harris sketched and painted a number of urban scenes in Berlin. He concentrated on the houses beside the River Spree and the shabby, sunless alleys that attracted Skarbina. In one of his watercolours, Buildings on the River Spree, a cart horse stands before the facades of riverside buildings whose picturesque details—shutters, dormer windows and steeply pitched, snow-covered roofs—are offset by the grey sky and an air of desertion. The work shows obvious parallels with Skarbina’s Hof im Schnee (Courtyard in the Snow), painted in 1905 and undoubtedly seen by Harris in Skarbina’s studio. Like Skarbina, he painted his houses in a vertical rather than a horizontal format, exploring the effects of snow and failing light on the warm brown tones of the buildings.
    Dissatisfaction with the ugly and overcrowded metropolis led many German intellectuals to escape into the countryside to experience what one Berlin city planner extolled as “the incomparable joys of Mother Nature.” 18 The beauty of the German landscape was the subject of a loose group of artists known as Heimatkunstlers, or regional painters. Among them was one of Harris’s other teachers, Fritz von Wille, who concentrated his efforts on the Eifel region of Germany, portraying what one critic called “Nature with her vastness and grandeur.” 19 Harris was to discover this vastness and grandeur first-hand in the summer of 1906, when he went on a hiking holiday in the Austrian Alps, and then again the following summer in Bavaria, with his third instructor, Adolf Gustav Schlabitz. Harris found Schlabitz, then in his early fifties, “an interesting character” (Schlabitz played the flute as they hiked). 20 He was, however, less adventurous as a painter than Skarbina. A member of neither the Group of Eleven nor the Berlin Secession, he painted mainly placid mountain landscapes of sunbathed, flora-covered alpine meadows.
    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