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works, since by his own account he “went the rounds of the public and dealers’ galleries.” 11 During Harris’s time in Berlin, Munch would exhibit five times with the Berlin Secession and another six in private galleries around the city, and seventy-two works by Van Gogh were shown in Berlin between 1904 and 1907. 12
    Harris did not entirely comprehend these new currents in European art. His small acquaintance with Canadian art had little prepared him for the galleries of Europe. “Modern paintings interested me most,” he wrote later of his years in Berlin. “I remember, however, while I was strongly attracted to them I did not understand Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne.” 13 This same baffled fascination would be experienced a few years later by another young Canadian art student, Emily Carr, who arrived in Paris in the summer of 1910. “Something in it stirred me,” she later wrote of the art she saw, “but I could not at first make head or tail of what it was about.” 14
    What neither Harris nor Carr understood at first was how these painters were exploring new visual modes. Many younger European painters were abandoning the techniques taught in the academies: the varnished surfaces, delicate brushwork and modulated tones of the Old Masters. They renounced efforts to create convincing illusions of three-dimensional space through shading, modelling and perspective; they emphasized instead the flatness of the picture plane and the sensuous manipulation of their materials. Brush marks and even the weave of the canvases were often left visible. Colours became more strident, and the more experimental added their pigments in small, separate touches. Gauguin worked with flat planes of bright colour thickly outlined in black, and Van Gogh sometimes applied paint in an impasto so thick that he might have been (and sometimes was) squeezing pigment onto his canvas straight from the tube. Such experimental and individualistic styles were sharply at odds with the tried-and-true modus operandi of the art academies.
    IF HE HAD little comprehension of these ideas and techniques at this early point in his career, Harris did absorb one aspect of modern art passed on to him by Franz Skarbina. An English writer described Berlin as a modern city that showed “the most complete application of science, order and method . . . to public life.” 15 But Skarbina did not see the city, least of all Berlin, as a utopia. He was among the German artists and intellectuals who deplored the poverty and inhumanity of the modern metropolis. A number of prominent European thinkers—Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel—were writing about the alienating effects of the urban environment. Tönnies distinguished between the Gemeinschaft (a community based on personal ties and fellow feeling) and the Gesellschaft (the rootlessness and impersonality of modern industrial society). Durkheim believed rural life was characterized by a unity of values, beliefs and sentiments that produced what he called “collective consciousness”—a cohesiveness that he believed could not exist in a large city. 16
    Skarbina specialized in depictions of this rootlessness, showing downtrodden workers against the background of soot-and-steam cityscapes. He won a reputation for showing the poor and industrial areas unknown to the German middle classes and for rendering them in a style combining Realism with an Impressionist concern for light and atmosphere (he was widely praised by the critics for his ability to paint artificial light). One of his best-known works, The Matthiasstrasse in Hamburg (1891), featured a woman clutching a baby in a claustrophobic and ramshackle alley in the middle of a slum. In 1895 he exhibited Gleisanlage des Güterbahnhofs Weißensee (known as Railway Tracks in North Berlin ) depicting an exhausted couple crossing the steam-filled rail yards