The Royle/Nutt Case

[Rodney C. Mackay]

Harris had war experience, family connections and a great art background so it was not surprising that he became the new man in charge of the Owen's Art Gallery and School at Sackville when his teacher, Stanley Royle, sailed back to England in 1946. Harris was destined to remain as Art Department Head until 1975, a definite political achievement considering the fact that he faced resistance to his reign.

As art critic Cliff Eyland has noted, there was a very strange divide between the chief's "uncompromising abstract painting" and the very convincing photographic look of his formal realist portraits. Harris seemed even less at ease with abstraction than Royle had been with social realism. Harris was a better teacher of design theory thanhe was a field worker. Unlike the American minimalists of this time, his paintings were small, cramped and incoherent.

Alexander Colville, who became his second in command, could not possibly have overlooked his lack of of desig in these post war efforts? Colville had great bureaucratic tendencies and was probably better suited to this job, but he was not from far enough away! In the early nineteen fifties, Harris was also at odds with the Roulston brothers who had assumed control of the Appled Arts division of the Art Department. I know there was friction, as my first marriage was to Anne Torey, who studied applied arts in the basement rooms under the Fine Art Gallery. This artsy/crafsty quarrel may have harkened back to the Royle/Nutt case?