Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, believe it or not. And this is stuff you should know. The Artsy edition.
Yeah, the uh, the O Canada or the Oak Canada Edition.
I don't know. I think it's a Well let me ask you this, had you heard of any of the members of the Group of Seven, we should probably just say Group of Seven is Canada's most famous art school. In that school like you go and Sydney classroom and learn, but like a group of painters who work together, influence one another, support one another, right.
Like a school of fish, except a paint.
Right, school of fish with paint brushes. Yeah, so like like this is these guys were working in the teens, nineteeneen's and nineteen twenties and they're still like the foundation of Canada's art right.
Yeah. To answer you, I don't think I had, at least as far as name recognition, but I feel like I have seen some of these works of art before in my many museum visits.
I didn't recognize any of them. But I have to say, at first, I'm not a big fan of like nineteen twenties thirties in particular esthetic. There's a lot of brown and yeah, just dark stuff. But I actually, just from researching this and looking at more and more of their paintings, I actually did become a fan of that school, but a couple of them in particular.
Yeah, I really like this stuff. It's not the kind of thing that personally I would like hang in my house, because that's just not my house aesthetic that we're cultivating. But I really enjoy these landscapes of the northern realm of Canada, which is where as you'll see shortly, they mainly concentrated on the sort of woodlands north of the major cities and to some criticism, kind of ignoring the beautiful coastlines of Canada.
Yeah, and even the central prairies too.
Yeah. So it was this pretty specific thing. Seven sometimes six, sometimes eight, sometimes ten, oh as many as ten.
I think there was ten overall.
Okay, that kind of came and went, some passed on, some were fringe members that they were like, you're really one of us, but maybe not an official group of seven zero woman, Yeah, and in her case for sure. But yeah, so let's let's dig into this, okay.
So we said that the Group of seven kind of formed the foundation of Canada's artistic identity. And there's a number of reasons why, like really solid reasons why that go well beyond these these guys artistic abilities, which makes the whole thing that much more interesting if you ask me.
But one of the reasons why is because they came together and started painting Canada's wilderness, in particular at a time when Canada was looking to develop its national identity, because it wasn't until eighteen sixty seven that Canada formed the Dominion of Canada with the Province of Canada which is now Ontario and Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and then I think of five years later they brought
BC into the mix. But that's what rushed things about when they sing about marching to Bastille day aboard the Thailand Express.
Yeah, totally. And that's you know, they were trying, like you said, to form a national identity sort of d Angliz, Yeah, can get something you do in a kitchen, actually, right, d anglies And you know, in other words, shake off a bit of that Britishness that lingered on both, you know, politically, economically, and as we'll see are artistically. Their formal formation started in nineteen twenty, but as you said, they were pretty well acquainted with each other in the nineteen tens and
nineteen teens. Most of them were living in and around Toronto, Canada. Toronto, Canada, don't I get bagged on for saying that.
Yeah, like Atlanta, USA.
Yeah, that's right. We're doing our best. Still. We love Canada and they love us, so they forgive us of these indiscretions.
Most of them love us, for sure.
Yeah, some of them don't. But you know, there's people everywhere that don't like us.
I don't agree with that.
Where are some places where everybody likes us?
Germany?
Yeah, Germans dooth tend to like us, huh.
Australia. I don't think there's a single Australian that doesn't like us.
Yeah, I think you're right. And there were a couple of key sort of employment places and institutions that kind of helped foster this cohesiveness. One was a design firm called the Grip because most of these, if not all of them, at some point worked for the Grip as
commercial designers. And they had a manager there named Albert Robson that really or Robesen maybe, who helped sort of foster their outside art, not outsider art, different thing, but just saying like, hey, we love your design work, and you should also do this other stuff because all boats
will rise. And then a place called the Arts and Letters Club, which was a private club, a social club for men and for artists in particular, so they would get together with other Canadian musicians and writers and actors there. They had patrons there that could they could get a little juice to help support themselves, right, And those two places were sort of the nuclei of which they spun around.
Yeah, And there was actually a person who you could kind of point to as the nuclei of the group, in part because he was the oldest of them. Apparently he was a father figure to some of the younger ones. But his name was J. E. H. McDonald and he was originally born in the UK and he moved to Ontario when he was a teenager. And he was the first one to work at the Grip all the way
back in eighteen ninety five. And by the time most of the other members of the group of seven got their jobs at the Grip, he was already head designer.
One of the things that kind of differentiated him and made it not surprising but noteworthy and remarkable that he was kind of the center or the head of the group of seven is that part of being a member of the group of seven was getting out there in nature, in rugged country that was way far away from the cities, and really, you know, like most of the people in Canada, in the towns did not go north at that point, so it was a pretty kind of rebellious thing to do.
And J. H.
McDonald was always kind of frail. He was prone to falling ill very easily. So he didn't make it on all of these excursions. And yet he was doing as good a work because any of them, if not better in my opinion. In some cases, yeah.
His stuff is pretty great. He was a trans and dentalist. Though he was he just got sick a lot, and as we'll see, he died fairly young. And he kept trying to tell everyone like, I really love this stuff. I'm not an indoor kid. I promise, I just can't go bushwhacking this weekend.
We have one more thing about him too. I don't know if you saw this or not, But he had a painting called Missed Fantasy. Huh that appears in the shining in the background.
Of which scene you know? Is it the famous office interview scene.
It's in the fireplace room. Oh okay, and then I think it's also I think it also moves and is in like the main lobby where mister Olman is giving Jack like the beginning of the tour.
Yeah, so one of those from that documentary that probably means something very significant.
Yeah, that painting's moving around. That's where I learned about it from. I screamed two three seven and that's eye screen two three seven dot com, which, Man, if you want a deep dive into just Missed Fantasy and what it means, just start there. Yeah.
Okay. There was another guy named and these are we're going to kind of jump around as far as introducing these people, or I guess it's not jumping around because it's fairly chronological, okay, but these are sort of the pre dudes before it was official McDonald's. One was a guy named Tom Thompson. He passed away before the group was officially founded in nineteen seventeen. It was founded in
nineteen twenty. Like I said, so he was never an official member, but he was a really influential guy in that he was a one of just a few Native Canadians. He was born. I believe he was born in Ontario, in rural Ontario. Big time outdoorsman also worked at the Grip in nineteen oh eight. I don't think I mentioned I mentioned they were designed for him, but they mainly worked on designed for department stores, so I guess early
Canadian department stores. And it was at the firm where he met McDonald and they were like, hey, we should like get together and start going out in the woods and sketching and painting.
Yeah. So apparently Tom Thompson. So he's one of Canada's most famous artists by far. He must have been inherently likable because I read that he hung around the Arts and Letters Club even though he wasn't a member. They didn't check him out. All of the members who met him of the Group of seven took him under their wing because he was a really talented artist but didn't
have any formal training. So he introduced the Group of seven to the wilderness that became like the basis of all of their paintings and their whole school and they taught him in turn formal techniques.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Yeah, and he actually is well. See he died young at thirty nine, and his career was very short. It was five years. But in that five years he painted fifty canvases and left behind four hundred sketches and he got really good and sadly he died just as he was really starting to get going.
Yeah, for sure, that was definitely a sad thing because he was just getting cooking. I feel like, yep, for sure, there's got him Lauren Harris law r e n. He may be the second. I mean, I don't want to judge how famous they are, but he seemed to be pretty famous. He notably, I think, has sold at auction the most valuable painting ever from a Canadian artist, at eleven million bucks. It was called Mountain Forms, And I
like the painting. It looks quite a bit different, I think than a lot of this other stuff as far as steering away from like a Van go like post impressionistic look. It looks a little more graphic designing. But it's super cool. But you know, eleven million bucks. I know Steve Martin's a big fan, yes, because he went to some show of his ia on YouTube and was kind of going on about his love for Harris.
Yeah, he mounted a touring exhibition back in twenty fifteen, Like he's a big Superquan and one of the others. And Harris is a really good example of this. A lot of people consider Lauren Harris the first abstract painter in Canada, and you can kind of make a pretty good example that the Group of Seven represents the transition
from traditional painting to modern painting. They're the kind of portal that it goes through in Canada, and it's really neat to see their early work before they all kind of came together, and then to see starting about nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty, all of them start to kind of resemble one another, even though it's very distinct and different, you can see that kind of through line that really did make them like a cohesive school.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of the point. I don't even think that stuff is necessarily done on purpose. I think similar sensibilities hanging out with each.
Other, ripping each other off, ripping each other.
Going to place, you know, the same places you know, as we'll see that went on these excursions, and this guy, he was one of the more adventurous ones. He went as far as the Arctic to paint, you know, in the colder climbs, including that eleven million dollar work as a snowcap mountain. But he was a rich kid. He was even though he was born in Ontario. He was the heir to a British fortune from the Massy Harris
company that made agricultural equipment, so they're still around. He didn't have to you know, there's no other way to say it. He didn't really have to work to support himself as an artist, so he was very free to do his thing.
Yeah, and he was a very dedicated artist too, so he wasn't just like I don't feel like doing anything today.
He was for some days.
He was also heavy into spiritualism, which was pretty predominant at the time. Remember, Yeah, we did a whole episode on that. And so if you put together McDonald's transcendentalism, Tom Thompson's Exposure of Everybody to the woods Canadian forests, and then Lauren Harris's non spirit or non religious spiritualism, those kind of form like that. Ethosthys I can remember
which one it is. I remember one time I said ethos and we were on a zoom call with Scott Ackerman and he just kind of said, almost to himself, like, wow, you got both vowels wrong.
Did he really?
Yeah? He did in no way.
Yeah, that's the kind of thing that sticks.
With you for sure. I'll never forget it. But I still don't remember which way to say it.
I thought it was always ethos, So according to Scott Ackerman, it would be ethos, ethos ethos. Yeah, but if you said ethos, you didn't get both wrong.
Yeah, So so I said no ethos I think is yeah. Wow, Okay, I think that was it. Regardless, I still don't say it right, I'm sure, and if I do, it's accidental. People know what I'm saying exactly. Yeah, you're Josh Clark. We're known for mispronouncing. We really are.
So before they got together as a group again, which was nineteen twenty, they took a pretty formidable trip in May of nineteen twelve, when Thompson and another staff member at the GRIP named Harry B. Jackson took this train from Toronto to the Algonquin Provincial Park, or to Algonquin Provincial Park. There's no d there and they just started sketching. Again. Like you said, at the time, you know, you had to be pretty adventurous to start venturing into those wild climbs.
It was rough and rugged territory. So certainly there probably were not a lot of artists doing that. I mean there were There's have always been Canadian men and women who were like, yeah, I'm very comfortable out there and it doesn't scare me. But I think artists to be going out there was a pretty radical thing.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, these guys are They were rebels in their time. You just got to kind of remember that, even though retrospectively now you're like, what's a big deal, But yeah, at the time, this is all very new. It was very big and also, as we'll see, they were basically making like in your face style of art that just was not the taste of Canada at the time.
Yeah, they spent a lot of time in that park, and specifically Thompson at a certain point he was spending you know, eight months out of the year there. He left in the winter finally because it was pretty rough, but he really really loved Algonquin Provincial Park, and I think they even like the media initially started calling them the Algonquin School before they settled on a name, and some really beautiful paintings came out of that pre nineteen twenty formation.
Yeah. The jack Pine is a very very famous painting in Canada that was by Tom Thompson, I think from nineteen sixteen. It's basically when he started it. But you can really clearly see the Art Nouveau influence that he developed as a commercial graphic designer.
Yeah.
Another one is a Y Jackson's The Red Maple. I like A Y Jackson's work, but I don't like the Red Maple, but it's about equally famous as the jack Pine in Canada.
I like that one too, Again, not for my house, but I would dive into it in a museum with Gusto.
They would not like that. The security guards would be on you, like white on rice.
Oh. Sometimes I just want to touch those Oh.
Yeah, you can't do it. It's like the call of the void.
It is a call of the void. Or yeah, I could either touch the painting in the Guggenheim or pull the gun out of the cops holder to his security at the Guggenheim.
So one of the things that these guys did too that was pretty smart is they got out there in the wilderness. But it's not like they set up their easels and were just sitting there painting the final paintings that they showed to the public. They would do kind of sketches. Tom Thompson was apparently very good and prolific
at it. I saw that he captured transient moments of light and atmosphere by making these sketches out in the actual like seeing the actual thing and then just kind of bringing it back and translating that into the actual finished canvas. And all of them basically did that. But yeah, something about Tom Thompson's eye being translated to color and texture in his paintings was really it was really something.
Yeah, I agree. One of my favorite things now. And I've noticed this because did I tell you Emily started painting.
No, how awesome what medium.
Paint on canvas? Oil? Mainly? Oh wow, she dabbled in watercolor a little bit, but she's mainly painting oil on canvas, And like she's good, and it's it's sort of like surprising and annoying. It's like, oh, okay, so you can
actually paint. That's that's super cool. Yeah, but it's she started to you know, now they make these little travel kits that or you can do your own in like an Altoy ten of you know, very small little paint sets that can like fit inside of a notebook, and she takes them along and we'll just paint little things or sketch little things and in nature, because that's mainly what she's painting. And we went on this last trip when we went to New York to see Guling Gary
Glenn Ross, which was awesome. By the way, we went to the New York Botanical Gardens for the first time in the Bronx we had been to Brooklyn's and I noticed there were artists just everywhere, sitting on benches, sketching and painting stuff around them, and it's it's just such a lovely thing to witness because it's just so quiet and peaceful, and they're creating art inside of, you know, the natural wonder of nature's art, and I just I just love it.
Yeah, I envy that. I admire it too. I've always wanted to be able to at least draw too. I mean, can't do any kid. I was friends with like artists that could draw like real like it was. They were just natural talents at it, and I would just try, try, try and take classes and I just couldn't do it.
I couldn't either. My whole family. My father wasn't, but my mother is an artist and an art major and a painter. My brother could always draw. I believe my sister could draw, and I can't draw a stick figure.
That's all right? Yeah, I was gonna say, anybody who's seen my drawing of a horse on Instagram knows that I can.
That was better than what I could do, I think.
Oh. Also, by the way, if Emily's making art kits out of Altoyd tins, that makes her a Tentovator.
Chuck, Well, she's not doing that. She bought a kit, but from a Tivator. I will not be a Tnovator because of that episode. Can we just get that one off? Can we scrub that?
I'm sure we can. Should we also do scuba cat? Yeah?
Those are two that really should go away?
So yeah, well we'll look into that. We'll have to ask Jerry.
Should we take a break?
Oh yeah, I guess we should. We kind of got away from ourselves, so.
All right, let's take a break. We're gonna ask Jerry if we can scrub a couple of episodes. That means we're gonna have to do two more at the end of our career. Of course, that's fine, because we don't want to short change ourselves. So we'll debate all that and then we'll be back to talk more about the Group of Seven.
So I think, with the exception chuck of Tom Thompson, all of the rest of the Group of seven artists, all of them over the years, even went and studied in Europe at some point or another. They were formally trained. I read that Lauren Harris was encouraged by his math professor to study art in Berlin. Now I'm guessing then that he wasn't very good at math. Right, you like to draw, you play the piano, and I think, can you do anything? Yeah. But when they were trained in Europe,
this is the time of the Impressionists. They were trained in traditional conservative landscapes, and they brought all that back. But they found, to their dismay that they were having a really hard time translating the European techniques that they had learned to the Canadian wilderness. It just wasn't working
quite right. And there was a really big, important turning point that happened in nineteen twelve when Lauren Harris and j. E. H. MacDonald traveled to Buffalo, New York to see an art exhibition of Scandinavian artists and they were just blown away. It completely freed them to create the art that went on to become synonymous with them. And I saw that.
I think McDonald said that these were artists that were not trying to express themselves so much as they were trying to express something that took hold of themselves.
Oh wow.
Yeah, So these guys were like overwhelmed with nature and they were painting the feeling that nature brought out in them. And that's what the group of seven started doing.
Yeah, that's cool. I know. Van Go is another inspiration, in particular from the European school, and that a technique that I really love, the imposto technique where you just goop that paint on there so you see the brushstrokes, and in the case of some of these artists and Mango and of course many others, it's you know, when you get up close to these paintings, don't touch, but you can lean in and get a really good look at just how caked on it is in some places. I just really really love that.
Yeah, And if you're really sly, you can kind of touch it with the tip of your nose and just be like, oops, I got too close. Yeah, sorry, Yeah, that Jack Pine Thompson's Jackpine. If you look at the sky or the lake, you can really see his use of that. It's really it's a really cool painting. I'm just gonna say it again.
Agreed. Another. You know something I've learned a lot more having known an artist in my adulthood is that a big part of doing your art is just having a space to do it. Not everyone can just set up in their dining room or whatever, and so studio space is cherished and not. It's sometimes hard to come by, sometimes too expensive, and so patrons are very important in that regards. And there was a guy named doctor James McCallum who built a building along with Harris, I think
funded by James McCollum. It's called the Studio Building in the Rosedale neighborhood of Toronto, and that was a real sort of cohesion cohesive thing. Cohesion unit, is that a thing yeah, like a rank leader. Yeah, it was like two units of cohesion when they built that building.
For sure, which is not there anymore. Unfortunately, I think they built a high rise apartment over it. They tore it down first and then built the high rise apartment. But during the time, I think, well into the fifties, this was still a thriving artist studio and it was cheap apartments as well. I saw that Tom Thompson was so broke that he couldn't even afford the subsidized rent for the artists apartment at the at the studio. So
again he was so likable. James McCallum built him a shed out back and charged him a dollar a month for it.
Yeah, but they would you know, Canadians are known for being nice, but they would bag on them. They'd say, man, you're so broke you can't pay attention.
That's a good one.
And then they all started coming up with it, you know, you're so broken joke.
How have I made it almost forty nine years without having heard that one?
Have you not heard that one? No, that's the only broke one I know. But yeah, I introduced Ruby that whole that. You know, those kind of jokes it burns your mama jokes and stuff that, you know, playground burns. It's pretty fun, for sure. Your mama is so old she owes Jesus and Nickel. Wow, did you ever hear that one?
No? Wow, I really wasn't paying attention on the playground.
Apparently I couldn't make these up. Of course, I was just trying to copy the great artists of the playground.
For sure. But I mean I still haven't heard them. And you say them just beautifully.
I appreciate. I got a lot more. I'll trot them out here and there.
Moving forward, kid, kid, So we talked about Tom Thompson dying and this is a really big deal, right it was.
Another big deal was World War One? Oh yeah, that came along, and you know, was a big disruption because a lot of it certainly delayed the formation, the official formation of the group right there in the late nineteen teens. But a lot of them actually served in the war in some capacity. A lot of them worked for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, and they were producing art about the war, some of which was super cool. I don't know if we should talk about it now or later,
but the well, maybe let's hang onto that. Okay, put a dazzle camouflage. Yeah, Arthur Listmer stuff. But yeah, we'll hold on to that.
It is cool. So yeah. One of the things that I think also cemented Tom Thompson's reputation as one of Canada's most famous artists is that he died under what some people consider mysterious causes. Like this guy was born in rural Ontario. He was an avid outdoorsman. He spent so much time up in the Canada, the Canadian forests I guess around Algonquin or Algoma, that he would be a fishing guide. Sometimes he served as a park ranger. He was just there so he might as well do
that extra stuff. And he went out one day in a canoe and his canoe was found overturned later that day or the next day, and he was missing. His body was found I think eight days later, and he had like a bump and a bruise on the side of his face. And some people are like, well, yeah, he just stood up in the canoe and like fell
out and like hit his head and then drowned. And other people are like, you didn't know Tom Thompson then, because number one, he would never do something that stupid and number two see number one.
Yeah, I mean it's hard to tell how fishy that might have been. It very well could have been an accident, but it's also very easy to say, like an experience outdoorsment like that wouldn't have died that way, But it was officially declared an accidental drowning. Some people theorize that he may have killed himself if he wasn't murdered, because he got his girlfriend pregnant, But I couldn't really see a lot of like solid evidence other than just people surmising.
Yeah, there was like one or two people over the years who wrote a book or something like that and kept the whole thing alive. Yeah, but it was a really big deal to the group of seven. They hadn't even formed yet, and they lost to one of their members already, and this was the guy who introduced them
to the wild. He was in inpherently likable guy. They were really bummed out about it, but they still carried on, you know, I think, at least in part out of tribute to Tom Thompson, but also because they had really come to appreciate what he introduced them.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. That also led to another sort of if not tragedy like setback when McDonald was helping to build a memorial cairn at the at Canoe Lake where he died and McDonald collapsed because you know, as we said, he was a pretty frail guy. May have had a stroke, but recovered within a few months, well enough at least that he was able to go on this painting trip you mentioned Algoma in Ontario. They went there.
Frank Johnston, who was he would be another one of the ogs as far as the group members go, and doctor McCollum, who funded that studio, they all went along on this trip.
Yeah, so they went on box car journeys because Laurence so cool. Yeah, Laurence Harris was so rich. He went to one of the railroads and said, hey, give us a box car, will you, And they said, sure, mister Harris, whatever you want. So they took a box car and outfitted it, refurbished it with to basically turn it into a traveling studio and arts quarters.
Yeah, it sounds like super cool. I mean that had a stove that had furniture and they could move it around to the different rail sidings and hang out and stay. Then had a little home base there with some warm some warmth warmth to it, sure, And the Wild River was painted there, which is one of McDonald's biggest, most popular paintings, and that was in nineteen nineteen, and it is very gorgeous as well.
It is I don't remember that one. I had so many tabs open and looked at so much heart that I couldn't remember that. But I don't think there was many paintings that I was like, oh, that's a real dog.
Right, except for that one painting of the dog, the real one.
So by this time nineteen nineteen's rolling around, they've been on box car journeys, they've lost Tom Thompson, they've gone out in the wild a few times. They've really kind of gotten into this new modernist interpretation of landscapes, specifically Canadian landscapes, to basically create this new art identity of Canada.
It's like a nationalistic art movement. And they mounted their first exhibition from at least one or more of those box car journeys, and I think there was something like two hundred canvases and it did not go over all that well.
Actually, yeah, I mean there were some critics who didn't love it. Some people did like it, but that was just a key exhibition because it was their first one as a group. And that was when and this is in nineteen nineteen. That's when within the group they were like, you know, we should official, like call ourselves a school and form an official like the Avengers. We need to get together and be an official group because it'll probably just help our reputation, get us a little more press. Yeah,
in February March of nineteen twenty, they did. So. Jackson was not there. He was on one of his sketching trips at the time, and he came home and said that he learned that it had been formed and that I was a member.
Yeah, we haven't met Jackson yet. This is a different Jackson than the one that went on that first trip with Tom Thompson. This was a Jackson.
Well we introduced him, Oh we did.
I didn't remember that.
Because I almost made the joke that did they call him.
A yeah A but I didn't like the funds.
Yeah a y Jackson who actually he lived I think the longest. Yeah, he lived all the way until nineteen seventy four, ripe old age. He was born in Montreal, had a single mom, with six or five other siblings total six and as a result he had to work a lot to support his family. But eventually he found his way to Europe, where he was one of the ones, like you said, that studied like formally in Europe, which he did in France before he moved back to Ontario in nineteen thirteen.
Yeah, and thanks to doctor James McCollum, he was able to move to Toronto because he was not very well off at the time, and McCollum said, how about this, I will buy all of your paintings that you produce in a year to keep you afloat essentially, and that gave A. Y Jackson the ability to come to Toronto, start working six hundred things right and make a name for himself in time to be able to support himself through his art.
Yeah, and he had that Montreal connection, so he sort of Montreal artists would he'd make connections with the Group of seven again, you know, artists knowing each other and sharing ideas and just sensibilities ethos if you will is a good thing. But he was one of the ones that went over with World War One to fight. He was actually wounded there and also painted for War memorials.
Yeah. Another guy who painted for Canadian War memorials that you mentioned earlier was Arthur Lismer.
Yeah.
He was famous for painting warships that were returning to port that had dazzle camouflage on them, which essentially is like op art painted on warships. Yeah.
I had never heard of this before he do you No, huh, it's super cool. It's a way for It's not you know, camouflage in the way that it's supposed to blend in with the sea around it. In fact, far from it. It doesn't do anything like that, right, Like you said, it looks like cool pop art, you know, painted on a warship like could It almost looks like some weird art installation and not a real thing that the Navy did.
Uh.
But the intention there, again is not to like conceal it like it's not there, but to confuse and mislead about like the course heading or something up like that, or like how fast they're going or yeah, like I said, where they're headed, And apparently it worked pretty good.
Yeah. They look like disjointed zebra stripes that there are in different chunks that don't line up with one another.
Yeah. So that's on the actual ship, and he painted paintings of these ships and they're really cool looking. I love it.
Yeah, And Arthur Lismer is one of those painters whose style seemingly changed overnight around nineteen twenty and really falls into line with the rest of the group. So it's pretty cool.
Yeah, I guess we'll go with the last three. Here. We have Frederick Varley, who lived till nineteen sixty nine,
so I think he was the second longest. He was a schoolmate of Lismers in England, and I think we didn't mention that they both studied in Antwerp, Belgium, and then he reconnected with Lismer after living in Yorkshire and getting married, and he was like Listmer's like, come on over to Canada, man, and he did so in nineteen twelve, went to work at the Grip like a lot of them, and also painted for the war memorials.
Yeah, he was actually embedded in Europe with the Canadian military, so a lot of his paintings that he made during the war were like bombed out villages or I read that he's one of his paintings was a shelled cemetery. To basically say, like even the dead can escape war. It's some harrowing stuff that he produced, for sure, and he was very affected by the war. I should say, yeah, to answer your question, who else we have is my
favorite by far of the group, Frankie, Franklin Carmichael. And you were saying you wouldn't hang any of these in your home. I would hang at Carmichael basically any of them.
Yeah, I agree, actually, and that that's some of my favorite stuff too, And I might I might hang some of the other stuff, mambe I was being too harsh.
Hang it all. So he had kind of a more decorative sensibility. I saw it described as he used more colorful, softer colors. Its like just go look up Franklin Carmichael art and you will just sit there and watch it all day.
Yeah, he did more water colors than the rest of them, but did work in other medium And then rounding out, we have Frank Johnston born in Toronto, so another one of Canadians sons, and he worked at the Grip as well, and he's I think the only one that actually studied
in the United States. He went there for a little while, studied there, did some work there, and then went back to Toronto in nineteen fifteen, and he was known for his opaque watercolor techniques, so he was kind of, you know, watercolors quicker, so he was pumping out paintings much quicker than the rest of these guys.
Yeah. I saw he contributed sixty of the two hundred canvases that were at that first show.
That's amazing.
He also this is so artist. He was born Francis Hans Johnston, and later on in life he compressed that to Franz.
Oh wow, Hans and Franz.
Pretty cool. Yeah, exactly.
Maybe we should take another break, yes, and we'll be back with mart Art. All right. So we've talked about nineteen twenty and what happened over and over again. But finally on May seventh is when the official Unified School opened at the Art Gallery of Toronto with one hundred and twenty paintings. And this is like definitely when the critics kind of some of them poo pooed it. One described some of the paintings as looking like the contents
of a drunkard's stomach. And I think this was maybe more just because it was a departure from the traditional art. They got popular pretty quickly. I think their second show in May of twenty one drew about twenty five hundred people over just three weeks in change. So people got on board pretty quickly.
Yeah, for sure. Again because in part this is that they were painting Canada's national identity. That's right. One of the other things. I don't know if I've made that point yet.
I think a few more times that might get at home.
One of the other things that was really big about this this show was that the director of the National Gallery of all of Canada bought at least three of their works. His name was Eric Brown, and in addition to basically ensconsing them in Canada's National Gallery saying like these guys are legit, this is the real deal, he put them in other exhibitions that Canada put on around the world. And he would really play a big role later on during World War one and two, as we'll see.
Yeah, and he you know, he was a patron of the arts. He loved these guys, but he was also criticized at times later by just solely being into these guys and like, hey, you're not championing the work of women as much as you should, or are indigenous artists, So you know, he was criticized for that. That's all I'll say for sure.
So the group is kind of like rolling by now they're doing more journeys. They're meeting once in a while to basically set up exhibitions. Franz Johnston leaves and they're like, well, God, where the group of seven? We need to get a seventh. They bring in a guy named aj Cassen, who used to be Franklin Carmichael's assistant. They're like, okay, let's just break the trend and bring in an eighth member. So they brought in a guy named Edwin Holgate. He was brought in in nineteen twenty nine.
Yeah, he was a portraitist, which was a little different from the rest.
Of them for sure. He had also formed another group in Montreal called the beaver Hall Group, which is a.
Pretty good group name, Yeah, great name.
And then Lemoyne Fitzgerald, who you could call the Jinks. He was brought on in nineteen thirty two. The group broke up in nineteen thirty three, So the Jinks missed their last exhibition in nineteen thirty one, and then he was there for their breakup the year after. He was brought on board.
Yeah, that's too bad for Lemoyne, but he got a brief taste and then you know, he looked until nineteen
fifty six, so he was still painting after that. We did mention a woman, Emily Carr near the beginning as like, you know, this is a boys club, but she was never official officially Group of seven because of that, but they did feature her works in some of their shows, one in nineteen twenty seven in particular, and that's when they you know, they kind of pulled her aside and they were like, hey, you know, you're really you're one
of us. Like it might not be official, but you're definitely one of us.
But don't tell anybody.
Yeah, exactly, don't tell anyone. And she painted a lot of indigenous villages and stuff like that. Yeah, and at one point was doing indigenous art like hooked rugs and pottery and selling it to tourists. But yeah, she like even way back then, was like, wait a minute, maybe I'm appropriating this. They didn't use that word, I'm sure, but she stopped doing it. She was like, this is not a culture I'm a part of, so maybe I shouldn't be doing it and selling it.
Yeah, that lady was ahead of even MPR.
Yeah yeah, or what's Canada's version of NPR.
CBC now, right, of course, So all good things must come to an end. And one of the things that I think you can give a nod to the Group of Seven about is they're like, Hey, this thing's run its course. Let's just disband. So they actually disbanded, They had a formal disbanding, I think again in nineteen thirty three. It was LeMoyne's fault. Again. Part of it was that McDonald had died in nineteen thirty two, and again he was kind of like the guy who was the original,
the figurehead, I think, Papa Smurt. Yeah, that was part of it. They thought I had to run its course. But they were also now starting to get real pushback, not just them, but also the National Gallery and Eric Brown saying like, you know, there's other there's other artists in Canada. Can we kind of include them. There's other parts of Canada besides the northern Boreal forest. Yeah, And
because of that they actually stepped back. They disbanded the Group of Seven and then they regrouped and expanded to the Canadian Group of Painters, which started out with twenty eight artists and eventually grew to sixty one total over the years, and this one included women.
Yes, they expanded it greatly at that point. One of the reasons that you know, they're obviously famous because they were you know, Canadian through and through and what they were doing and where they were living in some of them where they were from. But they in World War two, the Canadian government got involved to do this silkscreen program where they silk green prints of this art and they put them up in their buildings and their government buildings
and then put them up for sale. And Eric Brown was behind that as well, and that really just cemented them because all of a sudden people were like buying this stuff and putting it on their own walls as prints.
Yeah, they were in banks, they were in schools. Apparently Arthur Lismer, one of the original Group of seven, was in charge in part of selecting images. So, yeah, the Group of seven was disproportionately represented in this and that is one reason why they are so enmeshed in Canada's artistic psyche, Like this is Canadian art, this is the foundation of it. That's a big part of it.
Yeah, because you could get it at the Spencer Gifts all of a sudden.
Yes, and you could you could also make an argument that they were selected for this cheap silk screen reproduction because the colors, the bold colors, the shapes, the contours of the whole thing. They it was ripe for reproduction through screen printing.
Yeah, for sure it looked good on a screenprint. Emily Carr was not chosen. In fact, no women were chosen, and I think no artists that painted the coastlines of Canada were chosen, and no work by indigenous artists as well, or work that depicted their community. So again some controversy surrounding that stuff. Obviously, that kind of thing today would be handled a lot differently, but this was again back in the mid nineteen forties when they started the silk screening.
Yeah, but it was interesting that they were still criticized for that kind of stuff even back then. You know people were aware of it, for sure, Yeah, totally. But yeah, if you want to waste some time, well wasted, I should say, go check out the Group of seven dot CA and they have bios and like a lot of selected art or just look up these artists and type in artist name works, and just look at all the
amazing stuff that comes up. It's good stuff. I'm glad you found this one or picked it, or it was suggested. I'm not sure.
I think I had just heard of him, and Olivia helped us out. And I love learning more and more about art here later in life, me too. Chuck in my fifties.
Well, since Chuck said he's in his fifties, of course, that means he's just unlocked. Listener mail, mid fifties.
When are you fifty?
I will be fifty the July after next, And I don't care because forties suck. Yeah, it's the worst decade so far at least. But I've heard it just gets better after your forties, that your life satisfaction dips in the forties and starts to climb back up and peaks again in your sixties, and that that is comparable to your younger years, the peak of happiness. So we have a lot to look forward to, man.
Yeah, just get ready.
Yeah, we're going to be podcasting the whole time.
That's right, all right, This is a positive correction about fentanyl. By the way, we got some props for just saying fentanyl not fentanyl all right. Josh noted, if you go to prison, you're expected to simply dry out and hopefully recover that way. That is not the case, Guys, I teach in a correctional play in Indiana. I'm happy to report that our prisons give incarcerated individuals or iii IS the option to take subox zone in a controlled environment
at a certain time each day. The II and the program are sent to our medical department and given suboxone in order to help with their treatment. This has helped those who struggle with addiction, but it's important to note that it can be addictive, leading to potential abuse as well. Suboxone compared with recovery programs, has helped a lot of my students, and I found I've been very fortunate to
see some people turn their lives around through this. And we heard from a couple of other correctional workers from different states that do the same thing, So it sounds like it's sort of the norm.
Yeah, that's heartening.
Yeah, that's great to hear. Additionally, guys, I appreciate that you cleared up some misconceptions about fentanyl. I can confirm that those ideas still impact law enforcement, as our officers are required to wear gloves during cell searches in order to prevent absorbing fentanyl through the skin. Thanks for providing years of knowledge and relaxed and fund manner. Thanks for coming to Indianapolis. I was at the show and it was great.
It was a good show.
And that is from Samuel Adult Basic Education instructor.
Thanks Samuel, you're out there doing God's work. Congratulations to you and thank you for it. And if you want to be like Samuel and gently correct us, we love that kind of thing. You can send it via email to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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