The Group of Seven
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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 O'Canada, or the O'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 and not school like you go and sit in a 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 they paint. Right. A school of fish with paintbrushes. Yeah. Yeah.

So, like, this is – these guys were working in the teens, the 19-teens, the 1920s, and they're still, like, the foundation of Canada's art, right? Yeah. To answer you, I –

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

1920s, 30s in particular aesthetic. There's a lot of brown and 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.

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 of

And to some criticism, kind of ignoring the beautiful coastlines of Canada. Yeah, and even the central prairies, too. Yeah, so it was a 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. Because you're a woman?

Yeah, in her case for sure. But yeah, so let's dig into this. Okay. So we said that the group of seven kind of formed the foundation of Canada's artistic identity. There's a number of reasons why, like really solid reasons why that go well beyond 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 1867 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 five years later, they brought BC into the mix. Yeah.

But that's what Rush sings 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 de-anglize. Yeah, I guess so. It's like something you do in a kitchen, actually. Right.

De-Englise 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 here, artistically. Their formal formation started in 1920. But as you said, they were pretty well acquainted with each other in the 1910s and 1910s. 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 do 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 Robson maybe who helped sort of foster their outside influence.

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. Uh, and then a place called the arts and letters club, which was a, uh, private club, a social club for men, uh, and for artists in particular. So they would get together with other Canadian musicians and writers and actors there. Uh, they had patrons there that could, they could get a little juice to help support themselves. Um,

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. Yeah.

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 1895. 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 and rugged country that was way far away from the cities. And really, you know, like most of the people in Canada in in the towns.

did not go north at that point. So it was a pretty kind of rebellious thing to do. And J.E.H. MacDonald 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 as any of them, if not better, in my opinion, in some cases. Yeah, his stuff is pretty great. He was a transcendentalist, 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 that appears in The Shining in the background. Which scene do 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 Mr. Ullman is giving Jack like the beginning of the tour. Yeah. So one of those from that documentary, that probably means something very significant. Yes. That painting's moving around. That's where I learned about it from iScream237, and that's E-Y-E-Scream237.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 won. It was a guy named Tom Thompson. He passed away before the group was officially founded in 1917. It was founded in 1920, 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 1908. I don't think I mentioned, I mentioned they were a design firm, but they mainly worked on design 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

It 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, like 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 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, as we'll see, he died young at 39.

And his career was very short. It was five years. But in that five years, he painted 50 canvases and left behind 400 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. Yeah, for sure.

There's a guy named Lauren Harris, L-A-W-R-E-N. He may be the second. I mean, I don't want to judge how famous they are, but he seems to be pretty famous. He notably, I think, has sold at auction the most valuable painting ever from a Canadian artist at 11 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 Gogh-like post-impressionistic look. Right. It looks a little more...

graphic design-y, but it's super cool. But, you know, 11 million bucks. I know Steve Martin's a big fan. Yes. Because he went to some show of his I saw on YouTube and was kind of going on about his love for Harris. Yeah, he mounted a touring exhibition back in 2015. Like, he's a big Harris fan. Yeah, super cool. And one of the other, and Harris is a really good example of this. A lot of people consider Lauren Harris the first abstract painter in Canada. Yeah.

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 1919, 1920,

All of them start to kind of resemble one another, even though it's very distinct and different. Yeah. 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. Yeah, ripping each other off. Going to the same places, 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 in the colder climes, including that $11 million work as a snow-capped mountain. But he was a rich kid.

Uh, he was, um, even though he was born in Ontario, he was a heir to a British fortune from the Massey Harris company that made agricultural equipment. I think 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 also heavy into spiritualism, which was pretty predominant at the time. Remember? Yeah. I think 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-religious spiritualism, those kind of form like the ethos?

Ethos. I can never remember which one it is. I remember one time I said ethos, and we were on a Zoom call with Scott Aukerman, and he just kind of said almost to himself, like, wow, you got both vowels wrong. Did he really? Yeah, he did. No way. 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 Aukerman, it would be ethos? Ethos.

Ethos? Yeah. But if you said ethos, you didn't get both wrong. Yeah. So I said, no, ethos, I think is what I said. Oh, you said ethos. Yeah, that's what it was. 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. Yeah. People know what I'm saying. Exactly. Yeah. You're Josh Clark. We're known for mispronouncing. Yeah, we really are.

So before they got together as a group again, which was 1920, they took a pretty formidable trip in May of 1912 when Thompson and another staff member at the group 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 had to be pretty adventurous to start venturing into those wild climbs.

It was, it was rough and rugged territory. So certainly there probably were not a lot of artists doing that. I mean, there were, there's, I have always been Canadian men and women who were like, yeah, I'm, I'm very comfortable out there and it doesn't scare me. Right. But I think artists to be going out there was a pretty radical thing. Yeah, for sure. And,

And yeah, these guys are they were rebels in their time. You just got to kind of remember that, even though it retrospectively now you're like, what? What's the 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 it was pretty rough. But he really, really loved Algonquin Provincial Park. And I think they even like the 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 1920 formation.

Yeah. The Jack Pine is a very, very famous painting in Canada. I love it. That was by Tom Thompson, I think from 1916. 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 to avoid. Yeah, I could either touch the painting in the Guggenheim or pull the gun out of the cop's holster who is 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 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? 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 sort of, like, surprising and annoying. It's like, oh, okay, so you can actually paint. 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 Altoid 10 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 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 Gary Glenn Ross, which was awesome, by the way. I bet.

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 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 love it. Yeah. I envy that. I admire it too. I've always wanted to be able to at least draw. Me too. I mean, since I was a kid. I can't do anything.

I was friends with like artists that could draw like, 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 that. My sister could draw, and I can't draw a stick figure. That's all right. Yeah, I was going to say anybody who's seen my drawing of a horse on Instagram knows that I can't draw. That was better than what I could do, I think. Oh, also, by the way, if Emily's making art kits out of Altoid tins, that makes her a tin-evator, Chuck. Well, she's not doing that. She bought a kit, but...

From a tenovator? I will not be a tenovator 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, 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. All right, let's take a break. We're going to ask Jerry if we can scrub a couple of episodes. That means we're going to have to do two more at the end of our career, of course.

That's fine. Because we don't want to shortchange ourselves. So we'll debate all that, and then we'll be back to talk more about the Group of Seven. Thank you.

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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. I'm guessing then that he wasn't very good at math. Right.

Yeah, he edged him in the— He's like, do you like to draw? Do you play the piano at all? Can you do anything? Yeah. But when they were trained in Europe, this was the time of the Impressionists. They were trained in traditional conservative landscapes. Yeah.

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 1912 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, you know, synonymous with them. And I saw that happening.

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 Gogh is another inspiration in particular from the European school and that a technique that I really love

love the impasto technique where you just goop that paint on there. So you see the brush strokes and in the case of some of these artists in Van Gogh 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 Jack Pine. If you look at the sky or the lake, you can really see his use of that. It's really it's it's a really cool painting. I'm just going to say it again. Agreed. Another, you know, something I've learned a lot more having known artists 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 sometimes hard to come by, sometimes too expensive. And so patrons are very important in that regards. And there was a guy named Dr. James McCallum who built a building along with Harris, I think funded by James McCallum. It was 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 50s, 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 artist's apartment 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 him. 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, you know, you're so broke jokes. How have I made it almost 49 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 to 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's so old she owes Jesus a 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 it. I got a lot more. I'll trot them out here and there moving forward. Okay, good, good.

So we talked about Tom Thompson dying, and this is a really big deal, right? It was. Another big deal was World War I. 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 19-teens.

Uh, but they, uh, a lot of them actually served in the war in some capacity. Um, a lot of them worked for the Canadian war memorials fund and they were producing art about the war. Um, some of which was super cool. Uh, I don't know if we should talk about it now or later, but the, uh, well, maybe let's hang on to that. Okay. The, the, the dazzle camouflage. Yeah. Arthur Lins, uh, Lismore stuff. But yeah, we'll hold on to that. It is cool.

Um, 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, um,

that he would be a fishing guide sometimes. He served as a park ranger. He just, 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 experienced outdoorsman 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 like 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 one of their members already. And this was the guy who introduced them to the Wild. He was an inherently 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 to. 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 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 recover

Go on this 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 Dr. McCollum, who funded that studio, they all went along on this trip.

Yeah, so they went on boxcar journeys because Lauren Harris... This sounds so cool. Yeah, Lauren Harris was so rich, he went to one of the railroads and said, hey, give us a boxcar, will you? And they said, sure, Mr. Harris, whatever you want. So they took a boxcar and...

outfitted it, refurbished it with, to basically turn it into a traveling studio and artist quarters. Yeah, it sounds like super cool. I mean, it had a stove, it 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 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 1919. 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 art that I couldn't remember that. But I don't think there was many paintings that I was like, that's a real dog. Except for that one painting of the dog, the real one. So by this time, 1919 is rolling around.

They've been on boxcar 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 boxcar journeys. And I think there was something like 200 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 1919, that's when within the group, they were like, you know, we should officially 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. And February, March of 1920, 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 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. But I didn't. Like the Fonz. Yeah, A.Y. Jackson, who actually he lived, I think, the longest.

Yeah, he lived all the way until 1974. Nice. 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 1913.

Yeah. And thanks to Dr. 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. Yeah.

And that gave A.Y. Jackson the ability to come to Toronto, start working. He painted 600 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 Canadian 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. Had you? No. 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, it almost looks like some weird art installation and not a real thing that the Navy did. 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. They're 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 1920 and really falls into line with the rest of the groups. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I guess we'll go with the last three here. We have Frederick Varley who lived till 1969. So I think he was the, lived the second longest and,

He was a schoolmate of Lismers in England. And I think we did mention that they both studied in Antwerp, Belgium. And then he reconnected with Lismers after living in Yorkshire and getting married. And he was like, Lismers was like, come on over to Canada, man. And he did so in 1912, 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

out villages. Yeah. I read that one of his paintings was a shelled cemetery to basically say like even the dead can't escape war. It's some harrowing stuff that he produced for sure. Who else do we have? He was very affected by the war, I should say. Yeah. To answer your question, who else we have is my favorite by far.

far of the group. Frankie? Franklin Carmichael. Yeah. And you were saying you wouldn't hang any of these in your home. I would hang a Carmichael, basically any of them. Yeah, I agree, actually. And that's some of my favorite stuff, too. And I might hang some of the other stuff. Maybe 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. Yeah.

Like, just go look up Franklin Carmichael art and you will just sit there and watch it all day. Yeah, he did more watercolors than the rest of them, but did work in other mediums. 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 watercolors.

He went there for a little while, studied there, did some work there and then went back to Toronto in 1915. 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 60 of the 200 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 more art. Time.

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See why more than 15,000 small businesses use Ruby. Visit ruby.com or better yet, call them at 844-900-R-U-B-Y. All right, so we've talked about 1920 and what happened over and over again, but finally on May 7th is when the official Unified School opened at the Art Gallery of Toronto with 120 paintings.

And this is like definitely when critics kind of some of them pooh poohed it. One describes some of the paintings as looking like the contents of a drunkard stomach.

And I think this was maybe more just because it was a departure from the traditional art. Yeah. They got popular pretty quickly. I think their second show in May of 21 drew about 2,500 people over just three weeks and 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 don't know. Think a few more times. It might get it home. One of the other things that was really big about 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 ensconcing 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 I and II, 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, yeah.

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, we're the group of seven. We need to get a seventh. They bring in a guy named A.J. Casson.

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 1929. 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 Jinx. He was brought on in 1932. The group broke up in 1933. So the Jinx missed their last exhibition in 1931. And then he was there for their breakup the year after he was brought on board. Yeah. Yeah.

That's too bad for Lemoyne, but he got a brief taste. And then, you know, he lived until 1956, 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 officially a group of seven because of that. But they did feature her works in some of their shows, one in 1927 in particular. And that's when 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 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 NPR.

Yeah. Or what's Canada's version of NPR? CBC. Oh, 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 1933. It was Lemoyne's fault again. Part of it was that McDonald had died in 1932. And again, he was kind of like the guy who was the original, the figurehead, I think. Papa Smurf. Yeah. That was part of it.

They thought it had 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 28 artists and eventually grew to 61 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 and some of them where they were from. But they in World War Two, the Canadian government got involved to do this silkscreen work.

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 Spencer Gifts all of a sudden. Yes. And you could also make an argument that they were selected for this cheap silkscreen reproduction because the colors, the bold colors, the shapes, the contours of the whole thing, it was ripe for reproduction through screen printing. Yeah, for sure. It looked good on a screen print. 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-1900s.

know, mid 1940s when they started the silk screening. Yeah. But it was interesting that they were still criticized for that kind of stuff. Even 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 C.A. And they have bios and like a lot of selected art or just look up these artists and type in artist name.

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 50s. Well, since Chuck said he's in his 50s, of course that means he's just unlocked Listener Mail.

mid-50s. When are you 50? I will be 50 the July after next. And I don't care because 40s suck. Yeah.

It's the worst decade so far, at least. But I've heard it just gets better after your 40s, that your life satisfaction dips in the 40s and starts to climb back up and peaks again in your 60s. 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. 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 facility in Indiana. I'm happy to report that our prisons give incarcerated individuals, or IIs, the option to take Suboxone 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'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 in a relaxed and fun 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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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