May 27, 2025 • 47 mins
Today Chuck and Josh celebrate Canada and their art through the lens of the Group of Seven.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Yeah, the uh, the O Canada or the Oak Canada Edition.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Like a school of fish, except a paint.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
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
(01:39):
a couple of them in particular.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
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
(02:01):
mainly concentrated on the sort of woodlands north of the
major cities and to some criticism, kind of ignoring the
beautiful coastlines of Canada.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah, and even the central prairies too.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah. So it was this pretty specific thing. Seven sometimes six,
sometimes eight, sometimes ten, oh as many as ten.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I think there was ten overall.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
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
(03:03):
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,
(03:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
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,
(03:59):
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,
(04:20):
don't I get bagged on for saying that.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, like Atlanta, USA.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, that's right. We're doing our best. Still. We love
Canada and they love us, so they forgive us of
these indiscretions.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Most of them love us, for sure.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, some of them don't. But you know, there's people
everywhere that don't like us.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I don't agree with that.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Where are some places where everybody likes us?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Germany?
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, Germans dooth tend to like us, huh.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Australia. I don't think there's a single Australian that doesn't
like us.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
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
(05:10):
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.
(05:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
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
(06:08):
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
(06:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And J. H.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Of which scene you know? Is it the famous office
interview scene.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah, so one of those from that documentary that probably
means something very significant.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
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
(08:31):
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
(08:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
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
(09:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
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
(10:26):
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
(10:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
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
(11:21):
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
(11:43):
can see that kind of through line that really did
make them like a cohesive school.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Other, ripping each other off, ripping each other.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
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
(12:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah, and he was a very dedicated artist too, so
he wasn't just like I don't feel like doing anything today.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
He was for some days.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
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,
(13:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Did he really?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah? He did in no way.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Yeah, that's the kind of thing that sticks.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
With you for sure. I'll never forget it. But I
still don't remember which way to say it.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
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
(14:28):
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
(14:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
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
(15:44):
some really beautiful paintings came out of that pre nineteen
twenty formation.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
I like that one too, Again, not for my house,
but I would dive into it in a museum with Gusto.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
They would not like that. The security guards would be
on you, like white on rice.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Oh. Sometimes I just want to touch those Oh.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah, you can't do it. It's like the call of
the void.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
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
(17:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, I agree. One of my favorite things now. And
I've noticed this because did I tell you Emily started painting.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
No, how awesome what medium.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
That's all right? Yeah, I was gonna say, anybody who's
seen my drawing of a horse on Instagram knows that
I can.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
That was better than what I could do, I think.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Oh. Also, by the way, if Emily's making art kits
out of Altoyd tins, that makes her a Tentovator.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
I'm sure we can. Should we also do scuba cat? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Those are two that really should go away?
Speaker 2 (19:49):
So yeah, well we'll look into that. We'll have to
ask Jerry.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Oh yeah, I guess we should. We kind of got
away from ourselves, so.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
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
(20:57):
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.
(21:18):
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
(21:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
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
(22:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
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
(23:24):
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
(23:45):
thing yeah, like a rank leader. Yeah, it was like
two units of cohesion when they built that building.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
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
(24:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
That's a good one.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
And then they all started coming up with it, you know,
you're so broken joke.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
How have I made it almost forty nine years without
having heard that one?
Speaker 1 (24:43):
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
(25:03):
that one?
Speaker 2 (25:03):
No? Wow, I really wasn't paying attention on the playground.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Apparently I couldn't make these up. Of course, I was
just trying to copy the great artists of the playground.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
For sure. But I mean I still haven't heard them.
And you say them just beautifully.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
I appreciate. I got a lot more. I'll trot them
out here and there.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Moving forward, kid, kid, So we talked about Tom Thompson
dying and this is a really big deal, right it was.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
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
(25:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
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
(26:31):
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
(26:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
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
(27:37):
a lot of like solid evidence other than just people surmising.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
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,
(28:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
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
(28:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
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
(29:43):
is very gorgeous as well.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Right, except for that one painting of the dog, the
real one.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
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.
(30:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
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
(31:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Well we introduced him, Oh we did.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
I didn't remember that.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Because I almost made the joke that did they call him.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
A yeah A but I didn't like the funds.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
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
(32:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
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
(32:32):
for himself in time to be able to support himself
through his art.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Yeah. Another guy who painted for Canadian War memorials that
you mentioned earlier was Arthur Lismer.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Yeah. They look like disjointed zebra stripes that there are
in different chunks that don't line up with one another.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah. So that's on the actual ship, and he painted
paintings of these ships and they're really cool looking. I
love it.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
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
(34:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
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.
(35:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
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
(36:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah. I saw he contributed sixty of the two hundred
canvases that were at that first show.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
He also this is so artist. He was born Francis
Hans Johnston, and later on in life he compressed that
to Franz.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Oh wow, Hans and Franz.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Pretty cool. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Maybe we should take another break, yes, and we'll be
back with mart Art. All right. So we've talked about
(37:24):
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
(37:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
I think a few more times that might get at home.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
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
(38:36):
the world. And he would really play a big role
later on during World War one and two, as we'll see.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
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
(39:04):
I'll say for sure.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
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
(39:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Yeah, he was a portraitist, which was a little different
from the rest.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Of them for sure. He had also formed another group
in Montreal called the beaver Hall Group, which is a.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Pretty good group name, Yeah, great name.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
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,
(40:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
But don't tell anybody.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
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
(41:01):
shouldn't be doing it and selling it.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah, that lady was ahead of even MPR.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Yeah yeah, or what's Canada's version of NPR.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
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.
(41:33):
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,
(41:53):
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
(42:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
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
(42:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
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
(43:25):
foundation of it. That's a big part of it.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Yeah, because you could get it at the Spencer Gifts
all of a sudden.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
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
(44:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
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
(44:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Well, since Chuck said he's in his fifties, of course,
that means he's just unlocked. Listener mail, mid fifties.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
When are you fifty?
Speaker 2 (45:14):
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
(45:34):
your younger years, the peak of happiness. So we have
a lot to look forward to, man.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Yeah, just get ready.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeah, we're going to be podcasting the whole time.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
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
(46:05):
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
(46:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Yeah, that's heartening.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
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
(47:00):
was great.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
It was a good show.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
And that is from Samuel Adult Basic Education instructor.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Yeah, the uh, the O Canada or the Oak Canada Edition.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Like a school of fish, except a paint.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
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
(01:39):
a couple of them in particular.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
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
(02:01):
mainly concentrated on the sort of woodlands north of the
major cities and to some criticism, kind of ignoring the
beautiful coastlines of Canada.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah, and even the central prairies too.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah. So it was this pretty specific thing. Seven sometimes six,
sometimes eight, sometimes ten, oh as many as ten.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I think there was ten overall.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
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
(03:03):
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,
(03:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
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,
(03:59):
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,
(04:20):
don't I get bagged on for saying that.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, like Atlanta, USA.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, that's right. We're doing our best. Still. We love
Canada and they love us, so they forgive us of
these indiscretions.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Most of them love us, for sure.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, some of them don't. But you know, there's people
everywhere that don't like us.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I don't agree with that.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Where are some places where everybody likes us?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Germany?
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, Germans dooth tend to like us, huh.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Australia. I don't think there's a single Australian that doesn't
like us.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
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
(05:10):
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.
(05:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
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
(06:08):
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
(06:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And J. H.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Of which scene you know? Is it the famous office
interview scene.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah, so one of those from that documentary that probably
means something very significant.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
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
(08:31):
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
(08:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
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
(09:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
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
(10:26):
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
(10:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
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
(11:21):
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
(11:43):
can see that kind of through line that really did
make them like a cohesive school.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Other, ripping each other off, ripping each other.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
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
(12:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah, and he was a very dedicated artist too, so
he wasn't just like I don't feel like doing anything today.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
He was for some days.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
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,
(13:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Did he really?
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah? He did in no way.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Yeah, that's the kind of thing that sticks.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
With you for sure. I'll never forget it. But I
still don't remember which way to say it.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
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
(14:28):
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
(14:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
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
(15:44):
some really beautiful paintings came out of that pre nineteen
twenty formation.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
I like that one too, Again, not for my house,
but I would dive into it in a museum with Gusto.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
They would not like that. The security guards would be
on you, like white on rice.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Oh. Sometimes I just want to touch those Oh.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah, you can't do it. It's like the call of
the void.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
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
(17:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, I agree. One of my favorite things now. And
I've noticed this because did I tell you Emily started painting.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
No, how awesome what medium.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
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
(18:04):
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
(18:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
That's all right? Yeah, I was gonna say, anybody who's
seen my drawing of a horse on Instagram knows that
I can.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
That was better than what I could do, I think.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Oh. Also, by the way, if Emily's making art kits
out of Altoyd tins, that makes her a Tentovator.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
I'm sure we can. Should we also do scuba cat? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Those are two that really should go away?
Speaker 2 (19:49):
So yeah, well we'll look into that. We'll have to
ask Jerry.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Oh yeah, I guess we should. We kind of got
away from ourselves, so.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
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
(20:57):
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.
(21:18):
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
(21:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
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
(22:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
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
(23:24):
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
(23:45):
thing yeah, like a rank leader. Yeah, it was like
two units of cohesion when they built that building.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
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
(24:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
That's a good one.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
And then they all started coming up with it, you know,
you're so broken joke.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
How have I made it almost forty nine years without
having heard that one?
Speaker 1 (24:43):
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
(25:03):
that one?
Speaker 2 (25:03):
No? Wow, I really wasn't paying attention on the playground.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Apparently I couldn't make these up. Of course, I was
just trying to copy the great artists of the playground.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
For sure. But I mean I still haven't heard them.
And you say them just beautifully.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
I appreciate. I got a lot more. I'll trot them
out here and there.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Moving forward, kid, kid, So we talked about Tom Thompson
dying and this is a really big deal, right it was.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
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
(25:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
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
(26:31):
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
(26:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
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
(27:37):
a lot of like solid evidence other than just people surmising.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
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,
(28:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
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
(28:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
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
(29:43):
is very gorgeous as well.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Right, except for that one painting of the dog, the
real one.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
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.
(30:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
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
(31:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Well we introduced him, Oh we did.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
I didn't remember that.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Because I almost made the joke that did they call him.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
A yeah A but I didn't like the funds.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
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
(32:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
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
(32:32):
for himself in time to be able to support himself
through his art.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Yeah. Another guy who painted for Canadian War memorials that
you mentioned earlier was Arthur Lismer.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Yeah. They look like disjointed zebra stripes that there are
in different chunks that don't line up with one another.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yeah. So that's on the actual ship, and he painted
paintings of these ships and they're really cool looking. I
love it.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
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
(34:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
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.
(35:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
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
(36:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah. I saw he contributed sixty of the two hundred
canvases that were at that first show.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
He also this is so artist. He was born Francis
Hans Johnston, and later on in life he compressed that
to Franz.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Oh wow, Hans and Franz.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Pretty cool. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Maybe we should take another break, yes, and we'll be
back with mart Art. All right. So we've talked about
(37:24):
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
(37:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
I think a few more times that might get at home.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
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
(38:36):
the world. And he would really play a big role
later on during World War one and two, as we'll see.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
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
(39:04):
I'll say for sure.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
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
(39:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Yeah, he was a portraitist, which was a little different
from the rest.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Of them for sure. He had also formed another group
in Montreal called the beaver Hall Group, which is a.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Pretty good group name, Yeah, great name.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
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,
(40:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
But don't tell anybody.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
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
(41:01):
shouldn't be doing it and selling it.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah, that lady was ahead of even MPR.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Yeah yeah, or what's Canada's version of NPR.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
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.
(41:33):
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,
(41:53):
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
(42:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
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
(42:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
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
(43:25):
foundation of it. That's a big part of it.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Yeah, because you could get it at the Spencer Gifts
all of a sudden.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
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
(44:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
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
(44:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Well, since Chuck said he's in his fifties, of course,
that means he's just unlocked. Listener mail, mid fifties.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
When are you fifty?
Speaker 2 (45:14):
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
(45:34):
your younger years, the peak of happiness. So we have
a lot to look forward to, man.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Yeah, just get ready.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yeah, we're going to be podcasting the whole time.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
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
(46:05):
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
(46:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Yeah, that's heartening.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
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
(47:00):
was great.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
It was a good show.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
And that is from Samuel Adult Basic Education instructor.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
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