6. Group of Seven are Overexposed Genre Painters

I like A.Y. Jackson as much as you do. His paintings remind me of when I went to summer camp. I grew up with a reproduction of The West Wind hanging in our living room. (That was by Tom Thomson, who wasn’t really a member of Group of Seven, but never mind.) Group of Seven were the first artists to depict the wild Canadian landscape, and they were bold young rebels in their time.

But that time was 80 years ago. Today their work is the quintessence of bourgeois picture-postcard art—the kind of art it’s safe to take your mother to see. Enough, already. Maybe it’s time we moved on.