Almost as soon as Pop Art made its debut in America, it was widely embraced. Unlike almost every other avant-garde movement, Pop Art immediately stuck a chord with the general public. Of course, critics argue, this comes as no surprise because consumers were simply treated to glorified signs of their own consumption. 

But there's a less familiar, darker and more perverse side to Pop. Pop Art treated sex and death with the same cool detachment honed in the mass market, and rendered them banal. It treated femininity with a variety of sensibilities ranging from pornographic objectification to humanely rendered subjects. It wasn't all born in New York and it wasn't monolithically commercial in character. If the spectacle of consumption is normalized in mass society, then a giant Campbell's Soup can is nothing new. But where American Pop artists tended to reduce their everyday to the ad-man's everyday, Patrick Caulfield, Michael Snow and others deployed Pop techniques toward very different ends.

Caufield's work in particular uses silkscreen and bold graphic composition (Pop staples) to depict a world devoid of market forces. Although Caulfield is classified within the hubbub rubric of Pop Art, his work is fundamentally contemplative. Compare one of these with Lichtenstein's still life Sandwich and Soda, and it becomes clear that the story of Pop Art is still incomplete.

click here for an essay by Curator Marcus Miller (pdf 217KB)

Richard Hamilton, Interior, 1964. © DACS (London) / SODART (Montreal) 2007

Peter Blake, Pin up Girl, 1962 © DACS (London) / SODART (Montreal) 2007

Related Programming

Andy Warhol's Sleep
September 8-November 25

Thursdays: 10:30 am- 8 pm
Fridays: 10:30 am-5 pm
Saturdays & Sundays: 11 am-5 pm

1963, BW/silent/5 hours 21 minutes, continuous play

Sleep is Andy Warhol's first film in his extensive filmography, comprising 273 films and almost 4,000 viedotapes, including 40 completed episodes of Andy Warhol's TV catalogue by the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA).

Sleep deploys John Palmer's theory of "1 to 1" and established Warhol's cinematic approach of reel-time-adhering-to-real-time. Screened in a repeated loop, Sleep is apparently a continuous, non-dramatic filmic document of then lover, poet John Giorno, at home sleeping. We are very pleased to screen this seminal work as part of POP ART: love, loss and the everyday...

Inside Art Lecture Series
Jeffrey Spalding
Thursday, September 27, 7 pm

Fine Arts Building (FAB) 2-20, University of Alberta
112 Street and 89 Avenue
$10 / $5 AGA Members / No charge for University of Alberta Students

Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Atlantic Canada's largest art museum, Jeffrey Spalding is an artist in his own right. He brings a populist, hands-on approach to his practice through his extensive teaching experience. As Director of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery from 1982 to 1999, Spalding was a saavy collector, expanding its permanent holdings from several hundred objects to over 13,000 artworks.

With a strong research mandate, and as one of the most significant repositories of 19th and 20th century art in the country, the collection provides an invaluable resourse to the university community, the region and the whole country. Spalding's interest in Pop Art resulted in a particularly rich collection of Pop works on paper, and provides the basis for the AGA's POP ART: love, loss and the everyday...