The 1950s in Britain were marked by post-war optimism as the end of rationing gave way to mass consumerism and mass marketing. Images, advertising, and an abundance of product information filtered into the cultural conscience and Pop Art emerged in direct relation to the deluge of consumer information finding its way into the homes and lives of the average Brit. British Pop artists such as Peter Blake and Patrick Caulfield led the way in creating art forms that reflected the changing cultural environment from which new pop music emerged as well as the attitude of swinging 1960s London.

On the other side of the Atlantic during the 1960s, American and Canadian artists began usurping popular culture for their own style of Pop Art. Andy Warhol became the quintessential American Pop icon, using his background as a graphic designer to capture the essence of American pop culture. For example, Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup cans reflected the pervasive “sameness” of mass advertising out of which his artistic sensibility burgeoned. However, Warhol also used this same aesthetic with darker subject matter such as suicide, execution, assassination, and car crashes to underscore the mass media’s desensitizing affect on the American public. The use of bright non-representational colour was a direct reference to popular culture rather than an expression of the artist’s phenomenological experience.

Earlier artistic movements like DADA and artists working with assemblage like Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, Kurt Schwitters, and Americans like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were influential in the development of a Canadian strain of Pop Art, particularly in Toronto during the 1960s. Artist Joyce Wieland’s artistic trajectory from animation, film, Abstract Expressionism and collage culminated in the 1960s with her assemblage sculptures. Her work The Cooling Room I (1964) reflects this aesthetic with its 3-dimensional composition made from a variety of found objects. Wieland’s success as an artist resulted in her being the first living woman to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada.

Like Wieland, who employed Pop Art’s aesthetics in her work, other Canadian artists such as Michael Snow also drew from autobiographical experience. Though seemingly banal and detached, Pop Art’s everyday signs and signifiers tell a far more complex story.

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