13.
According to Joan Lowndes, Pop Art, or a variant thereof, made its first appearance in local practice in 1963, with the two-person debut exhibition of the work of Gary Lee-Nova and Claude Breeze.22

Both artists studied with Audrey Capel-Doray who, with her husband Victor Doray, were actively engaged in experimenting with McLuhanesque ideas of collage, concrete poetry and communicability.

Both painters used hard-edge elements in their canvases, but they both turned to popular mass media for subject matter. American Pop Art had made an early appearance in Vancouver when Alvin Balkind showed works from Virginia and Bagley Wright's collection of Pop artists in January 1964.23 Neither Lee-Nova's nor Breeze's work referred to any of the artists in the Wright collection. Breeze's 1963 work was said to be derived from British Pop, specifically Bacon and Kitjai. Such easily read references contributed to the generalization promoted by Philip Leider, among others, that artistically Vancouver was more connected to California and London than to New York (he would have been ignorant of Regina and Montréal artists).

Presented under the sponsorship of one of the city's most respected senior artists . . .