Wall

Wall is from a series of collage-paintings that Blake created during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Its format of commercially printed matter affixed to a vertical surface recalls a tack-board or pin-up wall. The materials employed—cheaply printed Edwardian advertising cards, common oil paint, and thin wood household stripping—are mundane.

Among the earliest and most celebrated of British Pop artists, Blake sought an art that captured the fall of mass consumer culture. He frequently incorporated objects from earlier in the century, and his works do not so much criticize 20th century consumer culture as look at it with fondness and nostalgia. This strategy points both to an obsolete past and a rapidly changing present. In a 1963 interview, he stated: "For me, pop art is often rooted in nostalgia: the nostalgia of old, popular things…I’m always looking back to the sources of the idiom and trying to find the technical forms that will best recapture the authentic feel of folk pop."