Bob Masse

Robert Joseph Masse was born on April 5, 1945, the first of four children of Lillian Mae Sharp, a packer for a wholesale grocery firm, and Joseph Frank Masse, who served with an artillery unit of the Canadian Army during the Second World War. His parents married in 1944 after meeting on a blind date. After the war his father worked as a furniture polisher and refinisher at Woodward's department store. The Globe and Mail gives his birthplace as Vancouver, while the Vancouver Sun says he was born in Burnaby. Either way, he grew up in Burnaby and spent his childhood drawing in the family basement, copying Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck and MAD magazine cartoons.

After high school Masse attended the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design), with the encouragement of his parents. He later joked that he "didn't really learn anything" there, but a fourth-year practicum that required him to deliver a product to a real client on deadline produced his first concert poster, for Bob Dylan at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in 1965.

Masse began with posters for Vancouver folk coffeehouses such as the Inquisition and the Bunkhouse, and window displays at Woodward's. His first major commission was Bob Dylan's April 1965 Queen Elizabeth Theatre concert, where he misspelled the singer's name as "Dylon." As folk turned to folk-rock he became the resident poster artist for Jerry Kruz's Afterthought, designing the famous Steve Miller Blues Band poster of March 1967 with its wild-bearded old man, which appears in the book The Art of Rock.

Visits to San Francisco in 1966 and 1967, including stays at the Grateful Dead's house at 710 Ashbury Street, brought him face to face with Fillmore and Avalon poster art. He made his first Grateful Dead poster for the band's August 1966 Vancouver concert and his most famous one, his own favourite, for their 1967 Vancouver shows. He also designed posters for the 1967 Trips Festival in Richmond, the Doors at Dante's Inferno in July 1967, and the Retinal Circus.

From about 1967 to 1969 he lived in Los Angeles, first above the Whisky a Go Go and then in a converted garage on a former Errol Flynn property in Laurel Canyon. He designed posters and ads for the Whisky, worked for the Cheetah club, designed the debut album cover for the Collectors (later Chilliwack), and made a Doors poster for the Los Angeles Forum in 1968.

Back in British Columbia from 1969, he made posters for the Retinal Circus, Moose Valley Farms and Gassy Jack's, then moved largely into commercial illustration for McDonald's, CP Air, the Expo Space Station and Lock-It Guitar Straps. He drew the orange CFOX fox logo and worked on posters for Total Recall and Back to the Future Part III and on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

In 1992 a Donovan Mellow Yellow tour poster, financed by collector Rob Frith, brought him back to concert art. He went on to design for U2, Neil Young, the Tragically Hip, Tool, Rush, Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette, Furthur and many others, plus anniversary covers for the Georgia Straight. A reissue of his Grateful Dead poster, approved by the band, began a profitable trade in reproductions sold through bmasse.com.

Masse's first marriage ended in divorce. He had no children. For the last 33 years of his life his partner was Claire Norris, and in later years the couple lived on Salt Spring Island, where he kept a studio. He was a keen motorcyclist, often seen on his Kawasaki around the island. His brother Len Masse drew the DoodleArt poster Ecology, which sold more than a million copies. Friends at Steffich Fine Art on Salt Spring remembered him as "the 75-year-old five-year-old."

Masse described himself as "the Dude" of the art world and said he had always managed to support himself through his art. He named the Art Nouveau movement, and Alphonse Mucha above all, as his main influence, along with early 20th-century book illustrators and American pin-up art. His aim, he said, was to mix old and new styles: Art Nouveau with psychedelic lettering, pin-up girls with Art Nouveau. He described the 1960s poster revolution as "a total breakdown in the rules" after the structured system he had learned at art school. While working he preferred instrumental jazz, classical music and Grateful Dead jams.

Masse is regarded as one of the founding figures of West Coast psychedelic poster art and as the most prolific of the 1960s psychedelic artists, according to collector Rob Frith. Posters he once sold for 10 to 100 dollars now fetch thousands, and his 1967 Grateful Dead Vancouver poster hung in the band's own office. He was a rare 1960s poster artist to keep working well into the 21st century, and his CFOX fox remains one of the most widely seen logos in Vancouver. His partner Claire has said he was also involved very early in carrying concert artwork onto T-shirts. Tributes after his death came from the Doors, Jefferson Airplane and the Janis Joplin estate.

No formal awards have been documented in the sources used for this profile. His work is included in the reference book The Art of Rock (1987), and Billboard listed his poster for U2 at Reunion Arena among the top 10 concert posters of all time, according to a 2010 PlayItLoud interview.

His Steve Miller poster appears in Paul Grushkin's The Art of Rock (1987). Books cited as further reading on his work include Grushkin and Dennis King's Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion (2004), Jerry Kruz's The Afterthought: West Coast Rock Posters and Recollections from the '60s (2014), and S. C. Boyd's Busted: An Illustrated History of Drug Prohibition in Canada (2017). He was interviewed by the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, MOJO, Fine Art Magazine, Grateful Web, dead.net and CBC Vancouver's Then and Now, among others. He also designed the cover of Lawrence Aronsen's City of Love and Revolution.

Masse had a stroke around 2020 and in 2022 fell off his motorcycle, suffering a compression fracture that left him in constant pain. He then developed Parkinson-plus syndrome, a group of neurodegenerative diseases. He died at Lady Minto/Gulf Islands Hospital on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, on September 21, 2026, at the age of 81. His death was announced on the Bob Masse Studios Facebook page at the end of September, and wider coverage followed in early October.