The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock
Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art
and sponsored by American Airlines
10 April – 7 September 2008
Room 90
Admission free
Press view 9 April 10.30 – 13.00
The American Scene will feature spectacular images of
American society and culture made during a period of great social
and political change from the early 1900s to 1960. Featuring
147 works by 74 artists, the exhibition includes the work of
John Sloan, Edward Hopper,
Josef Albers, Louise Bourgeois,
Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning
and Jackson Pollock. This will be the first
exhibition in the UK to cover prints from this period for over a
quarter of a century, and aims to introduce a new audience to some
of the most memorable images of American art when a consciously
American subject matter and artistic identity were
emerging. The British Museum has the best collection of
American prints from the late-nineteenth century up to 1960 of any
museum outside the United States.
The exhibition encompasses the arrival of modernism following
the landmark Armory Show of 1913, the rise of the skyscrapers as
the symbol of modern progress and prosperity, the Jazz Age, the
Depression, and the effect of the rise of Fascism in Europe on
artists’ political consciousness and engagement and America’s entry
into the Second World War. There were many striking images produced
during this period, many of them have become iconic within America,
but are still relatively unknown outside. The prints have been
carefully selected to show the various episodes in American
printmaking between 1905 and 1960, as well as providing a visually
stunning pictorial anthology.
The exhibition opens in 1905 with John Sloan’s
etchings of everyday urban life, marking the genesis of a distinct
modern American school, later dubbed the Ashcan School,
which launched its first exhibition in New York exactly 100
years ago. The remarkable lithographs produced by George
Bellows of prize fights, mental asylums and capital
punishment will be displayed alongside remarkable colour woodcuts
by women modernist artists such as Blanche Lazzell and Grace Martin
Taylor. The inspiration of avant-garde ideas from Paris can be seen
in the work of John Marin, Milton Avery, Jan
Matulka and Stuart Davis, and the development of
the machine-age Precisionist lithographs of Louis Lozowick and
Charles Sheeler.
Highlights of the collection include highly evocative scenes of
New York at night by Edward Hopper, Martin Lewis
and other etchers working between the wars, many of whom had a
background in magazine illustration. The urban imagery of these
works is contrasted with the romanticised vision of the American
Midwest in the work of Thomas Hart Benton, John
Steuart Curry, Grant Wood and Doris Lee.
Printmaking was encouraged during the Depression through the
Federal Art Project which provided relief to unemployed artists
under the US Government’s Works Progress Administration. This
particularly helped to establish the screenprint as a new technique
for artists, and saw the print reach a wider audience.
Robert Gwathmey, Blanche Grambs and Dox Thrash
were among the many artists of this period making socially
conscious prints.
The political engagement of artists in the 1930s and the
response to America’s entry into the Second World War after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 are vividly expressed by artists
such as Hugh Mesibov, Joseph Vogel, Hugo Gellert and Benton
Spruance, including his classic image Riders of the
Apocalypse. The influx of émigrés from Europe including
Josef Albers, who introduced Bauhaus principles to
his students at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and the
artistic exchange that took place in Stanley William Hayter’s
Atelier 17 in New York are two further episodes in the narrative.
Pollock’s first all-over compositions were produced as engravings
in Atelier 17 while Louise Bourgeois made her enigmatic series,
He Disappeared into Complete Silence, shown in its
entirety, also at Atelier 17. The exhibition concludes with
abstract expressionism, the first major international art movement
generated in the United States. As well as Pollock, other key
artists included in the exhibition are Joan
Mitchell, Franz Kline, Willem de
Kooning, Hans Burkhardt and Emerson
Woelffer.
The exhibition is supported by the Terra Foundation for American
Art and American Airlines. The exhibition will tour to three venues
across the UK after it closes at the British Museum.
For further information or images please
contact:
Katrina Whenham 020 7323
8583
kwhenham@britishmuseum.org
Benjamin Ward 020 7936 1297
bward@brunswickgroup.com
Notes to editors
- In 2009 the exhibition will travel to three venues across the
UK after its closure at the British Museum in September 2008:
Nottingham, Djanogly Art Gallery: 28 February – 19 April 2009
(Press enquiries, please contact Marketing Manager Sofia Nazar tel:
01158 467 379 email: sofia.nazar@nottingham.ac.uk)
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: 2 May – 31 August 2009
Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery: 19 September – 13 December
2009
The tour is organised under the British Museum’s Partnership UK
scheme.
- The Department of Prints and Drawings and its American
collection: The Department cares for the national collection of
prints and drawings, all of which are accessible to the public
through its Students’ Room and through changing exhibitions and
loans around the UK and abroad. The collection comprises
approximately 60,000 drawings and over two and a half million
prints dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the
present day. More than 220,000 works from the collection are
searchable online, 100,000 of them with images. Search the collection database online
- The exhibition will be accompanied by a public programme, aimed
at making the exhibition accessible to the widest possible public.
The programme will be developed in partnership with the American
Studies Department at Kings College London and the London Review of
Books.
- A beautifully illustrated catalogue written by exhibition
curator Stephen Coppel, with the assistance of Jerzy
Kierkuc-Bielinski, offers an introduction to the principal themes
and episodes in American prints of this period will accompany the
exhibition. Published by British Museum Press and priced £25.
- The exhibition will run concurrently with Coming of Age:
American Art 1850s to 1950s: Paintings from the Addison Gallery of
American Art, Massachusetts at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
from 14 March - 8 June 2008.
- The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock
coincides with The London Original Print Fair, 24-27 April at the
Royal Academy, Burlington Gardens, London, W1. Many of the artists
in the British Museum show will be represented at the Fair
including Edward Hopper, Louise Bourgeois and Thomas Hart Benton.
http://blmcmsweb/edit/www.londonprintfair.com