The American Scene
features over 80 outstanding prints by 60 leading
modern American artists, including George Bellows, Edward Hopper,
Grant Wood, Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois and
Jackson Pollock.
The first half of the 20th century was a
period of great change in America, and this exhibition examines
American society and culture through the prints produced by some of
the most important artists of the time.
This exhibition begins with John Sloan's
Ashcan School etchings of everyday urban experience in the 1900s
and concludes with Jackson Pollock and the triumph of abstract
expressionism in the 1950s.
Many of the images in the intervening period
explore the changing urban landscape of New York, the onset of the
Depression, the romanticised visions of the American heartlands by
the Regionalists, the response to the rise of Fascism in Europe and
America’s entry into the Second World War.
All the works come from the British Museum’s
own American print collection, which is the most comprehensive
outside the United States covering this period.
Whitworth Art Gallery,
Manchester
19 September – 13 December 2009
Image: Louis Lozowick (1892–1973), New
York (detail), lithograph, c.1925. © Lee
Lozowick.