The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock at British Museum on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Apr 10 2008
until Sep 07 2008
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. OPENING HOURS: Daily: 10.00 - 17.30 Image Credits: Image 1: New York; c.1925. Lithograph. Artist: Louis Lozowick. Image Copyright Lee Lozowick. Image 2: Night on the El Train: Artist Edward Hopper. 1918. Etching. Image courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Image 3: Hitch-hiker; 1937. Artist: Robert Gwathmey. Colour screenprint. Copyright DACS 2008  |
