A BRITISH MUSEUM TOUR

The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock features spectacular images of American society and culture made during a period of great social and political change from the early 1900s to 1960 and charts the emergence of a consciously American subject matter and artistic identity in the twentieth century.

Featuring over eighty works by sixty artists, the exhibition includes prints by Edward Hopper, Louise Bourgeois, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The prints have been carefully selected from the collection of the British Museum to show the various episodes in American printmaking as well as providing a visually stunning pictorial anthology.

Opening with the social realism of the Ashcan School in the first decade of the last century, the exhibition encompasses the arrival of modernism following the landmark Armory Show of 1913 and the rise of the skyscrapers as the symbol of modern progress and prosperity. The optimism of the Jazz Age was followed by the Depression when printmaking was encouraged through the Federal Art Project which provided relief to unemployed artists.

The political engagement of artists with the rise of Fascism in Europe 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 in a number of the prints. The influx of émigrés from Europe, such as the influential Bauhaus artist Josef Albers, had a significant impact on post-war developments in American art. The exhibition concludes with abstract expressionism, the first major international art movement generated in the United States.

The American Scene Events Programme

Supported by 

Opposite: Louis Lozowick, New York. Lithograph, c.1925 © Lee Lozowick