Camden New Journal - Features: The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock at the British Museum

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The Review - FEATURE
Published: 3 April 2008

Robert Gwathmey, Hitch-hiker; 1937

Historic take on the birth of Modernism

FROM John Sloan’s first tentative forays into Modernism to the amorphous, paint-splattered symphonies of Jackson Pollock, one can charter – or attempt to at least – the seismic shifts in American culture in the first period of the 20th century.
Such is the hope of the British Museum, whose 147-print exhibition detailing the many episodes of the American Scene between 1905 and 1960 opens next week.
The pronounced metamorphosis of art during this period serves as a jettison for an exploration of social and political change: the Great Depression and the much-maligned kitchen-sink realism of Sloan and George Bellow of the Ashcan movement and its affiliates have an equal custody over Edward Hopper’s reverent studies of the everyday.
The Armory Show in 1913 brought modern art to America before skyscrapers, jazz, fascism and war impeded and challenged the public consciousness.
Other print works by Josef Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning attempt to depict and explain the rapidly changing world, where the severity of the times is matched step for step by the energy and versatility of its art.
Hopper once said that art would have to “deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature’s phenomena” before it could be great again. In the light of these fascinating prints it seems his prophecy was close at hand.
Simon Wroe

* The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock is at the British Museum from April 10 until September 7.

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