Art that's good enough to eat in American Scene

Art historians often talk about the tactile qualities of art but this superlative exhibition of 147 American prints, culled from the British Museum's virtually infinite collection, shows that great art can also seem edible.

I went through the show feeling as though I was dining out on the delicious inky blacks of lithographs of 1910s Manhattan streets, the crunchy grain of woodcuts of skyscrapers and the coulis of soft mists in Shelby Shakelford's innovative wax prints of Afro-American lives in the Deep South.

As that list suggests, this show is full of surprises. It displays a long list of artists whom most of us have never heard of, including a number of brilliant black print-makers, while also including the little-known prints of household names such as the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, the colourful American Cubist Stuart Davis, the Surrealist Louise Bourgeois and the lonely-person-sitting-in-empty-room-maestro Edward Hopper.

The overbearing Seventies wood veneer of the British Museum's print room faded into the background, as the exhibition persuaded me that modern art, usually described as the history of colour and form, is equally the story of texture and line.

It's a historical as well as sensuous-experience. The exhibition multi-tasks like a one-man band, the left foot kicking the bass drum of American social history.

Etchings of slum-dwellers sleeping on rooftops, prize fights in dingy clubs and lovers in Central Park are followed by a bread queue from the Great Depression, a frenzied Harlem dance hall, packed with jazz swingers, and then iconic images of America at war.

Meanwhile, the curator's mouth is blowing hard on the harmonica of modernist styles, showing us how American artists took the great "isms" of European art and applied them to real American subjects.

Views of American bombers airborne are rendered with appropriate Cubism, while the movement of an American football game is captured surprisingly-well by the Dalí-Picasso treatment.