From Ash Can to metropolis

The British Museum houses an extraordinary print collection. But though their print room exhibitions may include precious works, from Renaissance masters – usually shown in hushed, dimly lit rooms – to contemporary lithographs by the likes of the Chapman brothers, these shows are usually greeted with little fanfare. This says much about the poor status of prints, though there is often a special pleasure in exploring their quiet intimacy and meticulously worked over marks.

The American Scene: Prints From Hopper To Pollock has, however, happily received its due, overturning such previous neglect. And since the British Museum also holds the best collection of American prints from the late 19th century to 1960 of any museum outside the US, it can draw on some truly fascinating works.

The majority of these 150 or so prints are little known, so some will certainly come as eye-openers. Jackson Pollock’s 1935-36 Stacking Hay, for instance, is an almost naive depiction of a rural farm scene. Under the influence of his teacher, the regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, Pollock experimented with lithographs of the American Midwest. Later abstract expressionist prints by Pollock are also featured but it is the often unexpected encounter that makes this such a joy, as well, of course, as the pleasure of encountering so many less familiar artists.

Divided into segments, the exhibition explores the development of an American art, with its peculiarly US vocabulary. Kicking off with the Ash Can school (a movement so-called because it favoured the down and outs of the urban slums), we encounter artists such as George Bellows, who made his name chiefly with his brutal images of boxers, and John Sloan, whose 1917 print Hell Hole shows poor folk huddled in rowdy clusters in a dingy drinking den.

Also associated with this movement was Edward Hopper, whose Evening Wind (1921, pictured left) is a subtly erotic image of a naked girl kneeling on a bed, her profile hidden by her long hair, which echoes the billowing curtain behind. Many American artists of this period, such as Hopper, started their working lives as illustrators, which meant they excelled at the medium.

But one of the most evocative images of the whole show comes courtesy of Russian emigré Louis Lozowick. With its flat, curvilinear geometric planes, his 1925 lithograph New York offers a quintessential symbol of the 20th-century metropolis.

The American Scene: Prints From Hopper To Pollock
British Museum
Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, WC1B 3DG