American Dream
Inside British Museum’s latest blockbuster
The American Dream: Pop to the Present British Museum
Aneon sign is glowing on the walls of a museum. Twice, its letters spell out the same word, “MALICE”: once, going forwards, in a warm and pinkish red, and again, this time backwards, in a vicious acidic green.
Since the green version overlays the red, the sign is difficult to decipher. Looking at it makes us feel woozy, as though we’re lost and drunk, late at night, in a sordid, uncaring city.
Except, of course, we’re not, because this is the British Museum, a tranquil zone of scholarship where we expect to encounter many things – a bust of the Roman emperor Hadrian, a magnificent Ming jar – but not this: a sinister, unsettling work, from 1980, by the brilliant American artist Bruce Nauman. What is it doing here?
Welcome to the surprising and subversive world of The American Dream: Pop to the Present, a major new exhibition devoted to contemporary printmaking from the US. As it happens, Nauman’s neon is an odd one out – included because it relates to a monochrome lithograph, also by Nauman, which also spells out “malice” twice, forwards and back.
But its presence suggests the playful, mischievous desire of curator Stephen Coppel to upend expectations. There are flashes of humour: the first work is another Nauman lithograph, urging us to “Pay Attention”.
The very decision to devote such an epic exhibition to printmaking – with more than 200 works by 70 artists – is unexpected. Even today, printmaking is marginalised, a poor relation in art history, far down the pecking order.
Mounting this show in the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery compounds the provocation, like inviting a bit-part player to soliloquise centre stage. Good on the BM, then, for taking a risk, although maybe it isn’t being uncharacteristically cavalier. The exhibition builds on the success of another BM show, The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock, which Coppel also curated, to much acclaim, back in 2008. The American Scene ended at the turn of the Sixties, with an Abstract Expressionist screenprint by Joan Mitchell. The American Dream begins with a gallery of zappy prints by the Pop artists who came next. In other words, it is a sequel.
It also represents the persistent efforts, over the past decade, of Coppel and the BM’s department of prints and drawings to build up a collection worth shouting about. And many of these acquisitions, funded by supporters in the museum’s Vollard Group, are so monumental that they could be shown only in the Sainsbury Galleries.
Two impulses lie behind the show’s organisation: to present a primer to developments in American art over the past half-century and, in turn, offer an overview of US society; and to prove that printmaking isn’t peripheral but as experimental and profoundly brilliant as any art form.
As it happens, the latter impulse is more satisfying. The story of Pop Art is, frankly, over-familiar. Moreover, it feels disappointing to find prints by such major names as Jasper Johns that merely reprise masterworks created years earlier in other media.
The historical narrative, too, is thoroughly conventional, moving from shiny confidence at the start of the Sixties to a sense, by the end of the decade and beyond, of disillusionment following the assassination of prominent political figures, including President John F Kennedy, the war in Vietnam and Watergate.
Where the exhibition excels is in demonstrating the vigour of the fledgling world of printmaking in the Sixties. This was the era of new and ambitious print workshops, such as Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island outside New York City, and Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. They were committed to collaborating with the best contemporary artists to produce art of the highest quality.
The efforts of Robert Rauschenberg, whose prints are not represented in depth in the current Tate Modern retrospective, are here paramount. Experimentation was Rauschenberg’s lifeblood: consider his prize-winning print Accident (1963), acquired by the BM a month ago: it makes a virtue of the fact that, while he was working on it, the lithographic stone cracked – something that, for almost any other artist, would be a catastrophe.
Meanwhile, Booster (1967), a lifesized self-portrait featuring X-rays of the artist’s body, and Sky Garden (1969), the stand-out work in Rauschenberg’s Stoned Moon series of 33 lithographs that respond, at the invitation of Nasa, to the Apollo 11 Moon mission, are both awesome works. Each broke the record for largest hand-pulled lithograph. Sky
Garden places printmaking on a par with history painting.
And I defy anyone not to be charmed by Rauschenberg’s category-defying print-cum-sculpture-cum-installation
Cardbird Door (1971), a fully functioning standard-sized door, which appears to be a patchwork of scraps of scavenged cardboard boxes.
Rauschenberg is not the only hero of the show. Ed Ruscha is another, thanks to his charismatic, deadpan wordplay, inspired by billboards glimpsed through a windscreen on the highway. His extraordinary vision of an ordinary gas station against a toxic-orange sunset is justly famous.
I was more excited, though, by a lesser-known set of six experimental screenprints that Ruscha produced in London in 1970 using organic substances, including caviar and baked beans, which he’d picked up in a supermarket. As its title, News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues, attests, the suite wittily distils British culture into six rhyming words, each presented in a tongue-in-cheek Gothic typeface to evoke the “old world” of Europe.
If Ruscha’s work strikes you as clever-clever (he is often associated with Pop, but is really a debonair conceptual artist in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp), there are plenty of gorgeous prints. Helen Frankenthaler’s Asian-inspired woodcut Savage Breeze (1974) is one. Vija Celmins’s meticulous woodcut of the ocean’s surface, which took her a year, is also mesmerising.
The show ends with themed rooms devoted to politics and dissent (dominated by Andy Warhol’s savage screenprint of Richard Nixon with bilious green skin), feminism, and racial inequality. In the last gallery, Donald Trump isn’t invoked by name, but his vision of “American carnage”, which he proclaimed in his inaugural speech, is manifest in Ruscha’s incredible relief-like prints resembling tarnished, bullet-riddled metal signs. Emblazoned with stark phrases such as “Dead End”, they are epitaphs for America’s Rust Belt.
While the story of American printmaking today isn’t as thrilling as it was in the Sixties and Seventies, there is still cause for excitement: the final prints in the exhibition are a set of etchings by the Ethiopia-born Julie Mehretu, in which swirls of complex marks suggest a sense of inchoate energy and, perhaps, optimism.
‘The historical narrative is conventional, moving from shiny Sixties confidence to a sense of disillusionment’
From Thurs until June 18. Details: 020 7323 8299; britishmuseum.org