Exhibition of the week The American Dream
British Museum, London WC1 (020-7323 8181, www.britishmuseum.org). Until 18 June
Printmaking has long been seen as the “poor relation of art history”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Even today, it is often considered “far down the pecking order below painting, sculpture and drawing”. Yet by its very nature, it is a medium capable of reaching a far wider audience than other artistic disciplines – a fact that American artists from the 1960s to the present day have exploited to create some of their most enduring and famous work. Over the past decade, the British Museum has amassed a significant collection of these images, which it has now brought together in an “epic” new exhibition. With great gusto, the show seeks to prove that printmaking is an art form as “experimental and profoundly brilliant as any other”: it features work by famous artists of the postwar era, including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha, and its subject matter encompasses everything from the Kennedy assassination through to the Vietnam war and the Aids crisis. It all adds up to a “surprising” and “subversive” show.
“You’re hit by the big guns the moment you walk in,” said Katie Mccabe in Time Out – from Warhol’s pop pastel Marilyns to Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoons, from Jasper Johns’ American flags to Ruscha’s West Coast gas stations. “The whole show’s a bit of a visual ambush.” At best, it buzzes with ideas and visual flourishes, said Matthew Collings in the London Evening Standard, yet, it is only “intermittently exciting”. Too many of the prints are mere reproductions. Thus, James Rosenquist’s “immensely large” pop painting F-111 (1964-65) “gets rendered as a 1974 print to no particular benefit”. Printmaking is indeed an “important” art, but too many here “seem to be more about expanding markets than meanings”.
Many of the images we initially see here are “too familiar” to impress, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times. Warhol’s prints, for example, have been so extensively reproduced that even his celebrated Little Electric Chair series “can start to feel as comfortable as an old sofa”. But “the deeper you get into the exhibition, the more fascinating it is”. One later piece, the African-american artist Willie Cole’s 1997 woodcut Stowage, turns historical images of packed slave ships into irons and ironing boards, to ask us “to consider the drudgery of modern domestic service”. If this exhibition illustrates anything, it is not the “bright American Dream”, but its “darker flip side”.
The writer Clover Stroud picks her favourite books. Her memoir, The Wild Other, about the shattering effect of an accident that left her mother permanently brain damaged, is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £20
Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Estate) by Henri AlainFournier, 1913 (Penguin £7.99). A poignant study of an adolescent gripping the “lost domain” of the past, while on the exhilarating cusp of adult life. “It’s better to forget all,” wrote Fournier, who was 24 when he wrote this, and killed in action in 1914, a month after he joined the army.
Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan (Persephone £12). A subtle depiction of the claustrophobia and melancholy of thwarted maternal ambition. It deals with the loss of a mother who realises she’s raised children she doesn’t recognise, since “the kingdoms she had won for them had been
rejected”. Published in 1938, this surprising novel addresses the contemporary premise that motherhood is absolutely not the definition of a woman.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, 2013 (Abacus £9.99). The question of what happens to a life when visited by intense trauma lies at the heart of this novel. It’s a romp, too, crisscrossing America from New York city to the desert around Las Vegas then into Europe, with vivid depictions of drugs and the American wild.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, 1847 (Penguin £4.99). The beauty and consolation of pain is one of the themes of this classic, which I read
obsessively in my teens. Combining sex, ambition, violence and untamed nature, Brontë’s writing is terrifying, racy and unsettling, which is everything I want in a novel.
Journey into the Mind’s Eye
by Lesley Blanch, 1968 (Eland £12.99). The romance of Russia dazzles in historian and adventurer Blanch’s eccentric account of the fur-clad stranger who inhabited her heart and mind from childhood until she was 20. Her account of the yearning to recapture the sense of him, if not the stranger himself, takes her around the world, but the chapters in Moscow and on the Steppes are irresistible to anyone who has loved and lost in Russia.