Review: American Dream: Pop to the Present

Yesterday, pretty much on a whim, I diverted into the British Museum and got a ticket for their The American Dream: Pop to the Present exhibition. I am really, really glad I did. Printmaking isn't really an area I know a lot about, either in terms of technique or practitioners, so American Dream offered both a steep learning curve, and an insight into a lot of really exciting work.

The exhibition is being promoted like so:

America.
Land of the free. Home of the brave…
Trace 60 years of a superpower in this major new exhibition.

The past six decades have been among the most dynamic and turbulent in US history, from JFK’s assassination, Apollo 11 and Vietnam to the AIDS crisis, racism and gender politics. Responding to the changing times, American artists have produced prints unprecedented in their scale and ambition.
...
This exhibition presents the Museum’s outstanding collection of modern and contemporary American prints for the first time. These will be shown with important works from museums and private collections around the world.

The full description, available here, is quite detailed, and makes very clear how the British Museum are framing the show. The theme of politics is threaded through the work, sometimes subtly, sometime overtly, whilst each room represents the next evolutionary stage in the history of American printmaking. In the past, I've gone to exhibitions at the British Museum where, having paid for a full price adult ticket, I've walked through about three rooms of content, reached the end, and then gone, 'Is that is?' This was definitely not the case here. American Dream is a huge, detailed exhibition, so if you're thinking about going, make sure you leave enough time to fully take things in.

There is too much work in the show for me to talk in detail about all of it, but there were a few highlights that really stood out for me. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were well represented in American Dream, and seeing their work up close was particularly exciting as you can see their artistic practice play out over time. Chuck Close's portraiture was a masterclass of technique, and the stripped back minimalism of Donald Judd and Al Taylor articulated a reaction against both abstract expressionism as a highly personal form and pop art as an ironic gesture, representing how trends in printmaking have shifted in the past few decades. As I have already noted, though, these are just a few of the amazing pieces on offer.

American Dream is a well-curated, detailed exhibition, that treats the recent history of American printmaking with an appropriate level of care and attention. I learnt about this particular area of art history, as well as enjoying the work, and I would definitely advise you to make time to do the same.

5/5: Bold, brave and beautiful
The British Museum,
London.
Until 18th June