American Dream Art Working to the Top in America

The American Dream — at present available in London

Stephen Coppel, curator of Modern Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, discusses its dazzling new exhibition of prints,The American Dream: pop to the nowadays — featuring images also offered in our Prints & Multiples sale on 29 March

'Screenprint and the emergence of Pop Fine art go mitt in manus,' says Murray Macaulay, Christie'south London Head of Prints and Multiples. 'Screenprint had by and large been used for textile press and was largely ignored by fine artists, but from the 1960s it became recognised as a fine art medium.

'There was this idea of using printmaking in a very advanced way,' the specialist continues. 'Someone similar Frank Stella, for instance, created multimedia extravaganzas that were so over-the-top that no 1 fifty-fifty really knows how they were fabricated.'

Macaulay notes that American prints take become 'so familiar' that nosotros've almost forgotten what they're well-nigh. 'A lot of this art was breaking the mould,' he reminds the states. 'It presented an alternative view of America and the idea of American-ness right from the beginning.'

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Vote McGovern, 1972, Screenprint © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Inc/Artists Rights Club (ARS), New York and DACS, London

The British Museum is at present attempting to put this context back into the fine art. From 9 March to 18 June, information technology presents The American Dream: pop to the present , the UK's first deep dive into six decades of American printmaking. Several prints from series featured in The American Dreamwill be offered in our Prints & Multiples sale in London on March 29.

Presenting works by some of America'southward well-nigh important artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Kara Walker and Julie Mehretu, the British Museum's eagerly anticipated exhibition showcases the Museum'southward expanded collection of modern and contemporary American prints for the first time, showcases more than 200 works past 70 artists, and holds a mirror to American society over the past 50 years. Here, Stephen Coppel, curator of Modern Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, tells us more than.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Sweetness Dreams Baby!, From: 11 Pop Artists, Volume III. Image 905 x 648 mm, sheet 905 x 699 mm. Estimate: £80,000-120,000. This lot is offered in Prints & Multiples on 29 March 2022 at Christie'southward in London, Male monarch Street

What is the guiding thought behind the exhibition?

Stephen Coppel: 'The American Dream showcases the print in America from the 1960s, with the advent of Popular Art, through to the present. Information technology highlights that printmaking was a key practice for many artists who are now household names.

'We look at artists such every bit Bruce Nauman and Ed Ruscha, and the persistence of abstraction in the '60s and '70s. We look at Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Photorealism — which is the complete opposite — and the return of figuration in the 1980s with artists like Caroll Dunham. Then the exhibition turns a corner and we curl back to themes of politics and dissent. Finally, in this new millennium, there are artists who accost the position of America today.

'Prints from the 1960s onwards tend towards getting bigger, bolder and more aggressive, then the works demanded that we display them in a much bigger infinite than usual. There are about 200 on display, but no 1 area that dominates.'

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), Heaven Garden from 'Stoned Moon', 1969. Colour lithograph and screenprint. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/DACS/VAGA, New York

This is the start time the British Museum is showing its expanded drove of modernistic and contemporary American prints. Tin yous tell us more about the collection?

SC: 'Some 70 per cent of the works in this prove were drawn from the collection of the British Museum itself. Ten years ago nosotros wouldn't have been in the position to put on an exhibition like this, because we wouldn't have had the material to draw upon. We have acquired almost 100 prints in the past decade. These acquisitions were supported by artists like Jim Dine, private collectors, and British Museum patrons like the Vollard Grouping.

'The exhibit too includes very of import loans from MoMA in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Tate and the V&A, also every bit private collectors. Information technology is very much a collective endeavor.'

What's your favourite work in the show?

SC: 'Rauschenberg's 'Stoned Moon' project  from 1969 celebrates the first landing of human on the Moon. Information technology was commissioned past NASA, and usually a committee similar this would be relatively staid, but for Rauschenberg information technology's the complete opposite. He witnessed the launch at Cape Kennedy and collected many photographs of astronauts and mission control. Armed with this fabric, and his own photographs, he went to work at [the printmaking studio] Gemini in Los Angeles. In the side by side couple of months he produced an extraordinary series of lithographs. One of them, Sky Garden, was the largest hand-pulled lithograph ever produced — at 89 inches in superlative — when it was created in 1969.'

Kara Walker (b. 1969), no world, from An Unpeopled Land in Unchartered Waters, 2010. Aquatint. © Kara Walker. Reporduced past permission of the artist

Are at that place works visitors might not have seen before?

SC: 'Visitors may not know a work past May Stevens — Big Daddy with Hats. Stevens was i of the early feminist artists. In the tardily '60s to early on '70s she produced a series based on her father, who appears as a symbol of right-wing authoritarianism and the smugness of Middle America. It'due south non a work that would be very well known hither, but it's specially resonant.'

As printmaking took off in the 1960s, how of import were the printers themselves and their workshops?

SC: 'An incredible freewheeling experimentation took place betwixt the artists shown in this exhibit and the highly skilled printers working in state-of-the-art workshops on the East and West coasts. These shops became magnets — places where artists could brand really ambitious prints. There was no end to their imagination; it was a existent tin can-exercise, optimistic attitude. And that is reflected in the exhibition.'

Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), Malice. Epitome 625 x 970 mm, canvas 750 ten 1050 mm. Gauge: £iii,000-5,000. This lot is offered in Prints & Multiples on 29 March 2022 at Christie's in London, King Street

What has excited you most well-nigh the exhibit?

SC: 'What 1 sees in this exhibition is just how heady the piece of work produced in America has been over the past l to 60 years. And the vitality of printmaking remains: the work existence produced at present by Kara Walker is equal to that produced by Rauschenberg in the 1960s. They address different issues, but the vitality is there.'

What would yous like viewers to take away with them from the exhibition?

SC: 'I very much hope that they'll remember just how exciting and boggling this period of creativity in America has been. It's really the great renaissance of the print — the pieces produced were and are remarkable in their ambition, scale, boldness and size, reflecting the can-do mental attitude in America of the time.'

The American Dream: pop to present  runs from 9 March to 18 June 2017, Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery (Room xxx), British Museum, London

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Source: https://www.christies.com/features/the-american-dream-20th-century-prints-at-the-british-museum-8160-1.aspx

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