The British Museum has been intensively buying American prints for a major exhibition next year. The show, The American Dream: Pop to the Present, will deal with works from 1960 to today. Some of the works are very large, and the ambitious presentation is to be held in the new Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries rather than in the smaller prints and drawing gallery.
Of the 200 American prints, 100 have been acquired in the past eight years with the exhibition in mind. Hartwig Fischer, the British Museum’s director, tells The Art Newspaper that this represents “a fantastic achievement”, considering the prices of the big names (such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg). A further 40 prints were already in the museum’s collection and 60 are coming on loan, including important works from the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Among the key loans, from MoMA, is Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station (1966), representing the golden age of car travel in the US. Stephen Coppel, the exhibition’s lead curator, would love to be able to acquire an example of this screenprint for the British Museum’s permanent collection, saying that it is “high up on our desiderata list”.
Fischer feels that “as we near the next US election it is the perfect time to reflect upon the impact of the US over the past decades and how artists have reflected on and responded to this period of change”. In Coppel’s view, the "American Dream” has become “eclipsed by events” in recent years, including the 2008 financial crash, and this will be illustrated by some of the more recent prints in the exhibition.
• The American Dream: Pop to the Present, British Museum, London, 9 March-18 June 2017. Sponsored by Morgan Stanley.
