It is a banner year to view American art in London with five major exhibitions with works from some of America’s most celebrated artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Grant Wood, Robert Rauschenberg and Alice Neel on view.
It's an unexpected treat for art-lovers (both Londoners and travelers alike) to see iconic works from all over the USA, such as Rauschenberg’s Monogram 1955-59 and Wood’s famous piece American Gothic, conveniently gathered in London. The exhibitions at the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts and Tate Modern, cover a range of artistic movements from the 20th century, from Regionalism to Surrealism and from Abstraction to Pop Art, and those that are open so far are getting rave reviews for the breadth of work on display.
Just opened at the British Museum is The American Dream, Pop Art to the Present, an exhibition charting the creative momentum of the print across five decades of dynamic US history. Including works by American greats such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Chuck Close and Louise Bourgeois, alongside more recent works from artists such as Kara Walker, Willie Cole and The Guerrilla Girls.s The American Dream is on until June 18th.
The Royal Academy of Arts’ exhibition, America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, examines how American artists’ chronicled the unsettled economic, political and aesthetic climate that dominated the decade following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, on now until until June 4th. From September 23 through December 10th, the Royal Academy will present a survey of Jasper Johns including the artist’s paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings.
Already open at the Tate Modern is Robert Rauschenberg, the first posthumous retrospective and most comprehensive survey of his work in twenty years, organized jointly with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Each chapter of Rauschenberg's incredible six-decade career is represented by major international loans that rarely travel. The exhibition is open until April 2nd. Later in the year, Tate Modern’s major summer exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (July 12 through October 22), will explore how ‘Black Art’ was defined, rejected and redefined by artists across the US in the period between 1963 – 1983.