The American Scene

The American Scene features around 80 outstanding prints by 56 leading modern American artists, including George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Joseph Albers, Alexander Calder, Louise Bougeois and Jackson Pollock.

The first half of the 20th century was a period of great change in America, and this exhibition examines American society and culture through the prints produced by some of the most important artists of the time. It begins with John Sloan's Ashcan School etchings of everyday urban experience in the early 1900s and concludes with Jackson Pollock and the triumph of abstract expressionism in the 1950s. Many of the images in the intervening period explore the changing urban landscape of New York, the onset of the Depression, the romanticised visions of the American heartlands by the Regionalists, the response to the rise of Fascism in Europe and America's entry into the Second World War.