Prints Matter

LONDON—It's a little-known fact that London’s British Museum is home to the largest public collection of late 19th- to mid-20th-century American prints outside the U.S. From April 10 through September 7, 147 of these works by 74 artists are on view in “The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock.” The show opens with Turning Out the Light, a 1905 etching by John Sloan that depicts a poor city couple retiring for the evening, and ends with a one-of-a-kind screen-print abstraction, Black, Green, White, 1960, by Joan Mitchell. Among the many treats in between are a jazzy Stuart Davis 1931 lithograph, Sixth Avenue El, of a Manhattan street scene, and Thomas Hart Benton’s 1936 lithograph Frankie and Johnnie, portraying a barroom happening in which the female subject shoots the man who has done her wrong. Those in the market for a memento from this dramatically shifting period in American art history should head to the London Original Print Fair, from April 23 through 27 at the Royal Academy of Arts, where work by Sloan and his peers is on offer.

"Prints Matter" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.