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The American Dream

pop to the present

Stephen Coppel, Catherine Daunt, Susan Tallman

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£40.00

A comprehensive survey of post-1960 American printmaking, arranged chronologically with 12 different themes, from Pop art to race and identity

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Overview

In the early 1960s, American printmaking experienced a dynamic resurgence that placed it at the heart of artistic practice. Such was the medium's attraction that by 1970 virtually every major American artists was exploring its creative potential in collaborative print workshops. Throughout the past six decades, as leading artists have experimented with different materials and new techniques, prints have continued to reflect their central concerns.

The American Dream: pop to the present presents an overview of this extraordinary vibrant period of American printmaking, from the moment pop art burst onto the New York and West Coast scenes in the early 1960s, through the rise of minimalism, conceptual art and photorealism in the 1970s, to the engagement with contentious matters such as race, AIDS and feminism right up to the present day. Particular attention is given to key figures such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha as well as to more recent practitioners, including Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, Glenn Ligon and Julie Mehretu. The vital role of several print workshops is also discussed.

Fully illustrated with more than 200 key works by almost 70 artists, informative commentaries on the prints and concise biographies of the artists, this book reveals the unprecedented scale, boldness and ambition of American printmaking since the 1960s.

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Product Information

Book Details

Format: Hardback

Size: 28.0 x 25.0 cm

Extent: 332 pp

Illustrations: 388

Publication date: 9 March 2017

ISBN: 9780500239605

Contents List

• Sponsor’s foreword • Director’s foreword • Acknowledgments • List of lenders • Piecing together the American Dream by Stephen Coppel • Irresistible: the rise of the American print workshop by Susan Tallman • 1. Pop art • 2. Three giants of printmaking: Johns, Rauschenberg, Dine • 3. The print workshop: Laboratories of experimentation and collaboration • 4. Made in California: The West Cost experience • 5. Persistence of abstraction: Gestural and hard-edge 1960s–1970s • 6. Minimalism and conceptualism from the 1970s • 7. Photorealism: Portraits and landscapes • 8. The figure reasserted • 9. Politics and dissent • 10. Feminism, gender and the body • 11. Race and identity: Unresolved histories • 12. Signs of the times • Select bibliography • Glossary • Picture credits • Index

About the Author

Stephen Coppel is curator of modern prints and drawings at the British Museum.

Catherine Daunt is Monument Trust project curator at the British Museum.

Susan Tallman is editor-in-chief of the journal Art in Print.

Isabel Seligman is the Bridget Riley Art Foundation Curator at the British Museum. She is the author of Lines of thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to now and contributed to The American Dream: pop to the present.

List of Contributors

Isabel Seligman, Jennifer Ramkalawon