Alexander Walker (The British Museum, 2004)

With its focus on British and American art made after 1960, Walker's collection represents the largest and most important bequest of modern works that the Department of Prints and Drawings has received since 1949, when Campbell Dodgson, former Keeper of the Department, laid the cornerstone of the modern collection. Artists represented in Walker's bequest are equally balanced between the modern British, such as Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Ian McKeever, Bridget Riley and Rachel Whiteread, and the modern American, including Chuck Close, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns and Brice Marden. Underpinning this core is a smaller group of works from the first half of the twentieth century by artists of the School of Paris, including Picasso, Matisse, Miró and Dubuffet, together with a choice number of pieces by the English avant-garde of the First World War period, notably David Bomberg, Edward Wadsworth and C.R.W. Nevinson. Walker’s bequest undoubtedly transforms the expanding modern and contemporary collection at the British Museum. The present display of almost 150 works pays tribute to Alexander Walker and reflects his eclectic and wide-ranging taste. For the sake of coherence the works are loosely grouped by the tendencies and movements of British and American art from the 1960s, including figuration, geometric abstraction and Op art, minimalism and Photorealism. A modernist introduction to these works is provided by an assembly of the School of Paris and the English avant-garde. The kitchen showing Sol LeWitt, Arcs from Four Comers, 1986, above the draining board and Chuck Close, Phil Spitbite, 1995, near the stove

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