Watch out Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein are coming to galleries in the UK and their ideas are bold and breathtakingly original
American art shines forth in Britain this spring. Great American artists roll through top London galleries like hotshots on the freeway leaving double-decker buses full of British artists far behind. These guys are the real greats. Works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are at the Barbican, showing a freedom of thought that is breathtaking. Johns puts a cast of a foot on the inside of a box's hinged lid, with a layer of sand beneath it, so the foot leaves an impression as accurate yet fragile as a memory: the work is called Memory Piece. Meanwhile, Rauschenberg has made, in collaboration with John Cage, a print of a car's tyre track (Cage drove the car). At the Gagosian gallery, you can see his Jammers, dream-sails of coloured fabric that seem to float like dancers.
But wait, speeding round the bend comes Roy Lichtenstein, replying to these freeform improvisers with sharp, cool one-liners in his retrospective at Tate Modern. This quintessential creator of 60s pop is in London at the same time as the 50s experiments of Johns and Rauschenberg. That is a double measure of first-rate Americana. If you need a chaser, try the National Gallery's exhibition of Frederic Church, one of the founders of American painting in the 19th century.
This great American spring in art could not be more timely: anti-American feeling has reached a pitch among Britons that damages our own cultural life. We speak the same language as the US - even though Spanish is obviously a rival tongue there - and that, plus such shared artistic and literary heroes as John Singer Sargent, Henry James, TS Eliot and David Hockney, has always ensured a deep connection with American culture.
Today, the power of US popular culture is as vast as ever, but what is harder to acknowledge is the originality and quality of serious American high art and its profound contribution to modern thought. Evidence? The fact that no American has won a recent Nobel prize for literature is perhaps the most glaring and debated symptom of a refusal by today's wider world to revere American creative giants.
It is not hard to say why Europeans are less reverent towards the great American artists than we used to be. The catastrophe of the Iraq war left all kinds of scars. But, if we in Britain ignore America's outstanding contribution to modern culture, we risk vanishing into a nostalgic cul-de-sac. In the 80s and 90s, British novelists admired and emulated the modern American novel. Today's fashionable British novels are far less American and far more inward-looking. There has perhaps never been a more exclusively British Booker winner than Hilary Mantel: her fictional version of Tudor Britain owes nothing to Philip Roth, that's for sure. I prefer British writers who are open to American influence, such as David Mitchell.
In a different way, the very British modern art of Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst earns mileage from the fact that people don't know enough about a giant such as Rauschenberg. Indeed, Emin's bed was a rehash of a work by Rauschenberg. The same American giant was using stuffed animals to hilarious, provocative effect in his art decades before Hirst pickled a shark.
The wave of major American art now sweeping over Britain should make us wake up and smell the coffee. There are more things in modern art than Emin ever dreamed of. And a lot of them were born in the USA.
