The Department of Drawings and Prints boasts more than one million drawings, prints, and illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas from around 1400 to the present day. Because of their number and sensitivity to light, the works can only be exhibited for a limited period. To highlight the vast range of works on paper, the department organizes four rotations a year in the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Each installation is the product of a collaboration among curators and consists of up to 100 objects grouped by artist, technique, style, period, or subject.
Independence and Identity brings together works that explore ideas and ideals of autonomy—creative, social, and political. A special section of the installation, for example, explores the visual culture of the American Revolution. Planned in connection with an exhibition on view in The Met’s American Wing through August 2, the selection of prints presented here focuses on the role of New York within the broader struggle for nationhood.
Questions of artistic freedom come into play in a section dedicated to the stylistic and technical innovations of Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro, and other late nineteenth-century printmakers. Bold prints by WPA artist Joseph Vogel, meanwhile, attend to various definitions of autonomy through meditations on physical and conceptual experiences of vision and blindness, ability and disability.
Elsewhere in the gallery, images of architectural icons, including Roy Liechtenstein’s spectacular Cathedral series, point to our enduring fascination with and complex relationship to age-old monuments—repositories for collective and individual histories and aspirations. Finally, works by artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh to Elizabeth Catlett reveal the persistence of rural labor as a pictorial subject, whether celebrating communion with the land, calling for sympathy and reform, or affirming urban viewers’ own social identities.