Editing Metropolitan Museum of Art (section)

==== Drawings and prints ====
[[File:Dürer Melancholia I.jpg|thumb|''[[Melencolia I]]'' by [[Albrecht Dürer]]]]
Though other departments contain significant numbers of [[drawing]]s and [[Printmaking|prints]], the Drawings and Prints department specifically concentrates on [[North America]]n pieces and [[Western Europe]]an works produced after the [[Middle Ages]]. The first gift of Old Master drawings, comprising 670 sheets, was presented as a single group in 1880 by [[Cornelius Vanderbilt II]], though most proved to be misattributed.<ref name="Tomkins-1989" /> The Vanderbilt gift launched the collection, and the Department of Paintings also eventually acquired drawings (including by [[Michelangelo]] and [[Leonardo da Vinci|Leonardo]]). In the meantime, the Met library began to collect prints. Harris Brisbane Dick's donation of thirty-five hundred works on paper (mostly nineteenth-century etchings) and a fund for acquisitions led to the hiring of [[William Ivins Jr.|William M. Ivins Jr]]. in 1916.<ref name="History of the Department">{{Cite web |title=History of the Department |url=https://www3.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/drawings-and-prints/history-of-the-department |access-date=2024-01-27 |website=The Metropolitan Museum of Art |language=en}}</ref><ref name="Tomkins-1989" />

As the museum's first curator of prints, Ivans established the mission of collecting images that would reveal "the whole gamut of human life and endeavor, from the most ephemeral of courtesies to the loftiest pictorial presentation of man's spiritual aspirations." Over the next 30 years, he built what is credited as the best collection in the nation.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Gertrude Käsebier {{!}} William M. Ivins Jr. |url=https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/263962 |access-date=2024-01-27 |website=The Metropolitan Museum of Art |language=en}}</ref> Ivans opened three galleries and a study room in 1971. He curated almost sixty exhibitions, and his influential publications included ''How Prints Look'' (1943) and ''Prints and Visual Communication'' (1953), in addition to almost two hundred articles for the museum's ''Bulletin.''<ref name="www.metmuseum.org-2020">{{Cite web |date=2020 |editor-last=Bayer |editor-first=Andrea |editor2=Laura D. Corey  |title=Making The Met, 1870–2020 |url=https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Making_The_Met_1870-2020 |access-date=2024-02-02 |website=www.metmuseum.org |publisher=The Metropolitan Museum of Art |place=New York |language=en}}</ref> Ivans and his successor [[A. Hyatt Mayor]] (hired 1932, 1946-66 Curator of Prints) collected hundreds of thousands of works, including photographs, books, architectural drawings, modern artworks on paper, posters, trade cards, and other ephemera.<ref name="History of the Department"/> Important early donors to the department include: [[Junius Spencer Morgan II]], who presented a broad range of material, mainly 16th century, including woodblocks and many prints by [[Albrecht Dürer]] in 1919; Gothic woodcuts and Rembrandt etchings from the [[Felix M. Warburg]] family; James Clark McGuire's transformative bequest brought over seven hundred fifteenth-century woodcuts; prints by Rembrandt, [[Edgar Degas]], and [[Mary Cassatt]] with the [[Henry Osborne Havemeyer|H.O. Havemeyer]] Collection in 1929. Ivans also purchased five albums from the auction of the Earl of Pembroke's collection, and the 2,200 prints in these albums provided a nucleus of Italian prints.<ref name="www.metmuseum.org-2020" /><ref name="History of the Department"/>

Meanwhile, acquisitions of drawings, including an album of 50 [[Francisco Goya|Goyas]] (thanks to Ivans, the Met collected almost 300 works by Goya on paper) continued to be processed through the Department of Paintings.  In 1960, a Department of Drawings was established under Jacob Bean, who served as curator until 1992, during which time the museum's collection of drawings nearly doubled in size, with strengths in French and Italian works.<ref name="www.metmuseum.org-2020" /><ref>{{Cite web |title=History of the Department |url=https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/drawings-and-prints/history-of-the-department |access-date=2023-01-12 |website=www.metmuseum.org}}</ref>

Finally, in 1993, a unified Department of Drawings and Prints was created for all works on paper, chaired by [[George R. Goldner|George Goldner]], who sought to rectify collecting imbalances by adding works by Dutch, Flemish, Central European, Danish, and British artists. The department has been led by [[Nadine Orenstein]], Drue Heinz Curator in Charge since 2015. A particularly important recent gift was that of the Leslie and Johanna Garfield Collection of British Modernism in 2019.<ref name="History of the Department"/>

The broadened collecting horizons of the museum in the post-Black Lives Matter era have been displayed in the exhibition of contemporary political works on paper called "Revolution, Resistance, and Activism", held at the Met in 2021-22. It included such works as the Guerrilla Girls' famous poster ''Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?,'' 1987, Julie Torres' ''Super Diva!,'' 2020 (a posthumous image of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), and Ben Blount's ''Black Women's Wisdom,'' 2019.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Cordova |first=Ruben |date=November 28, 2021 |title=Taking it to the Street: the Guerrilla Girls' Struggle for Diversity |url=https://glasstire.com/2021/11/28/taking-it-to-the-street-the-guerrilla-girls-struggle-for-diversity/ |work=Glasstire}}</ref>

Currently, the Drawings and Prints collection contains about 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Drawings and Prints |url=https://www3.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/drawings-and-prints |access-date=2024-01-27 |website=The Metropolitan Museum of Art |language=en}}</ref> Many of the great masters of European painting, who produced many more sketches and drawings than actual paintings, are represented in the Drawing and Prints collection, sometimes in great concentrations. Prints are also represented in multiple states. Many artists and makers whose work is in the prints and drawings collection are otherwise not represented in the museum's holdings.