Prints, Drawings, & Photographs

About the Collection

The Prints, Drawings, and Photographs department holds an expansive array of works on paper that are displayed on a rotating basis in the Korman Galleries (221–223), Honickman Galleries (156-57), the Keyes Gallery (256), and in other temporary exhibitions and installations throughout the museum’s main building.

Because only a small selection of the department’s collection is on view at a given time, scholars and students are invited to study works on paper by appointment in the Abigail Rebecca Cohen Study Room on the first floor of the museum’s Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building.

Notable Objects

• Highlights of the collection include early modern European prints and drawings, Japanese prints, and American and Mexican prints and drawings from the 1910s to 1950s. The department also features the largest group of prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi outside of Japan, as well as important works on paper by Marcel Duchamp and Dox Thrash.
• The drawings collection has significant holdings from eighteenth-century Rome, as well as important pieces by late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century French and American artists, such as Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Wanda Gág, and Rockwell Kent.
• The photography collection spans the globe and covers the history of the medium, with a core focus on art photography from the 1920s until the present. The museum holds the most comprehensive repository of photographs by Paul Strand, as well as notable collections of work by Alfred Stieglitz, Eugène Atget, Frederick Evans, Dorothy Norman, Robert Frank, and Robert Adams.
• The Ars Medica Collection contains thousands of prints, drawings, photographs, posters, advertisements, and ephemera related to the history of medicine.
• The department actively collects works on paper by contemporary artists. Recent acquisitions include works by Emma Amos, Michelle Stuart, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jennie C. Jones, Rashid Johnson, and Susan Fenton.