Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints: Portraits and States

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 and are usually housed in on-site storage facilities. 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.

This installation features a selection of drawings that present diverse approaches to draftsmanship and design in Italy from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, including head studies and portraits observed from life; a recently acquired landscape drawing by Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) alongside other late nineteenth-century representations of trees from The Met collection; a series of portraits by French artist Alphonse Legros (1837–1911); state proofs of GERYON (1957) by American artist Bruce Conner (1933–2008); Pop prints by British artists, including Richard Hamilton (1922–2011) and David Hockney (born 1937); and a selection of baseball cards from the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection.