Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints: Revolution, Resistance, and Activism

One outcome of the Women’s March on Versailles was that Louis XIV conceded to bringing his court and the National Constituent Assembly to Paris. In this watercolor, Swebach depicts the arrival procession of the royal family through the city, with onlookers peering from every window and both revelers and protesters lining the street. The artist chose a symbolically fraught moment as the carriage approaches the gate to the Dominican monastery on the rue Saint-Honoré, which soon became the seat of the Jacobins after the nationalization of Church property the following month. Swebach, who also adopted the name Desfontaines, signed and dated this work in the banner hanging from the building at right.

This print is dedicated to the working-class women of Paris who marched on Versailles to protest the high price and shortage of bread, which became one of the founding events of the French Revolution. The woman in combat at center is Louise Reine Audu, a fruit seller who, according to contemporary accounts, killed several royal guards in the confrontation. She was apparently among the small delegation of women allowed to directly petition King Louis XVI. Caresme made two revolutionary prints but is otherwise known for his paintings of gallant themes.

The ambitious scale of this etching representing the storming of the Bastille is all the more remarkable considering that it is Thévenin’s only known print. It reprises his painting of the same subject, which he exhibited at the Salon of 1793. The artist deftly leads the eye through the composition with a brilliant use of light and shadow. He emphasizes the violence and bloodshed of this early revolutionary event with the dead and dying appearing prominently in the foreground. At the center, he shows the arrest of the Marquis Bernard-René Jordan de Launay, governor of the Bastille. The soldier rushing in from the right waving the flag of surrender makes clear that this moment marks a decisive turning point toward victory for the insurgents.

Following the Revolution of 1848, the new Second Republic government commissioned Couture to paint "The Enrollment of the Volunteers of 1792" for the Hall of Sessions of the National Assembly. The government sought a unifying message of patriotism by highlighting a historical moment when, amid the turbulence of the Revolution initiated in 1789, Frenchmen of many classes came together in defense of the Republic, then at war with Austria. This study for the left portion of the composition lays out the frieze-like procession of the volunteers. The workmen strain with the labor of pulling a cannon forward, while a young aristocrat following at their heels raises his arm with enthusiasm.

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of working-class Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning, Versailles-based government and declared Paris an independent commune on March 28, 1871. Published just two days after the proclamation, this print shows Daumier’s concern for the lives already lost in recent conflict and the bloodshed to come. An allegory of Paris points to a hillside filled with graves to tell the cowering reactionary that there are more than enough dead. This work proved to be prophetic as the Commune ended two months later with violent suppression by the French Army, known as "Bloody Week."

Women participated in the Paris Commune in great numbers, especially in the working-class neighborhood of Montmartre. Houghton’s illustration, which appeared in "The Graphic" in June and "Harper’s Weekly" in July of 1871, shows a group of women marching under a flag that reads "The Commune or Death." The accompanying article states: "In the present revolution the women have shown themselves almost worthy of their sisters of 1792–93." It is more generally critical of the "Amazons of the Commune," however, describing them as "coarse, brawny, unwomanly, and degraded; picturesque certainly, but by no means pleasing."

Illustrated periodicals such as "The Graphic" in London and "Harper’s Weekly" in New York helped the British and American publics to visualize the events of the Paris Commune. Houghton’s depiction of a barricade appeared in both publications on April 8 and May 6, 1871 respectively. The description of the Communards as a "mob" makes clear that the publishers did not support the insurrection. As in the preceding revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, the barricade, constructed with overturned carriages, furniture, and cobblestones, became a potent symbol of the uprising. The accompanying article employs a touristic tone, describing blithely how "these street fortifications have always been a great feature in a Parisian revolution."

After serving in the National Guard during the Siege of Paris, Manet remained outside the city for most of the Commune but returned to witness the atrocities of its violent suppression in late May 1871. According to his friend Théodore Duret, he based this lithograph on a sketch made from life near the Madeleine Church, the site of one of the first massacres of Communards by Versailles government troops. The dead National Guardsman lying beside the barricade stands for one of many, while the pinstriped pant legs in the right corner refer to additional civilian casualties. Manet’s animated use of the lithographic medium, which included employing the side of the crayon for broad strokes, as well as scratching into the greasy black marks, suggests that the dust has barely settled on this scene.

On May 16, 1871, a group of Communards led by the painter Gustave Courbet pulled down the Vendôme Column. In Franck's photograph its shattered remains litter the Place Vendôme.

Modeled on the ancient Column of Trajan in Rome, the Vendôme Column was built by Napoleon I in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a glorification of the victorious French soldiers who defeated the Russian-Austrian alliance at the Battle of Austerlitz; the seventy-six battle-scene bas-reliefs that spiral up the shaft were cast from the bronze of 250 captured Russian cannons. Louis-Philippe crowned the column with a statue of Napoleon in 1833, and Napoleon III replaced it thirty years later with another of Napoleon in Roman costume.

Courbet was arrested for his alleged role in the destruction of the Vendôme Column following the defeat of the Paris Commune in June 1871. He was initially jailed in the Conciergerie, where he must have executed this drawing showing two very young fellow prisoners in a graffiti-marked cell. He submitted the drawing for reproduction in the journal "L’Autographe" in September, perhaps aiming to solicit sympathy for the Communards facing trial. He dedicated the drawing to Léon Brigot, one of few lawyers who defended Communards, including the artist.

First published in 1871, Bertall’s illustrations of types of the Commune was popular enough to be printed in a third edition by 1880. An English translation of 1873 asserted that the album is the "visual textbook" of the Paris Commune. This page shows two of the pétroleuses, or female arsonists, accused of setting fire to several government buildings during the Commune’s bloody last week. The pétroleuse emerged as a mythic type and a scapegoat, whose role in the Commune was exaggerated in reaction to the threat posed by women’s empowerment during the conflict.

The etcher Martial spent his career focused on the city of Paris as his primary subject and created a number of portfolios of prints in response to the tumultuous events of 1870−71. Like many of his series, "Paris under the Commune" takes the form of an illustrated letter. This plate shows the Vendôme Column before and after it was toppled by the Communards. The text laments the demise of the monument that had stood as a testament to the superiority of the French army.

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Women participated in the insurrection in great numbers, most notoriously as pétroleuses, or female arsonists, who torched several government buildings during the Commune's bloody last week. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, gained exclusive access to a makeshift prison at Versailles and made portraits of individual prisoners, who ceded the rights to their likenesses. He issued many of the portraits as cartes-de-visites, such as these, but also integrated the Communards' faces into a series of propagandistic photomontages entitled "Crimes of the Commune."

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Women participated in the insurrection in great numbers, most notoriously as pétroleuses, or female arsonists, who torched several government buildings during the Commune's bloody last week. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, gained exclusive access to a makeshift prison at Versailles and made portraits of individual prisoners, who ceded the rights to their likenesses. He issued many of the portraits as cartes-de-visites, such as these, but also integrated the Communards' faces into a series of propagandistic photomontages entitled "Crimes of the Commune."

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Women participated in the insurrection in great numbers, most notoriously as pétroleuses, or female arsonists, who torched several government buildings during the Commune's bloody last week. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, gained exclusive access to a makeshift prison at Versailles and made portraits of individual prisoners, who ceded the rights to their likenesses. He issued many of the portraits as cartes-de-visites, such as these, but also integrated the Communards' faces into a series of propagandistic photomontages entitled "Crimes of the Commune."

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Women participated in the insurrection in great numbers, most notoriously as pétroleuses, or female arsonists, who torched several government buildings during the Commune's bloody last week. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, gained exclusive access to a makeshift prison at Versailles and made portraits of individual prisoners, who ceded the rights to their likenesses. He issued many of the portraits as cartes-de-visites, such as these, but also integrated the Communards' faces into a series of propagandistic photomontages entitled "Crimes of the Commune."

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Women participated in the insurrection in great numbers, most notoriously as pétroleuses, or female arsonists, who torched several government buildings during the Commune's bloody last week. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, gained exclusive access to a makeshift prison at Versailles and made portraits of individual prisoners, who ceded the rights to their likenesses. He issued many of the portraits as cartes-de-visites, such as these, but also integrated the Communards' faces into a series of propagandistic photomontages entitled "Crimes of the Commune."

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Women participated in the insurrection in great numbers, most notoriously as pétroleuses, or female arsonists, who torched several government buildings during the Commune's bloody last week. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, gained exclusive access to a makeshift prison at Versailles and made portraits of individual prisoners, who ceded the rights to their likenesses. He issued many of the portraits as cartes-de-visites, such as these, but also integrated the Communards' faces into a series of propagandistic photomontages entitled "Crimes of the Commune."

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Women participated in the insurrection in great numbers, most notoriously as pétroleuses, or female arsonists, who torched several government buildings during the Commune's bloody last week. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, gained exclusive access to a makeshift prison at Versailles and made portraits of individual prisoners, who ceded the rights to their likenesses. He issued many of the portraits as cartes-de-visites, such as these, but also integrated the Communards' faces into a series of propagandistic photomontages entitled "Crimes of the Commune."

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Women participated in the insurrection in great numbers, most notoriously as pétroleuses, or female arsonists, who torched several government buildings during the Commune's bloody last week. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, gained exclusive access to a makeshift prison at Versailles and made portraits of individual prisoners, who ceded the rights to their likenesses. He issued many of the portraits as cartes-de-visites, such as these, but also integrated the Communards' faces into a series of propagandistic photomontages entitled "Crimes of the Commune."

This print dramatizes the American foundation story of the Pilgrims, religious nonconformists who left England on the Mayflower seeking freedom of worship before establishing the Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts. Based on Rothermel’s painting of 1854, the image shows the group’s military adviser, Myles Standish, standing on a rocky shore, helping his wife, Rose, out of an open boat. All of the men, women, and children correspond to historical individuals who braved the difficult Atlantic crossing in 1620, but, in reality, only men probably disembarked the Mayflower on December 21 to set up camp; furthermore, despite the near mythic status of Plymouth Rock, the group’s exact landing place remains unknown. At upper right, distant Native Americans watch the arrival, reminding us that the land was already peopled.

Early New Englanders knew the Native American chief Metacomet as King Philip. Leading the Wampanoag people around Narragansett Bay, he responded aggressively when the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies repeatedly broke treaties with the local tribes and expanded westward. "King Philip’s War" broke out in June 1675, with raids and battles fought from the Connecticut River Valley north into Maine. When a truce was made in April 1678, the Native population had been reduced by more than half and rendered effectively landless. Many colonial settlements suffered great damage, with adult male numbers decimated, the economy ruined, and the western frontier pushed back by miles. A century later, Revere produced this portrait of Metacomet to illustrate a history that glossed over the war’s true costs.

The Bostonian silversmith-engraver Revere made this print in response to a violent confrontation between local residents and British troops on March 5, 1770. With two thousand soldiers billeted in the city to enforce the collection of taxes on imported goods such as tea, tensions grew and skirmishes became commonplace. On the night in question, Americans threw stones and ice balls at a lone guard stationed outside the Custom House. Reinforcements were called, a tense standoff ensued, and rifles eventually fired. Crispus Attucks, a multiracial dockworker shown here in the foreground, was among the five fallen Americans. Issued on March 26, Revere’s image casts the British as instigators and callous executioners. Often copied and widely distributed, it helped push the colony toward revolution.

Though restrained in feeling, this print describes a profound revolutionary moment. It affirms the right of the original thirteen American colonies to separate from Great Britain—an unprecedented challenge to royal authority. The title is slightly misleading since what we actually witness is the drafters of the Declaration of Independence—John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—presenting the text to the Second Continental Congress at Philadelphia on June 28, 1776, six days before ratification. Forty-two of the eventual sixty-two signers appear here portrayed from life. Based on Trumbull’s famous painting of 1786, the print was engraved to mark the centenary of the United States.

Five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, a pro-revolutionary group known as the New York Sons of Liberty tore down a statue of George III standing at Broadway and Bowling Green. This imaginative recreation of that event correctly shows enslaved and free Black men performing most of the labor, but dresses them in fanciful Turkish attire—a costume often worn by Black men in European art that refers to the legality of slavery in the Ottoman Empire. The Baroque architecture is more characteristic of a large European city from that era than Anglo-Dutch colonial New York, and the actual statue showed the king on horseback. Published in Paris, but based on a print issued slightly before in Augsburg and demonstrates broad European interest in the dramatic events taking place across the Atlantic. It was intended to be shown on a wall or screen using a "magic lantern", an optical device that projected the image by means of candles and mirrors, and often called a "Vue d'Optique.

Related to a children’s book about the French Revolution published in 1793, this broadside distills the ideals and heroes, both historic and contemporary, of the new French Republic. Among the allegories of republican values are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—evoking the foundational motto—as well as the more radical Jacobin ideologies of Unity and Indivisibility. The presence of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin among the "founders of liberty" highlights the interrelated American and French struggles. The nine "martyrs of liberty" feature men who died on the battlefield, by assassination, or by execution.

Théroigne was a Belgian proto-feminist revolutionary who moved to Versailles in the summer of 1789 in order to attend the debates at the National Assembly. She advocated for the participation of women in revolutionary clubs and authored a pamphlet urging the election of women representatives. She was known to dress in a masculine manner, as seen here in a physionotrace produced by Chrétien and Fouquet. Chrétien invented the physionotrace—the name of both the method and the resulting image—to aid his production of silhouette portraits. Fouquet completed the portraits from life and Chrétien scaled them down to the etching plate; both artists used pantographs, devices that link the movement of one instrument to that of another.

In addition to hosting a salon that was an important meeting place for revolutionary politicians in Paris, Madame Roland played a powerful role behind the scenes by writing speeches and letters for her husband, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, who became minister of the interior in 1792. As a moderate Girondin, she opposed the violence of the more radical Jacobins and was arrested at the outset of the Terror, a period when thousands of perceived enemies of the Revolution were executed. Roland wrote her memoirs from prison before she was guillotined. During her lifetime, she sat for multiple physionotraces, a silhouette portrait technique invented by Chrétien.

Toussaint-Louverture emerged as a leader during the widespread uprisings of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791 that led eventually to the abolition of slavery there in 1793. He became the first Black general of the French Republic in 1795 and ascended to commander in chief of Saint-Domingue in 1797. This print of 1802 portrays him as an imposing force, although its status as a likeness is doubtful given that the artist probably never saw the subject. By this date, Napoléon Bonaparte had grown concerned over Toussaint’s increasing power and sent troops to capture him. He died imprisoned in France in 1803. One of his lieutenants, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, declared Haiti independent in 1804.

Toussaint-Louverture emerged as a leader during the widespread uprisings of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791 that led eventually to the abolition of slavery there in 1793. He became the first Black general of the French Republic in 1795 and ascended to commander in chief of Saint-Domingue in 1797. This hand-colored print of 1802 portrays him as an imposing force, although its status as a likeness is doubtful given that the artist probably never saw the subject. By this date, Napoléon Bonaparte had grown concerned over Toussaint’s increasing power and sent troops to capture him. He died imprisoned in France in 1803. One of his lieutenants, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, declared Haiti independent in 1804.

White portrayed the celebrated abolitionist and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass repeatedly throughout his career as part of his ambition to produce inspiring images of African American historical figures. During his lifetime, Douglass, for his part, recognized the importance of recording and circulating his own image in the advancement of his cause and strategically employed photography for this purpose, becoming the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. Prior to producing this print, White traveled to Mexico with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Catlett, to study with muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros at the Taller de Gráfica Popular. This lithograph adopts the monumental scale of a mural to present a closely cropped portrait of Douglass as a dignified elder statesman.

In 1826, Frances "Fanny" Wright founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee to test her theory of emancipation. Although she aspired to found an interracial, egalitarian utopia, it was a fundamentally flawed scheme that required enslaved people to work to buy their freedom. When, ultimately, the community could not sustain itself, she took the remaining residents to the newly independent nation of Haiti in 1830, where President Jean-Pierre Boyer welcomed them as free citizens and gave them land. The artist of this portrait, Auguste Hervieu, accompanied the author Frances Trollope to America in 1827 as a tutor to her children. He later served as illustrator for her book "Domestic Manners of the Americans" (1832), which briefly describes their stay at Nashoba.

Mora contributed this portrait of Zapata, a leader of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, to a portfolio commemorating that historic struggle, published by the print collective Taller de Gráfica Popular. The workshop built upon an important tradition of revolutionary printmaking in Mexico and aimed to further the progressive and democratic interests of Mexican people in all of their work. Mora and his fellow participants believed that the social purpose of an artwork was inseparable from its quality. In this print, Zapata, who fought to redistribute land to the peasants in his state of Morelos, appears on horseback leading the Liberation Army of the South, whose members carry a partially obscured banner that reads "tierra y la libertad" (land and freedom).

Steinlen designed the cover illustration for seventeen of the twenty-five issues of La Feuille, an anarchist, single-sheet periodical published between 1897 and 1899. This edition of October 20, 1898, reported on a builders’ strike, which brought to a halt major construction projects of the time, such as the 1900 World’s Fair site and the new Paris subway system. Fearing riots, the government called in sixty thousand troops to the city. Steinlen shows a powerful scene of confrontation in which the workers—passive, but their gaze direct—confront the threat of violence posed by the rigid soldiers and their rifles.

The artist and teacher Claude Flight promoted linocuts – a relief printing method that utilized the quotidian material of linoleum—as a technique　that reflected the goals of the modern era. Not only would they employ a modern aesthetic, linocuts, he argued, could be sold at a price on a par with other consumer items aimed at a mass audience. Flight also believed artists should respond to the contemporary world in their subject matter. Unemployed and its companion Employed reflect his support for socialism as well as provide commentary on the global economic depression. In 1932, the nadir of what was known as the "Great Slump," almost three million people were jobless in Britain; unemployment numbers would stay above a million until the first year of the Second World War. Unemployed contains a group of men and women workers with children and animals in tow carrying a large banner with a red rectangle. Unified, they stride forward and face off against the all-male group in Employed, whose ceremonial uniforms and rigidity give the impression that the figures are toy soldiers from another era.

The artist and teacher Claude Flight promoted linocuts – a relief printing method that utilized the quotidian material of linoleum—as a technique　that reflected the goals of the modern era. Not only would they employ a modern aesthetic, linocuts, he argued, could be sold at a price on a par with other consumer items aimed at a mass audience. Flight also believed artists should respond to the contemporary world in their subject matter. Unemployed and its companion Employed reflect his support for socialism as well as provide commentary on the global economic depression. In 1932, the nadir of what was known as the "Great Slump," almost three million people were jobless in Britain; unemployment numbers would stay above a million until the first year of the Second World War. Unemployed contains a group of men and women workers with children and animals in tow carrying a large banner with a red rectangle. Unified, they stride forward and face off against the all-male group in Employed, whose ceremonial uniforms and rigidity give the impression that the figures are toy soldiers from another era.

Gellert aligned himself with the Communist Party in the 1920s and engaged radical politics throughout his career. He favored printmaking, illustration, and murals for their accessibility to the masses, creating works that center on the tenets of Marxism and celebrate the labor class. Miracle Makers, which shows two workers in profile, is included in the book Comrade Gulliver: An Illustrated Account of Travel Into That Strange Country, the United States of America, a fictional story of a Soviet man’s travels through the United States during the Great Depression.

Gellert aligned himself with the Communist Party in the 1920s and engaged radical politics throughout his career. He favored printmaking, illustration, and murals for their accessibility to the masses, creating works that center on the tenets of Marxism and celebrate the labor class. Primary Accumulation 3 is part of a portfolio illustrating Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. In the print, a muscular worker confronts an oversize caricature of Henry Ford—a representation of capitalism—who clutches onto a complex of industrial buildings.

A piñata is a large, hollow ornament filled with sweets or fruit. It is broken in a game during parties and celebrations. In this print a worker uses a baton to break a piñata representing President Plutarco Elias Calles and his Constitutional Revolutionary Party that is presented as a disguise for capitalism. At right, a group of supporters cheers him on. The inscription on his baton, Feliz Año 1936, implies that the print was designed as a New Year’s card, with the hopes of the imminent defeat of Calles and capitalism.

Escobedo joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) shortly after it was established in 1937. Founded by a group of young printmakers associated with the Mexican Communist Party and the left-wing Partido Popular (People’s Party), the TGP was engaged in numerous campaigns in support of the international popular front against fascism. Working alongside European exiles living in Mexico City and with the full approval of both the Mexican government and the Mexican Communist Party, the TGP began producing posters to advertise the activities of anti-fascist groups. Among these was Escobedo’s El Fascismo, part of a series of posters for conferences on the fascist threat organized by the Liga Pro-Cultura Alemana. It features four men from different classes and cultures linking arms in solidarity.

Kollwitz engaged themes of social justice throughout her career, drawing on the hardships experienced by the working classes as a frequent subject. In Uprising, Kollwitz applied her virtuosic handling of etching, drypoint, and aquatint techniques to render masses of peasants following a standard-bearer who charges forward, leading the people. An allegorical female nude, the personification of Revolution, flies above them. She turns her head toward the left to look at the burning castle, which she appears to have set on fire with her torch. Uprising is directly related to Kollwitz’s print portfolio Peasants’ War (1901–8). She based the portfolio on the peasant revolt in Germany in the 1520s, when hundreds of thousands of peasants fought for greater economic and religious freedom during the Protestant Reformation.

The aesthetics and politics of urban crowds attracted Vallotton as a recurrent subject in the early 1890s. For this scene of a dispersing demonstration, the artist effectively exploited the economy of the black-and-white woodcut medium, balancing the density of the hastening crowd in the upper third of the composition with the radical blank space below. The approaching authorities remain out of the frame, though their presence is inferred by the reactions of the fleeing protestors. Vallotton also omits any reference to specific cause, which made the work more palatable to a broad audience. It was included in one of the most significant avant-garde print projects of the fin de siècle, André Marty’s L’Estampe originale (1893–95).

Together with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Orozco was one of Los Tres Grandes, or the Three Greats—a term designating Mexico’s three most influential muralists. Rear Guard is part of a series of lithographs Orozco made based on his 1926 mural at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. The print consists of a mass of men, women, and children, some of whom carry rifles, suggesting that they represent the civilian soldiers who fought in the Mexican Revolution, which lasted from roughly 1910 to 1920. The figures are clustered closely together and seen from behind, emphasizing their group identity and collective effort. The sharp lines, oblique angles, and expressive play of light and dark tones are characteristic of Orozco’s unique aesthetic sensibility.

Cyril Power was a practicing architect before he left the field to study linocut with Claude Flight at London’s progressive Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Many of his prints focus on images of contemporary leisure activities (such as funfairs, concerts, sporting events, and circuses) and systems that both connoted modernity and allowed it to thrive (such as the London Underground and buses). Revolution is one of the few works in which he embraces near total abstraction. Like his print The Vortex, also made c. 1931, Revolution employs a bold palette dominated　by tones of red and yellow, and dramatic angular forms. The work connotes violence and destruction both in the title and fractured imagery, which is likely a reflection of contemporary political, social, and economic events. Power used darker red tones for the two horizontal forms at the bottom of the sheet, which resemble bleeding figures in both the editioned prints and this experimental proof.

Vogel worked for the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project, a New Deal initiative that put artists to work during the Great Depression. The Division’s New York workshop fostered a vibrant community of leftist printmakers. There, Vogel created Vision, a Surrealist montage of abstracted figures that conveys the horrors of an impending world war. A prophetic figure at left faces figures, including a horse, whose ribcages are exposed; at right, a figure hangs from a noose. Vogel made Vision after returning from Spain, where he had moved for a brief period to support the Popular Front during the Spanish Civil War. While in Spain, Vogel saw Picasso’s mural Guernica (1937), whose blend of abstract style and political subject matter made a profound impact on the artist.

The Dream and Lie of Franco I and its companion, The Dream and Lie of Franco II, form a damning condemnation of Francisco Franco, the fascist general who toppled the Republic during the Spanish Civil War and subsequently ruled as dictator of Spain for nearly four decades. Together, the two prints comprise an eighteen-scene narrative that was reproduced on postcards and sold to support the Republican government during the war. Picasso drew on his unique style of abstraction to impart the terror of war, representing Franco as an abject, monstrous figure throughout. The last four scenes, which were added after the Basque town of Guernica was leveled by bombs, relate to studies for his famed mural Guernica (1937) in the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Picasso made these two prints beginning January 8, 1937. Each is subdivided into three rows of three scenes that together form an eighteen-scene narrative. The prints were intended as propaganda against the regime of Generalissimo Franco; they were produced on postcards and sold for the benefit of the Spanish Republican Government. Since Picasso worked on the images from left to right, the etched versions (printed in reverse) read from right to left. In the second plate, starting at upper right, the Fascist general Franco is depicted as a monstrous grinning figure, devouring the innards of his own horse, which he has just killed; the next two scenes show the results of battle; and in the next two, Franco is in combat with an angry bull, representing Spain. The last four scenes were added on June 7; six weeks after the Basque town of Guernica was leveled by bombs. Three of the last four scenes of this print relate to his studies for the mural Guernica, now in Madrid.

Members of the decades-long suffragist movement marshaled posters to draw attention to their cause. On August 18, 1920, they won the right for women across the United States to vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. As the map illustrated here demonstrates, women were actually granted voting rights in most states in the western half of the country prior to the Nineteenth Amendment, with New York following suit on November 6, 1917. Public opinion was shaped in part by the country’s entry into World War I in April of the same year, when women took on jobs vacated by men fighting on the front lines.

Members of the decades-long suffragist movement marshaled posters to draw attention to their cause. On August 18, 1920, they won the right for women across the United States to vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Women were actually granted voting rights in most states in the western half of the country prior to the Nineteenth Amendment, with New York following suit on November 6, 1917. Public opinion was shaped in part by the country’s entry into World War I in April of the same year, when women took on jobs vacated by men fighting on the front lines, including farming duties.

Word draws on womanism in her work, a theory that engages the histories and experiences of Black women; the term itself was coined by Alice Walker. This poster depicts a woman in profile, her headwrap and top inscribed with the names of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black women reformers, including those who led the African American women’s club movement and fought for voting rights for Black women and men. The image was inspired by the cover of Homecoming (1969), a book of poems by writer, scholar, and activist Sonia Sanchez. The designer, Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, often included pin-back buttons in his work. In homage of this, Word included one such button on the figure’s top, left blank to invite our participation.

Black Women’s Wisdom (2021.60.7-.10) commemorates the contributions of four boundary-breaking Black women through their own inspirational words. These figures include Misty Copeland, the first African American woman to become principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre; attorney Jane Bolin, who became the first Black female judge in the United States; Marian Anderson, the first African American singer to perform as a member of the Metropolitan Opera in New York; and civil rights leader Amelia Boynton. Blount chose to foreground trailblazing women whose legacies continue to be overlooked in mainstream narratives of U.S. history.

Black Women’s Wisdom (2021.60.7-.10) commemorates the contributions of four boundary-breaking Black women through their own inspirational words. These figures include Misty Copeland, the first African American woman to become principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre; attorney Jane Bolin, who became the first Black female judge in the United States; Marian Anderson, the first African American singer to perform as a member of the Metropolitan Opera in New York; and civil rights leader Amelia Boynton. Blount chose to foreground trailblazing women whose legacies continue to be overlooked in mainstream narratives of U.S. history.

Black Women’s Wisdom (2021.60.7-.10) commemorates the contributions of four boundary-breaking Black women through their own inspirational words. These figures include Misty Copeland, the first African American woman to become principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre; attorney Jane Bolin, who became the first Black female judge in the United States; Marian Anderson, the first African American singer to perform as a member of the Metropolitan Opera in New York; and civil rights leader Amelia Boynton. Blount chose to foreground trailblazing women whose legacies continue to be overlooked in mainstream narratives of U.S. history.

Black Women’s Wisdom (2021.60.7-.10) commemorates the contributions of four boundary-breaking Black women through their own inspirational words. These figures include Misty Copeland, the first African American woman to become principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre; attorney Jane Bolin, who became the first Black female judge in the United States; Marian Anderson, the first African American singer to perform as a member of the Metropolitan Opera in New York; and civil rights leader Amelia Boynton. Blount chose to foreground trailblazing women whose legacies continue to be overlooked in mainstream narratives of U.S. history.

"Super Diva!" celebrates the trailblazing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It was made after her death in September 2020 when there was much reflection on her historic legacy and the great loss her death presented to the Court and the country. The image, primarily in tones of pink and purple, shows the Justice in her traditional robe with her celebrated decorative collar, this one made of South African beads. Justice Ginsburg turns her body to stare directly at the viewer. Her pose presents her as monumental, even though she was barely five feet tall, a reference to her towering importance and powerful arguments made as both an attorney and a judge to advance and protect civil liberties. Surrounding her figure are notable quotes from her arguments and interviews, including statements in favor of women's rights and "I dissent."

In 1989, the Public Art Fund in New York commissioned the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of feminist artists who maintain their anonymity by wearing gorilla masks in public, to design a billboard. They visited The Met to compare the number of women artists represented in the modern art galleries with the number of naked female bodies featured in the artworks on display. They included the statistics in a poster that asked, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" The Public Art Fund ultimately rejected it as a billboard, citing reasons of lack of clarity, so the Guerrilla Girls found an alternate public venue for their design: New York City’s buses. The poster has achieved iconic status for its bold, eye-catching graphic design, which includes a reproduction of the female nude figure from French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting Grande Odalisque (1814, in the collection of Musée du Louvre, Paris) donning a gorilla mask. It also made an impact with its message, which spoke to the lack of gender diversity at the Museum and the art world writ large in the 1980s. The Guerrilla Girls reissued the poster in 2005 and 2012, attesting to its continued resonance.

Based in Paris, Reddy made this print during a year marked by global cultural, political, and social revolution. In mid-May 1968, more than eight hundred thousand demonstrators—including Reddy—marched through the city to denounce imperialism, industrial capitalism, and the authoritarian bureaucratic Gaullist regime. Protests soon spread through France and some ten million people, a majority of the French workforce, eventually went on strike. Demonstrators responds to those events and communicates a spirit of solidarity by depicting bodies physically united. Reddy had moved from India to London in 1949, then worked in Paris, Milan, and New York. He became an associate director at Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17, and with Hayter and other members of the printshop, invented an expressive mixed-color process known as "viscosity printing," used here.

Echoing contemporary press coverage, Warhol titled this work a "race riot," though it actually shows police and their dogs attacking nonviolent civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. The print reverses and enlarges a photograph taken by Charles Moore, published in Life magazine on May 17, 1963; the unmitigated borrowing resulted in a lawsuit. Warhol encouraged emotional distance from his brutal subject by enlarging the image and rendering it slightly out of focus—a technique employed in other violent images of accidents, plane crashes, and nuclear bombs that became known as his "Death and Disaster" works. We are left to wonder if the artist intended to shock, point to the ubiquity of violence in American media, or comment on the numbness viewers developed in response to it.

Prints were an essential part of Richard Hamilton's oeuvre. They allowed him to experiment with form and technique by combining methods and creating new processes, as well as to allude to a variety of cultural references ranging from art history to popular culture. The image for "Kent State" was pulled from the television, a source Hamilton refers to with the print's rounded edges of the corners and the black outline. Hamilton has stated "It had been on my mind that there might be a subject staring me in the face from the TV screen." Equipped with a camera, he watched television for a week in May 1970 to realize this project. During this period the tragedy at Kent State occurred when the National Guard opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War. Hamilton pulled the image of a wounded Ohio student in the print from the BBC news, which broadcast coverage of the carnage. About the image, Hamilton stated "Every night I sat watching [TV] with a shutter release in my hand... In the middle of the week the shooting of students by National Guardsmen occurred at Kent State University. This tragic event produced the most powerful images that emerged from the camera, yet I felt a reluctance to use any of them. It was too terrible an incident in American history to submit to arty treatment. Yet there it was in my hand, by chance--I didn't really choose the subject, it offered itself. It seemed right, too, that art could help to keep the shame in our minds; the wide distribution of a large edition print might be the strongest indictment I could make." [Richard Hamilton: Word and Image: Prints 1963-2007]

Hamilton intentionally created the work to be printed in a large edition but demanded it have the same quality as that of his smaller editions. "Kent State" was a remarkably complex print to make, requiring fifteen layers and thirteen screens (two were printed twice), none of which used halftone. Hamilton also refused to add any additional marks to the screens or manipulate the image in any way. "Kent State" is the most direct piece in Hamilton's oeuvre to engage the system and power of television. At the same time, it has uncanny links to works from art history, such as Edouard Manet's 1864 "Dead Toreador," in which the fallen bullfighter lies in a similar position, as well as civilian casualties in Goya's "Disasters of War" and his ”The Third of May, 1808" (1814).

New York printmaker and art teacher Gardner chose bold Op Art colors for this word-based response to searing events that took place at Ohio’s Kent State University on May 4, 1970. When National Guardsmen fired at students protesting the Vietnam War, four people were killed and nine wounded. That tragedy prompted the artist to compose a poetic litany that moves between references to political ideals and descriptions of dark forces roiling American society. Commas are omitted to encourage multiple readings. Gardner’s use of text encourages ambiguity and anticipates Jenny Holzer’s and Barbara Kruger’s later use of language in their art.

Gardner here offers a minimalist response to the brutality that unfolded at Kent State University in 1970 (see 1971.554.1 for his companion print). A dark triad of weapons and repeated shocked questions are placed above and below red and white stripes echoing the American flag—a combination that challenges the viewer to ponder national values and identity. After unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War were killed and wounded on the Ohio campus, student-led strikes erupted across the country, forcing the temporary closure of many colleges. The tragedy is now seen as a turning point that helped shift public opinion against the war.

Associated with the Pictures Generation, Kruger emerged as a conceptual artist in the 1980s. Previous to that she worked as a successful graphic designer while teaching and exploring a range of artistic modes. This print employs a distinctive collage-like format, with bands of white text printed over red applied across a photographic image appropriated from a popular magazine. An elegantly attired woman wearing white gloves and pearls smiles while peering through opera glasses. The metallic ground seems to compress, even imprison, the figure, while the surrounding words communicate a feminist message of empowerment and agency. Kruger uses elements of mass media to probe gender issues, showing how distinct ideologies shape common phrases and images that are often seen as neutral.

Designed to be worn by participants at the January 21, 2017, Women’s March on Washington, these sashes are embroidered with witty and ironic feminist tropes. Part of a set whose titles are printed on a small poster, they were made by the Victory Garden Collective, women artists who create works in the spirit of a World War II "victory garden." Seeing the world as "again in political and environmental turmoil [... and] similarly in need of nourishment and unification," they make publicly engaged art that seeks to address those needs. This example evokes the efforts of early twentieth-century suffragettes, who marched under purple and green banners to assert women’s right to vote; the sashes also raise traditional, more troubling associations for feminists, such as the attire of parading beauty queens.

This work responds to the all-male congressional committee formed to hear critiques of President Barack Obama’s plan requiring insurance coverage of contraception for American women. Male clergymen of various faiths testified to the committee, prompting outraged Democratic women senators and constituents to ask why women had no voice in the proceedings.

When this cartoon appeared, the Supreme Court was about to hear oral arguments on two landmark cases concerned with same-sex marriage (California’s Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act). To comment, the artist transforms the justices into long-billed birds that have invaded the privacy of a frightened couple’s bedroom.

Oliphant’s cartoons combine artistry with trenchant political commentary, both evident in this response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had been erected in 1961 by Communist East Germany to keep its own citizens from leaving. The wall fell on November 9, 1989, and this image appeared the next day. Two doves stand atop a concrete, graffiti-covered barrier contemplating a widening crack—the message being that persistent pressure applied by everyday people can eventually effect great change. Having moved to the United States in 1964 from his native Australia, Oliphant worked at the Denver Post and Washington Star and soon became recognized as a leading editorial cartoonist. From 1981, he operated independently, with his work appearing in over five hundred newspapers.

Blount manipulates language to explore the intersections of race, identity, and history in his work. This print is part of a series (2021.60.3-.5) that concerns hypodescent, which, in the context of the United States, denotes the practice of identifying a person as Black based on their ancestry. For much of U.S. history, individuals with one-eighth African ancestry or "one drop" of African blood were considered Black, and enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a free individual for determining congressional representation. The series illuminates how language has been mobilized to enact discriminatory and violent practices aimed at Black individuals, and how racial designations have determined their social status and legal rights. Blount created the prints using historic wood type during a residency he held at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in 2017.

Blount manipulates language to explore the intersections of race, identity, and history in his work. This print is part of a series (2021.60.3-.5) that concerns hypodescent, which, in the context of the United States, denotes the practice of identifying a person as Black based on their ancestry. For much of U.S. history, individuals with one-eighth African ancestry or "one drop" of African blood were considered Black, and enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a free individual for determining congressional representation. The series illuminates how language has been mobilized to enact discriminatory and violent practices aimed at Black individuals, and how racial designations have determined their social status and legal rights. Blount created the prints using historic wood type during a residency he held at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in 2017.

Blount manipulates language to explore the intersections of race, identity, and history in his work. This print is part of a series (2021.60.3-.5) that concerns hypodescent, which, in the context of the United States, denotes the practice of identifying a person as Black based on their ancestry. For much of U.S. history, individuals with one-eighth African ancestry or "one drop" of African blood were considered Black, and enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a free individual for determining congressional representation. The series illuminates how language has been mobilized to enact discriminatory and violent practices aimed at Black individuals, and how racial designations have determined their social status and legal rights. Blount created the prints using historic wood type during a residency he held at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in 2017.

In Four Evils, Uncle Sam is cast as the devil and holds a trident whose prongs are emblazoned with the words "militarism," "racism," "poverty," and "pollution." Garcia marshals a bold, graphic style in his practice that calls attention to misuses of power and authority. The print was included in a portfolio published by the Poor People’s Campaign, an organization committed to fighting for social, economic, and environmental justice.

Mass protests against systemic racial injustice took hold internationally in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Along with countless artists across the globe, the staff at the Center for Book Arts—a New York–based organization dedicated to the book as an art object—printed and distributed posters for use in the protests. This poster quotes Martin Luther King Jr. in calling for universal justice.

Mass protests against systemic racial injustice took hold internationally in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Along with countless artists across the globe, the staff at the Center for Book Arts—a New York–based organization dedicated to the book as an art object—printed and distributed posters for use in the protests. This poster advocates for the protection of Black transgender individuals.

A prolific letterpress artist, Kennedy wields the centuries-old technique to create prints featuring aphorisms, proverbs, and phrases that comment on current sociopolitical events. This print is part of a pair (along with TR.88.3.2021) that challenges us to imagine being confronted with difficult questions that magnify an increasingly common tendency: the posting of footage of fatal police shootings of people of color onto social media platforms.

A prolific letterpress artist, Kennedy wields the centuries-old technique to create prints featuring aphorisms, proverbs, and phrases that comment on current sociopolitical events. This print is part of a pair (along with TR.88.2.2021) that challenges us to imagine being confronted with difficult questions that magnify an increasingly common tendency: the posting of footage of fatal police shootings of people of color onto social media platforms.

The Occupy Wall Street movement grew out of calls for greater economic equality in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–8. It began with a group of activists who occupied Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district in the fall of 2011. The list of grievances in Flowchart was collectively written, and Schragis, an artist and organizer, shaped them into a diagram. It was reproduced as a poster and handed out at Zuccotti to protesters and passersby.