Evolution of Swing

Evolution of Swing

Raymond Steth

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Evolution of Swing illustrates the development of swing music from its origins in rural Africa, represented by the scene at lower right, through the enslavement of Africans by white Americans, to the urban centers of the twentieth century. The subject is representative of the centrality of black American history and culture in Steth’s work. He took cues from the three primary leaders of the Mexican muralism movement—his contemporaries José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—in producing a flowing, allover composition that conveys an intelligible narrative. The print is based on a drawing that Steth used in his application to the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program that financially supported unemployed artists. He was placed in the Graphics Division of the Federal Art Project in Philadelphia, where he worked for a little over two years and developed the drawing into a lithograph.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.