Woman Ironing

Julius Tanzer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This luminous image of a woman ironing is one of tens of thousands of prints published in the 1930s and 1940s by the Works Progress Administration (WPA, also called the Work Projects Administration), an agency operated by the United States government to provide widespread work relief during the Great Depression. Like many other artists employed by the WPA’s Federal Art Project, New York printmaker Tanzer produced images that depict Americans at work—both inside and outside of the home. Whether the woman portrayed here is taking care of her own household or that of an employer, her quiet concentration on her task reflects the print’s immediate context as well as the longer visual tradition around women engaged in domestic work.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art