Vision

Joseph Vogel

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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.

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