The True Issue or "Thats Whats the Matter"
Currier & Ives
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Throughout the Civil War, Currier & Ives issued political satires. Here, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, presidents of the United States and the Confederacy, struggle to control a map of the eastern United States that has started to rip from east to west. General George McClellan, Lincoln’s opponent in the presidential campaign of 1864, stands between the contenders and declares that the Union must be preserved at all costs. Lincoln counters, "No peace without abolition!!" while Davis insists, "No peace without separation!!" The image encapsulates the chief political positions presented to Union voters in 1864 as well as the Confederacy’s official position on the war. The New York firm of Currier & Ives (established by Nathaniel Currier, who formed a partnership with his brother-in-law James Merritt Ives in 1857), lithographed 4,300 subjects between 1835 and 1907 for distribution across America and Europe. They offered images of almost everything animal, vegetable, or mineral in the United States, and issued landscapes, genre subjects, caricatures, portraits, historical scenes, foreign views and reproductions of art works. The pictures were drawn on lithographic stones, printed in monochrome, then generally hand-colored by women who worked for the firm at home. This example remained uncolored.
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.