Prints and Drawings

NOMA's Prints and Drawings collection is comprised of almost 7000 individual prints, books, portfolios and unique works on paper, the majority executed by noted l9th and 20th century European and American artists. On average, the department presents two exhibitions each year drawn primarily from the permanent collection. Recent presentations include Gentlemen Callers: Paul Cadmus and George Dureau; Home is Where the Art Is: The Zita Marks Templemen Bequest; Evening in Paris: Posters and Photographs; and from May 15, 2009, THE MIND'S EYE - Without Subject Matter, What does the Artist See?.

20th century American drawings and prints have long been a major component of the department's holdings. These include fine earlier examples by Arthur B. Davies, Gustave Baumann, Milton Avery, William Zorach, George Bellows, Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Reginald Marsh, and post-war works by Jasper Johns, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, and Chuck Close. NOMA also holds prints and drawings by artists who lived or worked in New Orleans, from Childe Hassam, Jules Pascin, George Overbury "Pop" Hart and Caroline Durieux to Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Robert Gordy, George Dureau and John T. Scott, a MacArthur laureate.

NOMA is home to an impressive array of prints and drawings by European artists. Included in the Muriel Bultman Francis Collection alone are distinguished l9th century masters such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cezanne, Jacques Louis David, Edgar Degas, Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Odilon Redon and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; and 20th century artists such as Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso.

The Prints and Drawings department also is home to extraordinary graphic suites such as Matisse's Jazz or George Rouault's Miserere, and livres d'artiste including Marc Chagall's Fables and Fernand Leger's Cirque. NOMA also boasts an impressive body of modern British prints by David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Gillian Ayres, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Patrick Caulfield, Elizabeth Frink, Gerald Laing and Richard Hamilton.