Lenox Avenue

Sargent Claude Johnson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

San Francisco Bay Area–artist Johnson was a sculptor of international renown. He also experimented with lithography, gaining access to Work Projects Administration (WPA)-operated printmaking facilities through his role as unit supervisor of the WPA sculpture division. Though his sculptures and prints are markedly different, the process of creating a lithograph by drawing on the surface of limestone has affinities with that of carving and sculpting. Lenox Avenue evinces Johnson’s engagement with abstraction while retaining referential figuration. Of his subjects, Johnson said, "It is the pure American Negro I am concerned with, aiming to show the natural beauty and dignity in that characteristic lip and that characteristic hair, bearing and manner; and I wish to show that beauty not so much to the white man as to the Negro himself."

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