Recent Acquisitions: Works on Paper

Teaching with the permanent art collection has been central to Vassar College since its founding. Just as Matthew Vassar purchased paintings, drawings, and prints for the young women of the 1860s to see and study, staff since then have cared for the original collection, added to it through purchases, gifts, and bequests, and engaged generations of Vassar students in a laboratory-like atmosphere of “going to the source” through direct experience and inquiry. Though emphases in the curriculum have changed throughout the years, works under consideration for acquisition have traditionally been weighed for their teaching value, for filling gaps in particular areas, and for conveying an aesthetic and conceptual boldness.

The past five years of collecting activity among the staff resulted in a number of significant acquisitions of works on paper, one of the strongest areas in the permanent collection. This exhibition sampled many of those drawings, prints, photographs, and artists’ books acquired since 2007 and ranges from the Italian Renaissance in the sixteenth century to Manhattan in the twenty-first. Artists represented are European, American, Japanese, and Inuit and include Giorgio Ghisi, Henri Matisse, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jacob Lawrence, Nan Goldin, and Andy Warhol.

The exhibition was generously sponsored by the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Exhibition Fund.