Among the 14 million photographs, drawings and prints currently housed in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division are more than 100,000 artists' prints. With a power and immediacy unique to visual communication, these creative works provide a panoramic view of human history and culture from the 15th century to the present day. Many of these works can be accessed on the Library's Prints and Photographs Online Catalog at www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html.
The collection is international in scope, with extensive holdings of works by American, European, Latin American and Japanese artists. Major creative and intellectual movements are richly represented by many of the artists who helped define them. Some notable examples include Renaissance printmakers Albrecht Dürer and Ugo Da Carpi; French impressionists Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas; Harlem Renaissance artists James Lesesne Wells and Hale Woodruff, Mexican muralist/printmakers Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, German expressionists Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; American social realists Isabel Bishop and Reginald Marsh, and abstract expressionist printmakers Stanley William Hayter and Sylvia Wald, to name a few.
Since the late 1920s, the Library's Prints and Photographs Division has actively collected works by contemporary artists. Acquisitions in recent decades include works by an international roster of artists, among them Jiří Anderle, Yuri Avvakumov, Romare Bearden, Robert Blackburn, Louise Bourgeouise, Enrique Chagoya, Ester Hernandez, Hung Liu, William Kentridge, Robert Rauschenberg, Keiji Shinohara, Kiki Smith and Tanja Softić.
Japanese art has long been celebrated, collected and studied by both private collectors and public institutions, and widely disseminated in galleries, exhibitions and catalogs. It has been a primary source of inspiration and creative cross-fertilization for artists in many parts of the world, including Europe and America. The Library's collections reflect this history. Though many schools, traditions and genres are represented among the more than 2,500 Japanese prints in the collection, color woodblocks from the Edo period are a particular strength, especially by such masters of the genre as Hishikawa Moronobu, Okumura Masanobu, Kitagawa Utamaro, Tōshūsai Sharaku, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Kunisada. Selections from the Library's holdings of Edo prints and illustrated books were exhibited in the 2001 exhibition, "The Floating World of Ukiyo-e." The Library has also collected Japanese prints by many artists from both the New Prints and Creative Prints movements.
Many of the Library's Japanese prints were acquired from a host of primarily 19th-century donors and collectors, including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, President William Howard Taft, Washington Evening Star editor Crosby Stuart Noyes and artist Helen Hyde. Collector Emily Crane Chadbourne donated her collection of some 180 Japanese prints from the Meiji period (1868–1912). Many of these depicted Western people and subjects, reflecting new trade agreements beginning in the 1850s that triggered an unprecedented flow of travelers and material culture between Japan and the West. Curators and specialists at the Library continued to acquire modern Japanese prints from the 1920s to 1960s, as well as a small number of contemporary works through the 1990s, now updated to the 21st century by the recent gift of prints from the 50th CWAJ Print Show.
