'This volume represents the most comprehensive selection of prints from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art ever published. This collection, which includes illustrated books, was formed over a period of seventy-five years and is remarkable in scope and breadth, now numbering more than fifty thousand works. Such a repository offers a unique opportunity to tell the story of the modern print. Some of the outstanding works included here are lithographed posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, woodcuts by Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch, German Expressionist prints by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Max Beckmann, landmark etchings by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and recent work using a variety of techniques, including screenprint and lithography, by Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois, Georg Baselitz, Elizabeth Murray, Chuck Close, and Damien Hirst, to name a few. 

'Including 350 colour plates, this volume is organised as an unfolding historical narrative with a focus on individual artists. Succinct texts describe each artist's relationship to printmaking within the broad outlines of his or her artistic practice. An introduction presents an overview of the Museum's print collection that reflects the history of the medium in modern art. Another text records the history of the Museum's collection, from its beginning in 1929 to the present. A full checklist of the works includes bibliographical references on the artists. The volume ends with a general bibliography, a glossary, and an index of publishers and printers.' (Back Cover)