William M. Ivins

William Mills Ivins Jr. (1881 - 1961) was the curator of the engraving department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from its founding in 1916 until 1946, when it was replaced by Mayor A. Hyatt. The son of William Mills Ivins Sr. (1851 - 1915), a public services lawyer who was a New York City Mayor candidate from 1905, Ivins studied at Harvard College and University of Munich, and then graduated from Columbia University Law School at 1907. After nine years of legal practice, he was asked to preserve and interpret the Meta print collection. He created the wonderful collections that can be seen there today, and wrote many introductions to the catalogs of exhibitions, as well as other, random works, which were subsequently collected and published. His most famous book is “Printed Publications and Visual Communications” [1] (MIT Press, 1969, ISBN 0-262-59002-6 (first published in 1953 by Harvard University Press)) and his “What Prints Look Like” (1943, Revised Edition 1987) remains in print.