Printmaking lends itself to series in part because prints are, for both artist and buyer, a relatively cheap enterprise. The Baltimore Museum of Art’s new exhibition, Print by Print: Series From Dürer to Lichtenstein, highlights this tendency, with more than 350 prints from the museum’s permanent collection, forming 29 different series. (More than half of the works on view have never been displayed at the museum.)

The show draws from both American and European artists working in series from the late 15th through the 21st centuries, but is not intended to be exhaustive. Rather than proceeding chronologically or, say, by printmaking technique, the show is broken up into six somewhat amorphous categories: Imagination, Narrative, Design, Places: Real and Imagined, Appropriation, and War. The impression one gets of the show as a whole has little to do with these categories, particularly because many of the series could have as easily been placed under one as another. But print series have served numerous functions, and that point is well taken. Early on, they often acted as a form of narrative—as with the ribald 18th-century etching and engravings that make up “A Harlot’s Progress,” by William Hogarth—or to complement a written narrative. But series have also allowed artists to dabble with variations on a theme, to explore obsessions—as with Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 18th-century “Imaginary Prisons,” 16 moody, intricate etchings of dungeons—to hammer home a point when one image will not do, to mimic an actual series—as with Johann Theodor de Bry’s 16th-century rendition of the alphabet—and to make money, as with a set of late 18th- or early 19th-century playing cards and an ill-fated foray into toy-making by Marcel Duchamp.

The exhibition opens—though you can enter from either end—with several series that are both modern and experimental. (The official category here is Imagination.) In this exhibition, the back-story is often as interesting as the work itself. Such is the case with Yukinori Yanagi’s 1997 “Wandering Position,” a set of five abstract red etchings, each one a quadrilateral shape inscribed with wiggling lines that overlay one another and thicken at the edges. The lines are distributed through the interior of the shapes and proceed organically, never in a straight line. Read the label and this visually pleasing, minimalist series becomes something wondrous: In creating each piece, Yanagi used an etching needle to painstakingly follow the trajectory of an ant as it traveled across a wax surface.

> Email Andrea Appleton