“...art is an attempt to extend and deepen our knowledge of life and our relations with our world. ... it is a way of seeking means of transmitting and sharing such experience with others. ...The source of the joy of working in this field may be the participation in a process leading to the unknown, the opening of the mind, the surprise of discovery and the breakthrough of revelations."
—S. W. Hayter, Paris, October, 1969.
"The test of whether a piece of work is good or bad is whether it's dead or alive, and that you can tell by feeling."
—S. W. Hayter, New York, October, 1940.
"He was like a stretched bow or a coiled spring every minute, witty, swift, ebullient, sarcastic. He was a famous engraver....And his face seemed engraved rather than sculptured in flesh. As if every line he had engraved on his copper plates he had at the same time engraved on his face."
—Anaïs Nin, 1940.
Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988) was a British artist and printmaker associated with Surrealism in the 1930s and Abstract Expressionism from 1940 onward. Regarded as one of the most significant printmakers of the 20th century, Hayter founded the legendary Atelier 17 studio in Paris, now known as Atelier Contrepoint. Among the numerous artists he influenced are Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, and Marc Chagall.
The hallmark of the workshop was its egalitarian structure, starkly breaking from the traditional French engraving studios by supporting a collaborative approach to labor and technical discoveries. In 1929, Hayter was introduced to Surrealism by Yves Tanguy and André Masson, who, with other Surrealists, worked with Hayter at Atelier 17. The often violent imagery of Hayter’s Surrealist period stemmed from his passionate opposition to the rise of Fascist ideologies while bearing witness to the brutal defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). He organized portfolios of graphic works to raise funds for the Spanish cause, including Solidarité (Paris, 1938), a portfolio of seven prints, one of which was by Picasso. Hayter frequently exhibited with the Surrealists during the 1930s but left the movement when Paul Eluard was expelled. Eluard’s poem Facile Proie (1939) was written in response to a series of Hayter’s engravings. Other writers with whom Hayter collaborated included Samuel Beckett and Georges Hugnet.
Hayter joined the exile of the Parisian avant-garde in 1939, moving with his second wife, the American sculptor Helen Phillips, to New York. He ran a course titled ‘Atelier 17’ at the New School for Social Research until 1945 when he opened the workshop independently in Greenwich Village at 41 East 8th Street. Important figures in the emerging New York School associated with Hayter included Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, William Baziotes, and David Smith.
By 1946, Atelier 17 operated independently in expanded and more versatile facilities. Engagements and temporary appointments kept Hayter traveling across the country. In 1949, he published New Ways of Gravure, a book that included a brief history of intaglio techniques and describing Atelier 17's experiments and achievements. In 1950, Hayter returned to Europe and reestablished Atelier 17 in Paris. Without him, the New York shop began a steady decline until its closure in 1955, while in Paris, the studio thrived.
Throughout the 1980s, Hayter continued to work with his customary drive and openness, consistently responding to currents of style and technique, eventually gravitating back to painting. In 1987, with the acquisition of four hundred prints spanning the period from 1926 through 1960, the British Museum became the largest repository of Hayter’s work. When the artist died in London on May 4, 1988, work was underway on a major retrospective of his prints at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.
Hayter's graphic work is now held in every significant 20th-century printmaking museum collection in the United States and the UK including the British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Guggenheim Museum, Harvard Art Museums, High Museum of Art, Hunterian Museum (University of Glasgow), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, National Galleries of Scotland, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Royal Academy of Arts (London), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Tate Modern (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.
