SELECTED ARTIST

Stanley Hayter1901-1988 (View Gallery )

Painter of abstracts in oils and gouache; engraver and etcher; writer. Son of the artist William Harry Hayter, he took a B.Sc. in Chemistry and Geology at King's College, London, and worked in Iran 1922-5, before going to the Academie Julian, Paris. There he met Balthus and Calder and he studied copper engraving with Joseph Hecht. He lived in Paris from 1926 to 1939 and in 1927 was the founder of Atelier 17. During these years he was influenced by the Surrealists and associated with Eluard, Miro, Arp and Tanguy. In 1934 he met Picasso who became a frequent visitor to the Atelier. In 1939 he moved to London and between 1940 and 1946 lived in the USA where he opened Atelier 17 in New York in 1941. Amongst the artists who worked with him were Motherwell, Pollock and Rothko. Returning to Paris in 1950 he reopened the Atelier and in 1951 bought a house in Alba in the Ardeche. He exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris in 1933, in London (1936), and in New York; he held his first solo exhibitions in Brussels in 1927 and in London at the Claridge Gallery in 1929. He exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, as a printmaker and as a painter, in solo and group exhibitions. His work is represented in numerous public collections and retrospective exhibitions have included those at the Whitechapel Gallery, 1957, Kobe, Japan, 1985, and the Ashmolean, Oxford, 1988. He taught in California, Chicago and New York and his many prizes and awards include the Liturgic Prize, Venice Biennale, 1958, and the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris, 1972. He was awarded a CBE in 1967 and in 1986 Commandeur, Legion d'Honneur. One of the most influential twentieth-century printmakers, he pioneered new processes which transformed the art of gravure, initiating simultaneous colour printing and a wider range of colours. His painting moved towards abstraction in the late 1920's and was influenced by Surrealism in its reconstruction of nature. His paintings show his concern with structure and movement expressed in mobile, rhythmic and graphic lines, which run across brilliantly coloured areas.

LIT:
New Ways of Gravure, S.W. Hayter, 1949
The Renaissance of Gravure, S.W. Hayter, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988.