On Stanley William Hayter

September – October 2012 Volume 2, Number 3 Latent Possibilities: the Legacy of Stanley William Hayter • Jasper Johns at Harvard • L’Estampe Originale in Minneapolis Inuit Printmaking in Winnipeg • Material Assumptions: Paper as Dialogue • Book Reviews • New York Print Week 2012 • News September – October 2012 In This Issue Volume 2, Number 3 Editor-in-Chief Susan Tallman 2 Susan Tallman On Stanley William Hayter Associate Publisher Andrew Raftery 4 Julie Bernatz Genealogies: Tracing Stanley William Hayter Managing Editor Ann Shafer 10 Annkathrin Murray Hayter: Content and Technique Associate Editor Julia Beaumont-Jones 17 Amelia Ishmael Studios of Paris: Stanley Jones on Hayter, Paris and Atelier Patris, 1956-58. Design Director Skip Langer Liza Folman 22 Stanley William Hayter and Design Associate Viscosity Printing Raymond Hayen Amelia Ishmael / Susan Tallman 26 Web Associate Stanley William Hayter—Essential Reading Kristina Felix Management Associate Exhibition Reviews Ashley Clark Susan Tallman Advertising Manager Jasper Johns / In Press: The Crosshatch 28 Pilar Sanchez Works and the Logic of Print L’Estampe originale: A Celebrated Album 30 of Original Printmaking, 1893-95 Courtney R. Thompson Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: 32 Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic Material Assumptions: Paper as Dialogue Book Reviews Mark Pascale 38 Proof! The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California Julie Bernatz 41 Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard News of the Print World 44 Cover Image: Stanley William Hayter, detail of Untitled (no. 6 from The Apocalypse) (1931), Contributors 57 drypoint and engraving. Printed by Paul Haasen, published by Editions Jeanne Bucher. The Baltimore Membership Subscription Form 59 Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Paul Mann, Towson, Maryland. BMA1979.377.6. ©2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. This Page: Stanley Jones, detail of Madron (1970), lithograph. Printed at Curwen Studio, published by Galerie Wolfgang Ketterer, Munich. ©Tate, London 2012. ©Stanley Jones. Art in Print 3500 N. Lake Shore Drive Suite 10A Chicago, IL 60657-1927 This issue of Art in Print was www.artinprint.org published with the support of the [email protected] Dedalus Foundation, Inc. No part of this periodical may be published without the written consent of the publisher. On Stanley William Hayter By Susan Tallman n June 1944, as Allied forces slogged their In this issue of Art in Print, generously I way through Normandy, the exhibition supported by a grant from the Dedalus “Hayter and Studio 17: New Directions in Foundation, we wanted to reassess the Gravure” opened at The Museum of Mod- legacy of Stanley William Hayter. We asked ern Art. It was a show of engravings and writers with different areas of expertise to etchings, as well as plaster reliefs and tem- consider aspects of Hayter’s art and practice plates by 32 artists from North and South from the vantage point of 2012. Ann Shafer America, Eastern and Western Europe and of the Baltimore Museum of Art focuses North Africa. Some were famous—Alexan- on the overlooked content of Hayter’s der Calder, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró—most images. Julia Beaumont-Jones of the Tate were not. All of them had worked with the interviews printmaker Stanley Jones about artist Stanley William Hayter, founder of Hayter’s influence on British printmaking the collaborative print workshop Atelier 17 and particularly the Curwen Press. Artist and the most influential printmaker of his Liza Folman provides a lucid explanation of generation. Hayter’s color printing innovations, while Hayter was a powerhouse: arriving in Andrew Raftery assesses the breadth and Paris in 1926 after a brief stint as a geo- depth of Hayter’s ideas, down three genera- chemist with the Anglo Persian Oil Com- tions of artists and teachers. Finally, Art in pany, he exerted a kind of gravitational Print staff writers put together an overview pull on his fellow artists; his studio became of essential Hayter reading. a social and creative hub for nascent Sur- Detail from photograph of Stanley William Hayter, As Shafer points out, Hayter’s valoriza- realists, his ideas and techniques became a 1960. Photo: Ida Kar. ©National Portrait Gallery, tion as a technician has come at the expense kind of currency. In the unlikely medium of London. of his reputation as an artist. Art is always a engraving, Hayter found a way to use phys- that such an outcome was possible. But by marriage between ideas and materials, and ics—chemistry, resistance, momentum and that time Hayter’s work—his prints and the manipulation of those materials— conservation—to jolt the artist’s mind and paintings, his technical innovations, the ‘technique’—is all that makes the marriage hand out of their habitual patterns. Relo- productivity of Atelier 17—had slipped to work. In the half-century since “Hayter and cated to New York during World War II, the periphery of art discourse. He had led Atelier 17,” we have become re-habituated Hayter’s influence spread through a second a movement that valued close engagement to the idea that technique can be out- continent. Rothko and Motherwell passed with materials—curiosity leading to mas- sourced: printers, fabricators, engineers, through the atelier on their way to Abstract tery, mastery leading back to curiosity. In the rolodex of the on-the-go contemporary Expressionism; Jackson Pollock engraved the brochure for the 1944 MoMA show, artist. This is nothing new: Raphael did not plates with looping skeins of line that seem Hayter explained the relevance of print weave his own tapestries, Bernini did not predictive of the drip paintings to come. techniques to modern art this way: “the cast his own bronzes single-handed. It may Hayter knew everyone: the preface to his effect of the graphic and plastic researches be that Hayter’s moment—those mid-cen- manual of intaglio techniques was written of modern painting and sculpture since the tury decades when dirty fingernails were by Sir Herbert Read; the philosopher and nineteenth century had been to set mod- seen as key to new thoughts—was an aber- Wittgenstein scholar Peter Hacker edited a ern artists new problems of technique, and ration. But Hayter’s legacy remains: if rela- major collection of essays on Hayter. Anaïs certain of these problem, notably the inte- tively few artists still use his precise tech- Nin left a compelling portrait: gration of space and object, find a perfect niques of engraving or viscosity printing, medium in methods of line engraving.”2 almost all follow his dictum: “it is the He was like a stretched bow or a coiled Such language, focused on formal prob- importance of the idea (communicated by spring every minute, witty, swift, ebul- lems and technical solutions, doesn’t reso- whatever process), and this alone, that lient, sarcastic. … He always moved nate today, the underlying approach, the determines the validity of the work.”3 about between the students, cyclonic, idea that art objects are artifacts of inquiry, making Joycean puns, a caricature, a does. So does the belief, on which Atelier 17 joke. He was always in motion. I won- operated, that art does not move forward dered how he had ever spent hours bent Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of through individual acts of isolated genius, over copper plates, delicate, demanding, Art in Print. but through collaborative exchange. And so exacting work. His lines were like projec- does the notion that artists are best trained tiles thrown in space, sometimes tangled not by rigid programs of imitation, but by like antennae caught in a windstorm. assisted adventures of their own design. I never saw him at low ebb or passive, Since his death, the audience that recog- Notes: and even pain, which he was known 1. Anaïs Nin, Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 3 (1939-1944), nizes Hayter’s name or his several visual to have, seemed to inspire only a more New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1971:125-126. styles has grown ever smaller, even as his 2. Stanley William Hayter quoted in James Johnson desperate aliveness, alertness. A volcanic approaches to teaching, workshop practice Sweeney, “New Directions in Gravure,” Museum of personality.1 Modern Art Bulletin 12.1 (August 1944): 3. and material problem-solving have become 3. Stanley William Hayter, About Prints, London: When Hayter died in 1988, at the age of so pervasive that we no longer think of Oxford University Press, 1962: 104. 86, his friends seemed genuinely shocked them as innovations. 2 Art in Print September – October 2012 Stanley William Hayter, detail of Flight (1946), soft-ground etching with engraving and embossing on wove paper, 37.3 x 24.8 cm. Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Gift of Mrs. Murray S. Danforth. 49.395. ©2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Art in Print September – October 2012 3 Stanley William Hayter, Figure 16. Sharpening the Burin from New Ways of Gravure, 1949. ©2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 4 Art in Print September – October 2012 Genealogies: Tracing Stanley William Hayter By Andrew Raftery ny artist who has been trained by a A teacher can trace his or her educa- tional genealogy by asking, “Who was my teacher’s teacher?” and continuing from that point. In the United States many painters can claim origins that go back to Eakins and from there to Ingres and David. Perhaps for some the chain could lead all the way back to Raphael and Perugino. But does this really mean anything beyond a pleasant exercise in artistic family trees? Certainly some prominent art teachers of the 20th century have a discernable residu- al influence to the present day. One thinks of Hans Hoffman in painting and Bernard Leach in ceramics.

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