ATELIER 17: EUROPE AND THE EARLY YEARS
“This workshop is an experimental shop. People who come here are
people whose curiosity is to find out new methods…This is not a
school of art; each pursues his own necessity. There is no common
agreement. This professor top-hat business is perfectly ridiculous!”
—Stanley William Hayter
The informal co-operative printmaking workshop, that the English painter and draftsman
Stanley William Hayter opened in 1927, had its modest and unforeseen beginnings at
his own dilapidated studio in Paris on 51 rue du Moulin Vert. As Hayter later recalled it
was not entirely of his own volition that the workshop began: “A couple of young artists
bought some of my prints and came to me a week later to ask if I would teach them the
techniques of engraving. I told them if they’d find two more persons who wanted to learn,
I could afford to buy the equipment— presses and stuff like that— that we’d need. Well,
they found two others, and we set up a workshop, and then a lot of other people came
around, and pretty soon we were an institution.” By the end of 1927 ten artists staffed
the atelier, requiring Hayter to move the operation to a much larger space on the Villa
Chauvelot in the nearby 15
th
arrondisement and again in 1933 to a studio at 17 rue
Campagne-Premier, from where the now famous printmaking workshop would take its
name, impacting European modernists, inspiring American abstract art and Abstract
Expressionism in particular.
Located in close proximity to Montparnasse, one of the liveliest quarters for artists, the
workshop brought many casual visitors and serious students alike who sought training or
advice on technical matters in printing. In fact, one of the greatest attractions of Atelier
17 in the beginning was not just the magnetic personality and technical prowess of Hayter
as printmaker and teacher, but the presence of experienced artists such as the Surrealists
Masson, Giacometti, Ernst, Tanguy, Miró and others, including Calder, Campigli,
Buckland-Wright, Lipchitz and Picasso, who worked side by side with younger artists.
Many of these young artists would themselves rise to fame, among them David Smith,
Stuart Davis, John Ferren, Gabor Peterdi, Roal Ubac and Maria Elena Viera da Silva.
These artists were open to new experiences in printmaking, which was not often their
predominant choice of medium. In fact, Hayter who was first a painter and draftsman,
did not learn the craft before coming to Paris. It was from the little known Polish engraver
Joseph Hecht that he learned and embraced the medium of engraving, not as a means
of mere visual reproduction, but as an exploratory and creative medium and process.
The method of working directly on the copper plate, without intermediaries of grounds
and acids, common to traditional etching, was learned from Hecht and underscored
Hayter’s teachings at the workshop. Hayter recalled Hecht’s influence years later: “When
I met Hecht in 1926 I was very strongly impressed with the latent possibilities of his
manner of using a burin [and] realizing the necessity of collective work in a group in
order to develop these and other possibilities…” (Moser, Atelier 17, University of Wisconsin,
1977, p. 2).