The surprising home of Surrealism in New York is chronicled in new book

It’s no secret that Surrealism influenced the event of Summary Expressionism. Martica Sawin’s wealthy research, Surrealism in Exile and the Starting of the New York College (MIT Press 1995), charted in nice element the numerous cultural change that occurred between 1938 and 1947, when Parisian artists fleeing Nazi Europe made their house in Manhattan.

Nonetheless, what has up to now been largely ignored by artwork historical past—Sawin’s account included—is the mechanism by which this change occurred. Surrealism was well-known in New York earlier than the Second World Battle, nevertheless it was not till its artists had been residing there that American artwork noticed a radical shift. The place was it, then, that Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and the remainder noticed Surrealism in motion? The stunning reply, writes the creator and artwork critic Charles Darwent, is a small, grubby workshop run by an English printer.

This guide’s title is maybe a bit of deceptive, for whereas over an introduction and eight chapters, Darwent offers an outline of the cultural overlap between Surrealism’s heavy hitters and America’s burgeoning AbExers, it’s, in essence, a portrait of 1 man, Stanley William Hayter (1901-88), and his influential print studio, Atelier 17. Based in Paris in 1927, Hayter’s workshop was central to the Parisian avant-garde and important to the revival of burin engraving as a artistic medium. Relocated to New York in 1940, it discovered a house on the New College, changing into a crucible for younger American artists who rubbed shoulders with main European figures similar to Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró and André Masson. As Darwent writes: “It might be simpler to record the avant-garde sculptors and painters who didn’t move via the atelier’s doorways between 1927 and 1947 than these, from Picasso to Pollock, who did.”

Pollock’s formation

Whereas it’s true that Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and different seminal American artists labored at Atelier 17 within the Forties, the extent of its affect on their work is open to conjecture. The tantalising downside is that Hayter, regardless of being a grasp printer, didn’t maintain proofs and no archive of his studio’s manufacturing exists. Rothko’s time on the studio is evidenced by a single extant etching. Motherwell solely produced a handful of prints there earlier than giving up printmaking for 20 years. And never certainly one of De Kooning’s prints has survived. Moreover, the self-deprecating Hayter was unwilling to take credit score for his function within the formation of any artist. However, Pollock named him as certainly one of his two masters, the opposite being the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton.

Pollock’s six-month stint at Atelier 17 is the topic of an entire chapter (“Pollock Makes A Print”), which offers an enlightening account of how the artist’s experiments with a tin of paint suspended from Hayter’s ceiling, coupled along with his night-time explorations of motion and line in intaglio, immediately formed his mature type. Thus, it was in a small room on the seventh ground of the New College at 66 West twelfth Avenue that Pollock realized from Hayter, Darwent observes, “much less a means of portray than a philosophy, a way of releasing the thoughts via repeated, cyclic movement…a means of working that regarded unintended whereas being wholly managed”. The artwork critic Clement Greenberg noticed Pollock’s new type as uniquely American and, intriguingly, made the emphatic declare twenty years later that the artist had realized nothing from Hayter, regardless of the apparent parallels between the 2 males’s work. As Darwent asks pointedly: “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?”

Though a big proportion of the scholars at Atelier 17 had been ladies, Darwent’s account is weighted firmly in the direction of their male counterparts: in equity, he recommends that Christina Weyl’s excellent research, The Girls of Atelier 17 (Yale 2019), be learn along side his personal. One lady who does come below his highlight is Louise Bourgeois who, regardless of not being a Surrealist, was closely influenced by their concepts. Dwelling in New York since 1938, she first visited Atelier 17 after the warfare, when the studio had moved to East eighth Avenue. She evidently had an excessive dislike for Hayter. In 1947 he had helped her make 9 plates for her illustrated guide, He Disappeared into Full Silence, which to her frustration offered only a handful of copies—a failure she inexplicably blamed on Hayter and for which she by no means forgave him. A half-century later, she contemptuously referenced his identify within the titles of a number of works, a transfer that sarcastically served to assist protect his reminiscence.

It’s honest to say that few trendy British artists have been as influential internationally as Stanley William Hayter. But, though well-known amongst printmakers, he and his studio had been for a few years quietly written out of artwork historical past. His significance, Darwent argues, was not primarily in his experience as a printmaker, however in facilitating a singular area the place experiment and a really specific form of artistic freedom had been inspired. In specializing in the artist’s actions in New York, this admirably lucid and punctiliously researched guide makes a compelling case for Hayter’s function within the revolution that occurred in American portray through the Forties. Additionally it is a stark reminder that artwork historical past stays a piece in progress.

• Charles Darwent, Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 and the Start of Summary Expressionism, Thames & Hudson, 256pp, 80 color illustrations, £25 (hb), printed 16 March 2023

• David Trigg is an impartial author, critic and artwork historian, and an everyday contributor to Studio Worldwide and Artwork Quarterly