Night Moth, Stanley William Hayter

Archive Label 2003:
Stanley William Hayter began his career as a geologist and chemist, taking his first job in 1921 with an oil company in the Persian Gulf. By 1926, he decided to move to Paris and study engraving, eventually starting his own workshop, Atelier 17, by 1933. Hayter broke with traditional workshop structure by using a cooperative, egalitarian approach to division of labor and through aggressive use of technological advancements. Many Surrealists working in Paris joined Hayter in his studio, often protesting in print the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany.

In 1939, Hayter accompanied the Parisian avant-garde to the United States and relocated Atelier 17 in New York City. The studio became a highly productive center for printmaking, attracting many exiled European artists, such as Masson, Chagall, Lipchitz, and Ernst, as well as American artists of the New York School, as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell. Hayter’s intaglio innovations included combining screenprint methods with etched plates for simultaneous color printing. Construction is an early example of this combination technique. The artist moved back to Paris in the 1950s to reopen his famous studio, where he continued to investigate alternative methods of color printing.