Stanley William Hayter

Stanley William Hayter (1901–1988)

British painter and master printmaker, Stanley William Hayter was one of the most significant and inventive printmakers of the twentieth century.

Born in London into a family of artists, he trained as a chemist and geologist at King’s College before working in the Middle East for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, a scientific grounding he would later carry into the print studio, treating engraving as a discipline open to experiment.

In 1926 he abandoned that career for Paris, where the Polish printmaker Joseph Hecht introduced him to burin engraving. A year later Hayter founded the workshop that, from its address at 17 Rue Campagne-Première, would become the legendary Atelier 17, the most influential print studio of the century. It was less a school than a shared laboratory, where the line between teacher and artist dissolved.

Through its doors passed Picasso, Miró, Giacometti, Calder, Chagall, Masson, Kandinsky and, later in New York, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

With the Surrealists, Hayter explored automatism and the unconscious; his own work moved from Surrealism toward abstraction. His chemist’s mind produced genuine technical innovation, most notably viscosity printing, a method of laying multiple colours on a single plate by exploiting the differing densities of inks.

Appointed CBE and an Honorary Royal Academician, Hayter worked between Paris, New York and London until his death in Paris in 1988.