Drawing Stanley William Hayter

In 1940, Hayter emigrated to New York with a group of notable avantgarde artists from Paris, and Atelier 17 continued work there. His theoretical writings about automatism and the expressive abstraction of his works had a formative influence upon Pollock’s and others’ conceptions of form. He returned to Paris in 1950 and began experimenting with methods of coloured engravings in his tachistic compositions relying on the impact of the accidental. The drawings and prints of his last twenty years are larger, their colours are brighter than earlier. The abstract approach to crystallized forms, the evocation of movement and light effects allowed a larger scope to the artist’s personal interest in astronomy, mathematics and physics.

Ferenc Tóth