Stanley William Hayter

Stanley William Hayter was an English painter and engraver who moved to Paris and founded the influential printmaking workshop Atelier 17 in 1927. The studio became an important transatlantic centre for artistic experimentation, bringing together figures such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, André Masson, and Alberto Giacometti, alongside younger generations of artists. Over more than six decades, Atelier 17 fostered exchanges between Surrealist automatism, abstraction, and innovative printmaking techniques, while also supporting the work of many women artists, including Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Louise Bourgeois, Nina Negri, and Helen Phillips.

Atelier 17 operated before the war at 17 rue Campagne Première and, after 1945, at 14 rue Hégésippe Moreau and focused on experimental intaglio techniques and collective technical innovation rather than the printing of finished editions. As a result, it rarely appears as the sole printer of postwar livres d’artiste, and many artists associated with the workshop later realised their books at ateliers such as Lacourière Frélaut and Crommelynck.

Sometimes Hayter himself participated in the projects, for example in Stephen Spender, Fraternity, trans. Louis Aragon (Paris and New York: Atelier 17, 1939), with nine original engravings by John Buckland Wright, Stanley William Hayter, Josef Hecht, Dalla Husband, Wassily Kandinsky, Roderick Mead, Joan Miró, Dolf Rieser, and Luis Vargas.