The Wizard of Atelier 17

Miro. Dali. Giacometti. Lipchitz. Pollock, and many other famous names of modern art share a common detail of biography: at one time or another they worked at Atelier 17, a studio that opened in 1927 at 17 rue Campagne-Premiere in Paris. Masters though they were, they had things to learn from the Englishman who founded Atelier 17 and still presides over it at another address: Stanley William Hayter. superb technician of the graphic arts and greatest innovator of modern etching. Last week in Manhattan, the AAA Gallery was showing Atelier 17 prints by Hayter and other artists, and a retrospective show of Atelier 17 work was touring the U.S. under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts.

Hayter. now 60. started out to be a scientist rather than an artist. He graduated from London University with honors in chemistry, did research in organic sulphur compounds, worked in Iran for three years with an oil company. When he decided in his early 20s that he wanted to devote his life to art. he found his knowledge of chemistry enabled him to bring new techniques to the old, nearly moribund art of etching.

The basic procedure of etching is to coat a copper plate with wax, draw on it with a needle that exposes the metal, and immerse the plate in acid, which eats away the exposed area. After removing the wax, the artist prints the plate by coating it with ink. wiping the ink from the surface, and pressing the plate against paper that draws ink out of the etched depressions by a blotting action.

Hayter experimented with substitutes for the wax. He tried using on a single plate various substances with different degrees of resistance to the acid. The acid, biting into the metal faster in one spot, more slowly in another, could produce complex and subtle effects not possible before. As the artist worked, the acid working on the copper would produce new images that as he observed them would excite his imagination.

He also learned, and taught other artists, how to impress the forms of textiles and other materials upon the plate to provide textural effects. He devised techniques for softening outlines, reproducing the fluffiness of a cloud, the delicacy of a veil, a swirl of movement as in his Tarantella. His discoveries and inventions opened up what was virtually a new realm of art: he showed that etching need not be merely a method of reproducing a drawing but an independent art form in itself, capable of effects that brushes or crayons could not achieve.

In his own prints and paintings Hayter shuns surface reality for an internal image or mood. He starts a painting with some sort of bold weblike line which runs all through the canvas, suggesting as it goes interlocking fields of color, vibrant intersections, the feeling of movement and force. He may use only three colors in a painting, but the interlacing and crisscrossing give a sense of many more. In the end. the painting becomes a generalized statement of intangibles--the rush of water, the cool darkness of a forest, the silent chemistry of day dissolving into night.

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