40. Stanley William Hayter
(1901-1988)
Greeting Card for 1945

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Hayter, Greeting Card for 1945

Greeting Card for 1945

Engraving, aquatint and embossing, 1944, 99 x 75 mm. Very fine, richly differentiated impression on a folded sheet of thick, ivory wove paper, dedicated, dated and signed in pencil and with penciled greetings on the back. Hayter was born in London, worked in Paris where he established his Studio 17, and later died in Paris. But from the outbreak of World War II until 1950 he was in New York, to which he moved the Studio. He was avant-garde almost from the start and an important figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism. He was also deeply committed to print making, a constant innovator and an enormous influence on many of his contemporaries; Miró, Picasso, Kandinsky, Pollock and Rothko all made prints at Studio 17. Minus the color, this small intaglio is typical of his work, embodying an almost astonishing variety of textures and tones in a tiny space and even using the engraved signature and date as a compositional element.