To mark the 30th anniversary of the artist's death, Crane Kalman Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition celebrating the work of S.W.Hayter.
It is also 60 years since Hayter’s landmark retrospective organised for the Arts Council at the Whitechapel Art Gallery by its renowned curator Bryan Robertson (1925 - 2002) - “the greatest Director the Tate Gallery never had”. Robertson wrote in his obituary of the artist in The Independent newspaper (07/05/1988):
A man of deep culture, wide-ranging knowledge and the liveliest intelligence, Bill Hayter’s strongly individual gifts have left their mark on the visual expression of the twentieth century in paintings and prints filled with surrealist imagery - and the poetic re-interpretation of nature, through abstraction.
Forgoing a career at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP) in London and the Persian Gulf, in 1926 Hayter left for Paris and a year later founded Atelier 17, named after his studio apartment at 17 rue Campagne Premiere. It was here that Hayter’s innovations transformed printmaking into an original creative process, attracting many of the great avant-garde artists of the day - Picasso in particular, Giacometti, Ernst, Tanguy, Miro, etc…and where Hayter’s own painting evolved from representational into a colour-imbued, dynamic abstract surrealism. He became a key figure on the committee headed by Roland Penrose, which organised the historic International Exhibition of Surrealism at the New Grafton Galleries in London in 1936.
In 1940, along with some of his Parisian contemporaries, Hayter was able to escape to New York, where he reconvened Atelier 17. It’s reputation as a democratic workshop of artistic ingenuity preceded it and along with his friends from Europe, it attracted many local artists - Rothko, de Kooning, Motherwell, Pollock to name a few. In New York, Hayter’s own work flourished. Already hardened to the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War (he had collaborated with Paul Eluard to produce Solidarite, an anthology of poems and etchings, to which Picasso & Miro had also contributed, which was sold in aid of the Republicans) the outbreak of World War II and the associated devastation, edged Hayter away from the fripperies of Surrealism, his painting adopting a more expressionistic, vigorous, almost violent tone.
Returning to Paris in 1950, Hayter’s paintings took on a more fluid, freer, naturalistic feel, eschewing the post-war existentialism of many of his European contemporaries. He frequented Alba, a small village in the Ardeche, through which the Escoutay river flows. It had an irresistible attraction to him - his work now lost any trace of representation; rainbow-coloured compositions - undulating, vibrating, spirals, helicoids inter-weaving and conflicting; intuitive and impressionistic, like Monet’s late, great water-lily paintings. As Roland Penrose wrote:
Hayter’s exploration of air, water, earth and fire is of the same nature as thought. Each idea is thus exposed to the action of currents formed by feelings, emotions or recollections. Because of these inextricably mixed influences the original idea can change and become either superficial or profound, luminous or obscure, joyful or painful…. Hayter shows us an authentic picture of our conscious self. With delight, we enter his sparkling world of magnetic fields and hear him say with conviction “You see, it works”.
In our forthcoming exhibition, Crane Kalman Gallery is fortunate to be able to present paintings that have never been viewed in the UK before; consigned directly from the Paris apartment of the artist's heirs. For although in France, Hayter received the Legion d’Honneur in 1951 and a major survey of his work at The Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1972, Museum retrospectives in Japan in 1985 and exhibitions in America and Europe since the 1940’s, his great achievements have been largely ignored in his native England. I leave the final words to his friend and supporter Bryan Robertson, from the 1958 Whitechapel Exhibition catalogue:
"He is a man of great culture with exceptional physical and mental energy: widely and deeply read, and entirely independent in his processes of thought as well as in his work. He has accomplished a great deal for the prestige of English culture abroad and with Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson has helped other English artists to receive attention in foreign countries. As an artist, his sympathies are broad and varied: As a highly articulate teacher he is held in great esteem and affection. His personality, intelligence and way of life are integrated with his work to an exceptional degree. Above all, he has thought constructively about the problems of an artist in this century and always with a sense of historical perspective."
