The O’Brien Art Foundation and The Marty O’Brien Collection of American Art and trace important developments in printmaking between 1929 and 1964 in America, telling the story of the medium’s evolution into a significant and highly inventive art form. Originally founded in Paris in 1927 by the British artist Stanley William Hayter at his studio at Villa Chauvelot and, later, 17, rue Campagne-Premiere, the workshop established a New York location in 1940 with the onset of World War II. As artists shuttled from Paris to New York, the Atelier functioned as a meeting ground between Surrealism and what would become Abstract Expressionism in addition to serving as a vehicle for spreading innovative printing techniques and modernist concerns.

A less examined story behind the explosion of new printing processes at mid-century is their spread across the country through the educational leadership of artists who were active in the community of Atelier 17 and shaped new strands of American modernism. Crucially, the dispersal of the Atelier’s discoveries outside of New York (the workshop’s primary American home) set the stage for new regional artistic centers. Many of these artists are represented in the collections, which contains among the largest holdings of this material in the United States. 

The Atelier’s emphasis on pure discovery and experimentation for its own sake, non-hierarchical collaboration, and quality production facilities drew artists from a range of regions and levels of recognition. As Hayter articulated: “You have got to put yourself on the level of the last beginner and keep in your mind the fact that with you too this is extremely tentative. That’s to say, you can look at a plate every day that you go to work with a lot of people as if you had never seen a plate before.” 

He stressed the importance of the tactile feel of marking the plate, rather than the traditional approach of visually creating a design. As such, the workshop provided a fertile training ground for manipulating the matrix (i.e. substrate from which a print is made, such as an etching plate, linoleum block, silk screen, lithographic stone, woodblock, etc.) and the printing process, including the use of power tools, guaffrages (relief white or blind embossing), simultaneous color, plaster cast, sugar lift, and viscosity printing. Oftentimes, the creation of the plate and the subsequent printing process were as important as the completed work, giving rise to an emphasis on self-printing, comparatively small editions, and variations in finished images pulled from the same matrix. When pushed to the extreme, some Atelier 17 artists stopped just short of the destruction of the printing matrix in an effort to push the boundaries of what could be materially achieved and psychologically unearthed. The aggressive scoring of the printing plate allowed artists to give into an automatic, nearly subconscious, approach to composition.

In the 1940s, Hayter taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Design Department of Brooklyn College in New York. As the Atelier’s founder, he was one of the workshop’s most active members known for his practice’s Surrealist underpinnings. He is represented in the collection by the engraving Maternité (1940), a significant work for advancing Hayter’s interest in multi-color screens—bringing a more expressive character to the previously constrained palette printmaking faced—and because it was the first print the artist made in New York. In this image, a deconstructed figure (presumably the mother referenced in the title) cradles a skeleton against a ground of orange, blue, grey, and brown shapes. As the haunting subject merges with the surreal background of overlapping shadow-like forms, a lyrical spirituality emerges between birth and death. 

In New York’s hub for Atelier 17, younger and lesser known artists who had worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) or immigrated to the United States came together with household names of Surrealism such as Salvaor Dali, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy, as well as a slightly older generation of American artists, such as Reginald Marsh and Armin Landeck. Figures primarily known for their inventions in Abstract Expressionism like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning also participated, leading to a cross pollination of artistic strategies and concerns. Although artists in the Atelier helped to identify medium-specific aspects of printmaking, for example, many practitioners expanded the medium’s limits through the introduction of painterly qualities based in color and space, which can be seen in Karl Schrag’s Last Glow in the Woods (1957) with both graphic and washy qualities. In 1968, German-born Schrag joined the faculty of Cooper Union in New York and taught there until 1968. He was also identified by the National Gallery of Art as one of the most important printmakers in the US of the 1950s.

A printmaker and teacher ahead of his time, Krishna Reddy also studied at Atelier 17 and went on to later teach. Perfecting the technique of multicolor viscosity printing enabled Reddy to experiment with different colors on the same plate and add depth to his textures, which in Flowers (c. 1960) takes on an almost sci-fi or biomorphic character with multidirectional radial lines and angles. Although he was a leader of Modernism in India, the artist held workshops and shared his technical and expressive prowess worldwide, and became a teacher and co-director at Atelier 17. Eventually moving to the US in 1964 to lead a printmaking seminar at American University in DC, and then to New York where he taught at NYU, Reddy was able to expand the impact of his work at the Atelier more broadly.

Through a group of influential teachers, Atelier 17’s focus on experimentation also had a significant impact that reached across the country including areas far from the traditional East Coast art centers. Artists such as Fred Becker, Salvatore Grippi, John Paul Jones, and Maruricio Lasansky played an important role in disseminating knowledge of printmaking in the US at mid-century. Like many members of the Atelier—including Salvatore Grippi, the founder of the art department at Ithaca College, represented in the collection by Confrontation, 1955—Becker went on to share his work through teaching. He spent two decades at Washington University in St. Louis followed by a tenure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. An example of Atelier 17’s emphasis on combined techniques can be found in Fred Becker’s Kaleidoscopic Organism (1946).

Here, the processes of engraving and etching endow the work with a range of textures and extremely fine marks, utilized to define otherworldly shapes. Born and raised in California, Becker moved to New York in 1941 where he established friendships with celebrated artists such as Andre Masson, Roberto Matta, and Yves Tanguy who also participated in Atelier 17. Influenced by their ideas of Surrealism, Becker produced images with highly complex forms and a heightened sense of drama, achieved through stark contrasts of black on blank ground and sharp radial lines. 

Mauricio Lasansky was another devoted educator who cut his teeth at the Atelier. The Argentina-born artist came into contact at the Atelier with Surrealism’s process of psychic automatism by which he would seemingly uncover an image through the unconscious choreography of marking a plate. Sol y Luna (1945) is a surrealist print made shortly after the Atelier’s arrival in New York upon Lasansky’s receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship. The work’s composite techniques—from scraping and burnishing to aquatint—gave the image a range of tones in black, white, and gray as well as an aggressiveness to its line-work, contributing to a frenzied, psychologically charged mood.

That same year, Lasansky took a temporary position at University of Iowa as a visiting lecturer in the graphic arts. He ultimately became a full-time professor and started a printmaking workshop that introduced the teachings of Atelier 17 to a wide range of students, causing Iowa to become another major center for spurring new approaches. Many of Lasansky’s students would go on to teach at major universities from UCLA to the Cleveland Institute of Art. 

A student of Lasansky’s at the University of Iowa, John Paul Jones also utilized extreme high contrast of both flattened and dimensional geometries, as seen in his etching and screenprint, White Table (1957). Although most nationally recognized as a painter, in 1953, he was recruited to the University of California in Los Angeles to set up a printmaking program. Beginning in 1969, he joined the faculty at UC Irvine. Known as an “artist’s artist,” he was an important figure in the mid-century Los Angeles art world, although he is less recognized today.

After beginning her career in the 1920s as part of a loose group of realist artists focused on the depiction of downtown city life in New York (as well as her own exploration of limited daily lives of women), Minna Citron worked as a muralist for the WPA in the mid to late 1930s but rapidly shifted her practice through her involvement at Atelier 17, which she joined in 1946. Citron’s Poseidon’s Revenge (1958) is a highly graphic, two-toned etching and engraving with a surface-roll that draws the viewer’s attention to boldly outlined grey shapes with red accents emulating the quintessential AbEx gesture. Citron taught consistently from 1935 through the 1940s, first for the WPA and then at the Brooklyn Museum School (1940–1944) and at the Pratt Institute.

Citron was one of many artists at Atelier 17 who turned to a rigorous investigation of abstraction and psyche defined by lyrical mark making. Such experiments can also be seen in Alice Trumbell Mason’s Suspension (1946), Anne Ryan’s The Quest (1945–1950), Sue Fuller’s Concerto (1944), and Seong Moy’s The Dancing Queen (1953), which all layer highly considered hues combined with traditional printmaking techniques such as etching and engraving. These developments helped to define the works produced by Atelier 17 artists with an expressive and seemingly multimedia texture. Citron herself taught consistently from 1935 through the 1940s, first for the WPA and then at the Brooklyn Museum School (1940–1944) and at the Pratt Institute. 

The expressive line can also be seen in the work of Cleveland-born artist Dorothy Dehner. After living in the shadows of her husband David Smith, Dehner began to gain recognition for her prints and expressive sculptures, such as Septenarius (1959), made in the wake of her divorce. Dehner’s The Barn in Bolton (1952) is an all-over composition of hatched and overlapping vectors, dividing the composition into a roughly decomposing grid, which resemble her sculptural work’s iconic totems and irregular geometries in a space between Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Through variation in line thickness as well as the addition of red aquatint, two heavier clusters of marks interrupt the grid in two angled forms, stacked atop one another to form an impossible architecture.

A friend of Minna Citron and Dorothy Dehner, Doris Seidler participated in the Atelier from 1950 to 1953. Moonlight Structures (1952) is a work that encapsulates much of the workshop’s spirit, including a celebration of mutual influence and camaraderie. By bridging techniques of etching, engraving, and aquatint with three colors (blue, red, and black), this composition moves between different types of spatial definition: a hazy atmospheric field, drippy marks, the jagged outline of the crescent moon, and a more precise linearity seen in the gridlike, architectural structure hovering in the distance. One of Seidler’s “moonworlds,” the print evokes a surrealist dreamscape, bringing together a European influence with her abstract explorations of cityscapes. The amalgamation of techniques leading to complexly layered expanses of black, white, and color that, like many of the works discussed, reads as both drawn and painterly.