Stanley William Hayter and Surrealism at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Untitled (The Dancers), 1944 is included in The Surrealists: Works from the Collection on view in the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Perelman Building through March 2, 2014.

Hayter is best known as a pioneer of modern art and the founder of the innovative Atelier 17 graphic arts studio in Paris in 1927. Though never a member of their group, Hayter counted the Surrealists among his closest colleagues. He helped produce the prints for the VVV Portfolio while temporarily operating Atelier 17 in New York from 1940 to 1950. Surrealism influenced Hayter’s working method as well. By shuffling stacks of automatic drawings done on tracing paper, he would isolate evocative designs and then further develop them in paintings or engravings. The process emerges here in the colorful, transparent bodies of the figures and the abstract space in which they seem to hover. While in New York Hayter enabled his fellow ex pats–Andre Masson, Max Ernst, Miro among them, to make prints at Atelier 17.