Charles Darwent’s Surrealists in New York is somewhat misleadingly titled, though its true content and focus are revealed in the subtitle: ‘Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism.’ Perhaps that sounds obscure and even academic. If so, it gives the wrong idea, for this is a very readable and accessible account of a hitherto unexplored area of mainstream art history. Many of us suspected the importance of European influence on what is always claimed as the thoroughly American art movement of Abstract Expressionism. This book sets out the situation in detail, and makes a convincing argument for giving credit not only to a bunch of European émigrés but to an Englishman as well.
Atelier 17 became a substitute café for the French: a place to exchange ideas and enthusiasms
Darwent’s contention is that the English painter and printmaker Stanley William Hayter (1901-88), who founded and ran an experimental print workshop called Atelier 17, first in Paris and later in New York, was a crucial influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism in America. The period under discussion is essentially the 1940s, with the first Parisians arriving in New York at the start of the decade. There Hayter gathered around him the (mostly French) Surrealists who had fled the Nazis, and it was in his workshop that young American artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning could meet and see the work of the European masters Max Ernst, Joan Miró and André Masson. Set up at West 12th Street, on the seventh floor of the New School for Social Research, later moving to East 8th Street, Atelier 17 was primarily a print workshop, but it was also a substitute café for the French, a favoured meeting place for the exchange of ideas and enthusiasms.
Among the visitors to the Atelier were Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois and Anaïs Nin.
