Prints With/Out Pressure
Atelier 17 and the Ruthven Todd Portfolio
In 1927 Stanley William Hayter (1901–1988) established
a printmaking workshop in his studio in Paris, with the intention of
making his equipment and his developing knowledge of printmaking techniques
available to interested artists. By the time he moved the studio to 17,
rue Campagne-Première, from which address Atelier 17 derived its
name, it had become a hub for numerous artists of diverse nationalities,
including many of the foremost painters and sculptors of the day, who
shared an enthusiasm for learning and experimenting with printmaking.
In 1940, with the approach of German troops, Hayter abandoned the workshop
and moved with his wife, Helen Phillips, to New York, where he reopened
Atelier 17. The new location attracted many of the former associates,
who had also immigrated to New York, as well as an increasing number
of local artists.
In 1947 Ruthven Todd (1914–1978), an English poet and William
Blake scholar who had met many Surrealist artists in Paris in the 1930s,
initiated a project to ascertain Blake’s method for producing his
handwritten poems as relief-printed etchings. Etching is a technique
whereby an image is engraved with acid onto a metal plate, usually copper
or zinc. An acid-resistant varnish is used to protect the areas that
the artist doesn’t wish to etch, while any area left uncovered
will be bitten by the acid. When the plate is printed as intaglio, the
etched areas are filled with ink. When the plate is printed as relief,
only the raised surface is inked, while the etched parts remain untouched.
In both cases, the resulting print is a mirror image of what appears
on the plate.
Todd and Hayter visited Lessing J. Rosenwald’s print collection
at his home, Alverthorpe, in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and borrowed a
fragment of one of Blake’s etched plates. On this plate, the words
of a handwritten poem stood out in relief, having been protected with
varnish while the areas surrounding the text had been eroded with acid.
After printing the plate, Todd and Hayter concluded that the writing
appeared so fluid and natural that Blake must have used a method that
allowed him to write on another surface in normal left-to-right script,
and then transfer it onto the plate. (This theory has subsequently been
disputed, with the argument that Blake, having been trained since the
age of fifteen as an engraver of script, would have found it second-nature
to write in reverse and, through his own experiments, had developed a
recipe for fluid varnish with which to do so.) Todd and Hayter, with
the help of Joan Miró, devised a method whereby Todd wrote with
a pen dipped in varnish on a sheet of paper that had been treated with
gum arabic. He then placed the paper face down on a heated copper plate,
and ran the two through an etching press. After the paper had been soaked
off with warm water, the words remained on the copper plate, needing
only slight retouching with varnish. In the margins Miró then
drew his own designs with a brush dipped in the same varnish. The back
of the plate was protected with more varnish, and the plate was submerged
in a bath of diluted nitric acid for up to fifteen hours, allowing the
areas unprotected by varnish to be bitten away by the acid to a depth
of about two millimeters. The plate was then removed from the acid and
the varnish cleaned off to reveal raised letters and images. At this
point another plate was coated with ink, and the incised plate pressed
face down against it, thus transferring the ink. The inked incised plate
was then printed onto paper using an ordinary etching press.
Todd and Hayter involved a number of Atelier 17 artists in this project,
including Miró, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and the American artists
exhibited here. Todd wrote a poem for each artist in his own hand, and
the artists drew their designs in the margins of their plates. Although
the portfolio was never published, the project was an important and influential
example of the printmaking experimentation that occurred at Atelier 17.
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