Cirque Chinois (Chinese Circus)
Stanley William Hayter (London 1901 - Paris 1988)
Category
Art / Prints
Date
1976
Materials
Copperplate engraving, soft-ground etching, roulette and scorper
Measurements
543 x 420 mm
Place of origin
Paris
Order this imageCollection
2 Willow Road, London
NT 112428
Summary
Engraving, soft-ground etching, roulette and scorper on paper, Cirque Chinois (Chinese Circus), by Stanley William Hayter CBE, (London 1901 – Paris 1988), 1976. Complimentary pink and turquoise elliptical shapes overlap to a white intersection, the whole overlaid with elliptical, triangular and looping lines in amber and white, against a purple-black background. Signed, titled and numbered 2/5 in pencil to the bottom. Within a beige mount and a simple wooden frame, glazed. Five states; limited edition of 75, printed by Hector Saunier on B.F.K. Rives paper, nos. 13-61 printed in 1981, nos. 65-75 in 1982.
Full description
Stanley William Hayter was a British painter and printmaker best known for founding the influential print studio Atelier 17 (renamed Atelier Contrepoint in 1988) which he ran in Paris and New York. Trained in chemistry, he worked as a chemist-geologist in Iran before turning to art in the mid-1920s. Hayter was a life-long adopter of the surrealist strategy of automatism - a spontaneous, unpremeditated form of mark-making guided by the subconscious. He worked freely and directly onto the support without reference to preparatory materials. His scientific background and interest in mathematics and visual perception also informed his practice. As the philosopher Peter Hacker notes, in Hayter's work we find 'topological transformations, [the] superimposition of one space upon another, non-Euclidean spaces, wave motion, and moiré interferences of fields in continuous deformation' (Hacker 2004; see also Peter Hacker (ed.), The Renaissance of Gravure: The Art of S.W Hayter, Oxford 1988). 'When Hayter was at the New School in America he did a lot of psychological experiments with visual art and discovered that we naturally see the diagonal from bottom left to top right as rising and the top left to the bottom right as falling. It’s not connected to the way we read. He found that it’s universal. He used these principles in the prints he made to create a multiplicity of rhythms. Most artists can’t create movement to save their lives. He couldn’t not create movement in his prints.' (interview with Peter Hacker, Gilded Birds, 31 May 2016). With the Indian printmaker and sculptor Krishna Reddy (1925-2018; co-director of Atelier 17 from 1964 to 1976), Hayter invented a printing technique that exploited the different viscosities of coloured inks to produce, for the first time, a multicoloured print from a single plate in one pass. Multi-colour printing had previously required the preparation of several plates for colour separation. This 'simultaneous colour printing' method, seen here in Cirque Chinois, was more efficient and could achieve new chromatic effects. By the late 1950s Hayter had moved away from surrealist imagery towards a more abstract visual language. Still rooted in automatism, his work increasingly focussed on non-figurative elements and optical effects achieved through line and colour. In Cirque Chinois, a 'spatial play of burin lines looped to trapezoid and elliptical shapes […] conjure up the trajectory of acrobats as they fly through their upturned world.' (Moorhead in Black and Moorhead 1992, p. 31). Here energetic line - weaving, whiplash, organic - is juxtaposed with geometric form. The title 'Cirque Chinois' may be a reference to the Chinese Acrobatic Theatre, or to a travelling Chinese troupe performing this ancient art in a western circus. The principal venue in Hayter's Paris was the Cirque d’Hiver-Bouglione which from 1954 to 1978 staged the popular and long-running monthly television show La Piste aux Etoiles. Hayter had portrayed the circus before (see for example The Circus, 1933, a watercolour at the Chazen Museum of Art, Wisconsin, acc.no 1986.27 and an engraving of the same title, British Museum, London, 1988,0409.31) and was no doubt drawn to it as a site of kinetic, visual spectacle and perhaps also melancholy. Indeed, the circus has long captivated modern artists from Seurat and Degas to Picasso and Alexander Calder, the latter a friend and collaborator of Hayter’s at Atelier 17.
Provenance
Owned by Ernö Goldfinger and Ursula Ruth Blackwell, also known as Mrs Ernö Goldfinger. Purchased by the National Trust in 1994.
Marks and inscriptions
Bottom edge.: "Cirque Chinois" further right "SWHayter 76"
Makers and roles
Stanley William Hayter (London 1901 - Paris 1988), printmaker
References
Black and Moorhead 1992: Peter Black and Désirée Moorhead, The Prints of Stanley William Hayter: A Complete Catalogue, London 1992, p. 341, no. 384. Hacker 2004: P. M. S. Hacker, Hayter, Stanley William (1901–1988), painter and printmaker, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 Farrell 2016: Jennifer Farrell, Expanding Possibilities: Stanley William Hayter and Atelier 17, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2016