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Georges Csato was born in Budapest in 1910. As a young man he headed to Berlin so that he could pursue his ambition to be an artist. From 1930-1932 he became a pupil of Alexander Archipenko; from 1932-1934 he studied with Kathe Kollwitz and Karl Hofer at the Academy of Beaux Arts in Vienna as well as receiving tuition from Paul Klee and Lionel Feininger. From 1936-1938 Csato studied with Oskar Kokoschka and Otto Thiele.

The artist wrote of this time ‘I was a realist painter to begin with because in Berlin in 1932 abstract art was very, very rare, though I received some lessons in abstract composition from Klee. And then the war came and disrupted everything.’ Csato was Jewish and having escaped the Nazis he was captured by the Russians and put into one of the labour camps. Whilst there he painted portraits of his captors. During this time he wrote in his diary ‘A commanding officer told me that I had to paint the most important portrait that I had ever done in my life. They blindfolded me and put me in an army car.

We drove at high speed for about an hour until we arrived at a little peasant house where I was searched. They took me into a room where an old man was sitting behind a huge table. It was Stalin ! While I was sketching him he never spoke a single word, he just sat there chain smoking. The only movement he made was to push a bottle of Vodka and a packet of cigarettes across the table to me.’ Csato’s experiences during the war and his earlier influence from Klee marked his gradual move from realism to abstract art. When the war was over Csato retuned to Budapest and began painting again but Hungary fell under Stalinist rule and abstract painting was strictly prohibited so he moved to Paris as a refugee and stayed there for the rest of his life.

Jean Cocteau organised Csato’s first exhibition in Paris at Librairie Paul Morihien in 1948. The artist went on to exhibit in many acclaimed exhibitions, most notably: Galerie Silvagni Paris, 1951; Hanover Gallery, London 1953; Gallerie de Berri, Paris 1954; Galerie Furstenberg, Paris 1956; Galerie Mariac, Paris 1959; Gallerie di Meo, Paris 1959; Santes Landweer, Amsterdam 1967; Walton Gallery, London 1970; Chastenet Gallery, London 1979; Salon D’Automme, Paris 1979; Arcadia Gallery, Paris 1981 & 1982; Gallerie L’Obsidienne, Paris 1986 as well as exhibiting successfully in New York, Sydney, Melbourne, Bonn and Canada.

Atelier 17 was an art school and studio founded in 1927 by Stanley William Hayter in Paris. In 1933 Hayter moved the workshop to a new location, 17 rue Campagne-Premier, which inspired the name by which the studio would be known: Atelier 17. The studio was an experimental workshop for graphic arts, promoting and teaching printmaking, whilst providing a collaborative atmosphere for artists to work in. It became one of the most influential studios and it has had a lasting influence on 20th Century Art, specifically the graphic arts.

There were a number of artists who created work at Atelier 17 including Jankel Adler, Massimo Campigli, Leonor Fini, Alberto Giacometti and Yves Tanguy. In Paris the Surrealists were prevalent with Max Ernst, Andre Masson and Joan Miro all working at the studio. With the outbreak of war Hayter moved the studio to New York and re-opened Atelier 17 there. The studio attracted many European artists who had fled from Europe; these artists together with their American contemporaries were instrumental in the development of gestural abstraction in America. Many artists worked at the New York studio including: Robert Motherwell, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson and Jackson Pollock.

In a 1971 interview with Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Hayter explained: ‘The way we work, there is no sort of professor and student deal going on here...I have always had the theory since I started this thing that if you are going to get anything done about this craft it is going to take a lot of people to do it and you have got to work with them, which means a damn sight more than it sounds because there are hardly any cases of it being done.... You have got to put yourself on the level of the last beginner and keep in 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. It is a very difficult thing to do because you have got to shake yourself up now, and then say: Listen, you think you know something about this, it isn’t true you see.... and you must of course have no personal vanity whatever when you’re playing this game’.

After the war Atelier 17 reopened in Paris where it continued to attract artists from around the world. It continued to operate until Hayter’s death in 1988. That year the studio was renamed Atelier Contrepoint and remains active today.