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.
