A Salute to Midcentury Women

It is well known in print circles that Stanley William Hayter was a master of innovation in early Modernist printmaking. What is less known is that his studio, Atelier 17, inspired some 200 other artists, including Jackson Pollock, to push the limits of the various mediums in both engraved and relief techniques.

In its latest exhibition, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will examine that legacy in the work of a core group of female artists who found inspiration there. “Innovation and Abstraction: Women Artists and Atelier 17” opens today.

Hayter founded Atelier 17 in Paris in 1927 and moved to New York in 1940 in response to the outbreak of World War II in Europe. It continued to operate until 1955. His assertion that the primary tool of engraving, the burin, was a masculine tool inspired the female artists in the studio to come up with their own interpretations. After making impressions with fabric, string, and other fibers on soft-ground etching plates, some artists then turned to other mediums, making woodblock prints from recycled floorboards and using can openers to carve up a plate, or placing fabric dipped in acid right on the plate and then running it through the press.

The show will focus on female artists whose work in prints is mostly unknown, including Louise Bourgeois, Minna Citron, Worden Day, Dorothy Dehner, Sue Fuller, Alice Trumbull Mason, Louise Nevelson, and Anne Ryan.

Christina Weyl, the exhibition’s curator and a co-founder and co-president of the Association of Print Scholars, will present both abstract graphic works created with unconventional means as well as sculpture and paintings.

“With the exception of Bourgeois’s prints, these artists’ graphic works have been largely absent from accounts of postwar American art, despite their having been regularly exhibited in print annuals, museums, and art galleries during the period,” according to Ms. Weyl. She added that this would be the first time their works have been shown together within the context of women’s collective innovations at Atelier 17.

There will be a reception and talk with the curator on Sunday from 5 to 7 p.m. The show will remain on view through Oct. 29.