Gabor Peterdi
American, born Hungarian, 1915 - 2001
Peterdi joined Atelier 17 in Paris in 1933, and through Stanley William Hayter (cat. 60) he became enchanted with the burin and the plate. Gradually developing an intimacy with engraving, he explored every phase of the technique.
In 1939, Peterdi emigrated to the United States. Later that year, his first American one-man exhibition of paintings opened at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Seven years later, having served in the army, Peterdi resumed his printmaking career at Atelier 17 in New York. He found working with the copperplate cathartic after his military experiences. His first prints reflected the horrors and destruction of war, but he soon began representing natural awakenings and biblical beginnings in such works as Adam and Eve (Johnson 35). At this time, the artist created his first color intaglio, Sign of the Lobster (Johnson 29), which incorporated eight stenciled colors and an etched and engraved key plate. Here Surrealism resurfaced in a distinctive, personal response to Hayter and Miro.
Maintaining his activity at Atelier 17, Peterdi began teaching at the Brooklyn Museum in 1948, organizing the graphic arts workshop there. His paintings and prints of this period were dominated by his own gestural imagery, the result of exposure to Abstract Expressionism. Peterdi's creative approach to intaglio continued to expand as he invented new techniques and printed from ever larger plates.
In 1952 he became an associate professor of art at Hunter College, where he taught until 1959. In 1953, he also began teaching at the Yale-Norfolk summer school, and he joined the art faculty of Yale University as a visiting professor, gaining a full-time appointment in 1960. Today Peterdi sustains a close association with Yale through his position as professor emeritus.
In 1959, Peterdi's book Printmaking Methods Old and New was published. It remains a standard technical reference for both printmaking students and professionals. Peterdi has also exerted his influence on American printmaking in well over a hundred solo exhibitions. Currently, the artist continues to work and exhibit widely.
From David Acton's A Spectrum of Innovation: Color in American Printmaking 1890-1960, Wooster Art Museum, 1990
A painter, print maker and teacher, Gabor Peterdi is best known for his intaglio prints and engravings although he worked in a variety of media and themes. He made his first color print, Sign of the Lobster, in 1947. One of his early themes was focused on destruction and appeared in his Black Bull series of 1939, which was tied to Surrealism. Expressing his thoughts on this, he said: "All miracles of nature and behind it all the lingering terror of the atomic age---I want to paint all this and say 'A man was here.' " (Baigell 273). Other subjects related to elemental forces of the universe.
He was born in Pestujhely, Hungary and studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, the Academy Belle in Rome, and the Academy Julian in Paris. He was associated with the Stanley William Hayter Atelier 17 from 1933 to 1939 in Paris and again in 1947 in New York City. (Hayter, 1901-1988, was a highly influential abstract painter who taught many young modernists at his experimental Atelier 17).
Peterdi arrived in America in 1939. He eventually settled in Rowayton, Connecticut where he taught at the Yale University School of Art, 1960 to 1970s. He also spent time in Hawaii as a teacher at the Honolulu Academy of Art, the Brooklyn Art School (1948-1952), and Hunter College from 1952 to 1959.
Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Peter Hastings Falk, Editor, Who Was Who in American Art
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