Appendix B: Selected Artist Biographies

Weyl, Christina

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Appendix B: Selected Artist Biographies

Christina Weyl

The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York

Appendix B: Selected Artist Biographies

Author

Christina Weyl

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20508

Appendix B: Selected Artist Biographies

A complete set of biographies for all of the artists listed in Appendix A can be found online at http://atelier17.christinaweyl.com.

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Description: Scattered Journey by Countey, Ellen Abbey

Ellen Abbey Countey, Scattered Journey, 1946. Engraving and soft ground etching, plate: 5⅞ × 8⅞ in. (14.9 × 20.3 cm); sheet: 9⅛ × 13 in. (23.2 × 33 cm). Dolan/Maxwell, Philadelphia.

Ellen Abbey Countey (1923–2017)
Brooklyn-born Ellen Abbey Countey was active in the New York art community before marriage and family. In the early 1940s, she studied at the Art Students League—with George Bridgman, George Grosz, Ossip Zadkine, and Morris Kantor—and had private lessons in direct carving with William Zorach in Maine. Enrolling at the New School, she met both Hayter and her future husband, Edward Countey (1921–1984).1Thomasin Countey kindly shared information about her mother’s career. A member of Atelier 17 from approximately 1944 to 1948, Abbey Countey made about a dozen plates, which are wonderful examples of the technical experimentation characteristic of this period in Atelier 17’s history. The abstract Scattered Journey (1946) features automatist burin work, several areas of high relief, and tonal areas made with aquatint. Unfortunately, she never printed complete editions, like so many artists at Atelier 17, and her prints are quite rare as a result. The Counteys eventually moved to Long Island, where her husband taught for many years at SUNY Stony Brook, first in the Engineering Department and later the Department of Art. Though Abbey Countey’s professional career ended with motherhood, she remained close to Hayter and other Atelier artists. As a widow she visited Hayter and his wife, Désirée, in Paris and renewed her work in printmaking.

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Description: Moon Night by Aronson, Irene

Irene Aronson, Moon Night, 1951. Etching and aquatint, plate: 5 13/16 × 4 in. (14.7 × 10.1 cm); sheet: 13⅛ × 10 in. (33.3 × 24.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously.

Irene Aronson (1918–1992)
Born in Dresden, Irene Aronson and her family fled to London in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution.2See SEF for biographical information about Aronson. “Aronsohn” appears to have been the original spelling of the artist’s surname, but she used the Anglicized “Aronson” or, later, “Anderson” while living in the United States. She began art studies at the Eastbourne School of Arts and Crafts (1935–37) and following that, simultaneous enrollment at the Slade School of Fine Art and Ruskin School of Drawing (1937–40). In August 1940 her family immigrated to the United States by way of Ecuador. Newly arrived in New York in March 1941, she pursued short instruction with George Grosz at the Art Students League. As a young child in Dresden, Aronson had been fascinated by opera and, not being able to sing herself, she became a stage designer, which was her primary occupation.3Aronson exhibited a gouache and ink drawing of a costume design in MoMA’s fifteenth anniversary exhibition, Art in Progress (1944). In addition to teaching stage design and costuming at institutions such as City College of New York, Aronson created the costumes for the Barnum and Bailey Circus and the Broadway performance of Front Page. Joining Atelier 17 sometime in the early 1950s allowed Aronson to combine her interest in the visual arts with her passion for stage performance. Most of her intaglio prints have a theatrical or musical quality, such as her major portfolios, Danse Macabre (1951) and The Circus (1952), which earned her a solo show at the Weyhe Gallery in 1952. Aronson indicated that the former portfolio, from which the print Moon Night is a part, made reference to the nightmares and death she witnessed as a Jew in Nazi Germany.4Mary Jane Moore, “She Puts Circus Life on Canvas,” Long Island Daily Press, April 17, 1953. Critics praised the simplicity of her etchings, comparing them to children’s drawings and citing the influence of Paul Klee. Dore Ashton, for example, felt that the linear directness of her prints was “refreshing, in these times of extensive technological research in graphic art.”5Dore Ashton, “Irene Aronson,” Art Digest 26 (September 1952): 22; and Irvin Haas, “The Print Collector,” Art News 49 (May 1950): 13. After her affiliation with Atelier 17, Aronson remained active in the printmaking community: she mastered woodcut and color lithography, wrote how-to articles about printmaking techniques, and exhibited her work at cooperative spaces such as Tanager Gallery.

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Description: Angel of the Annunciation by Ascher, Lily

Lily Ascher, Angel of the Annunciation, 1948. Engraving, 7 × 8⅞ in. (17.8 × 22.5 cm). Indianapolis Museum of Art. Gift of Dr. Steven Conant in memory of Mrs. H. L. Conant.

Lily Ascher Neogy (1923–1988)
Lily Ascher was the second child born to Morris and Bella Ascher, who owned a dry goods store in Jersey City, New Jersey.6The artist’s daughter, Esha Neogy, was helpful in filling in many biographical details. Thank you also to Chessa Nilssen and Peri Swaniger for their genealogical assistance. The family moved to Harlem sometime before 1940, where Ascher attended the High School of Music and Art—an influential magnet school founded by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia—which jump-started her creative interests. She attended the Cooper Union between 1942 and 1946 and also took evening courses at the Art Students League. Likely through the advice of Leo Katz, a teacher from Cooper, she joined Atelier 17 immediately after graduation. Her engravings are masterful and range from stylized figural studies—such as Angel of the Annunciation, one of her best-circulated prints—to fully abstract compositions. She exhibited widely, participating in Atelier 17’s exhibition at the Laurel Gallery (1949) and several other print annuals: SAGA (1947, 1948, and 1951), the Brooklyn Museum (1949), and Northwest Printmakers (1951). Around the time of her Atelier 17 affiliation, Ascher also made designs for Winfield Fine Art in Jewelry, a short-lived venture specializing in encasing a variety of objects within plastic.7Three examples of her jewelry can be found in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt, New York. In 1957 Ascher married the Indian art historian Prithwish Neogy, and together the couple moved to Honolulu for his teaching position at the University of Hawaii. Later in life, she worked in ceramics, sculpture, and woodcarving.

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Description: City Counterpoint by Cantieni, Margaret Balzer

Margaret Balzer Cantieni, City Counterpoint, 1946. Engraving and soft ground etching, plate: 7 × 8½ in. (17.8 × 21.6 cm). Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, Pa. Gift of Peggy Whitney Hobbs, LUF 60 1008 (Acc. #2006–9).

Margaret Balzer Cantieni (1914–2002)
Margaret Balzer spent most of her childhood and young adulthood in the Midwest. Born in Newton, Kansas, her family moved to Northfield, Minnesota, where her father, a Congregationalist minister, took a faculty position at Carleton College, his alma mater and eventually hers. The year after graduating from Carlton in 1936, Balzer attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and what was then called the New Bauhaus, studying primarily with the Hungarian émigré Gyorgy Kepes, who headed the curriculum in Light and Color. Later that year, she accepted a full-time faculty position at Berea College, a small liberal arts college in rural Kentucky, recruited by her undergraduate art teacher and mentor, Mary Ela, who served as chair of the college’s Art Department. Although based in Kentucky until 1945, Balzer took advantage of additional opportunities to absorb Bauhaus-inspired principles, participating in László Moholy-Nagy’s summer session at Mills College in 1940 and attending summer classes at Black Mountain College in 1945, where she studied color and design with Josef Albers and architecture with Paul Beidler. At Black Mountain she also made a strong impression on Lyonel Feininger, who told Albers she was one of the most eager students to attend his meetings.8Lyonel Feininger to Josef Albers, 17 September 1945, Summer Institute 1945, Margaret Balzer application file, Black Mountain College Papers, Western Regional Archives State Archives of North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Asheville. Newly married in 1946, she and her husband, fellow artist and Berea faculty member Joseph Cantieni, set out to live in New York, where she attended Atelier 17. She absorbed Hayter’s theories about compositional “counterpoint,” which appealed to her interest in merging sound with the visual arts. In later interviews she affirmed her abiding commitment to bring a spiritual focus to abstraction: “We just wanted to enlarge our visual language and liberate ourselves from dependence on the object itself. We wanted to get to the inner core.”9Quoted in Janice Carter Larson, Painting the Halls of Heaven: Life and Works of Margaret Balzer Cantieni (Bethlehem, Pa.: Payne Gallery of Moravian College, 2004). The Cantienis moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1948 when Joseph was appointed to the faculty at Muhlenberg College (he eventually quit academia and served as artistic director of Bethlehem Steel). She continued to teach locally in the Lehigh Valley (Swain School, Allentown; the Baum School, Allentown; and the Southern Lehigh Public School district) and remained active as an artist until her death.

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Description: Figures in a Garden by Nurkse, Harriet Berger

Harriet Berger Nurkse, Figures in a Garden, 1950. Engraving and aquatint, 9 15/16 × 17½ in. (25.3 × 44.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, New York. Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 50.31.

Harriet Berger Nurkse (1916–1978)
Born in France to a British father and American mother, Harriet Berger graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1939 before immigrating to the United States in 1940.10Thank you to Dennis Nurkse for speaking with me about his mother’s career. Sailing from Lisbon aboard the Excambion, one of the last commercial vessels crossing the Atlantic, she met her future husband, Ragnar Nurkse, an Estonian-born economist who was then employed by the League of Nations. The couple dated for several years before marrying in 1946, during which time Berger lived with her parents in Englewood, New Jersey, and worked as an occupational therapist with wounded soldiers. She always considered herself an artist and from 1940 to 1945 regularly enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, where her primary focus was the graphic arts with instructors Harry Sternberg and Will Barnet. She enjoyed the camaraderie at the League and was particularly close with Alicia Legg, a family friend and later a curator at MoMA. Berger Nurkse began entering her prints into competitive exhibitions as early as 1943, participating in the annuals of the Library of Congress, Society of American Etchers, and National Academy of Design. She also exhibited the print Wounded Soldiers in America in the War, an exhibition that took place simultaneously at twenty-six museums in October 1943. Likely through Legg or Fannie Hillsmith, another close friend, Berger Nurkse began working at Atelier 17 during the late 1940s. She exhibited with the workshop twice (1947 and 1949), and in 1950 was awarded a Brooklyn Museum purchase prize for Figures in a Garden (1950). This surrealistic print is divided into four parts showcasing different intaglio techniques: deeply bitten etched lines at far left, engraved lines at far right, and a combination of stop-out varnish and aquatint for the central two panels. After this activity, Berger Nurkse’s professional career went quiet. Her husband died unexpectedly in 1959, leaving her to raise their two sons. Settling in central New Jersey, she eventually reactivated her artistic practice and was a member of the Princeton Art Association.

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Description: Playing with an Idea (with Stanley William Hayter) by Bishop, Isabel

Isabel Bishop, Playing with an Idea (with Stanley William Hayter), 1931–43, printed 1985. Etching and engraving, plate: 5⅞ × 3 15/16 in. (14.9 × 10 cm); sheet: 13 × 10 in. (33 × 25.4 cm). Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Mass. The Nancy Gray Sherrill, Class of 1954, Collection (2008.207).

Isabel Bishop (1902–1988)
The well-known urban scene painter Isabel Bishop was among the earliest wave of artists to enroll in Stanley William Hayter’s class at the New School. By the time of her attendance in 1943, she was in her forties and already well established in the New York art world, having had several solo exhibitions at the Midtown Gallery throughout the 1930s. Bishop began making figural line etchings in 1925, and she likely pursued instruction in engraving with Hayter at the encouragement of fellow Fourteenth Street School colleague Reginald Marsh, who had himself been a student at Atelier 17 in 1940. Two uneditioned plates, both recycled from earlier efforts in etching, give a snapshot of how Bishop learned to handle the engraver’s burin and execute both curved and straight lines. Bishop realized two engraved plates of female figures during her time at the New School, but both were editioned much later in the artist’s life. She made only one more engraving in 1949 and instead greatly favored the quickness and portability of sketching an etching from life.11For Bishop’s engravings, see entries 7A, 12A, 30, 33, and 44 in Susan Teller and Alan Hyman, Isabel Bishop: Etchings, Engravings and Aquatints. A Catalogue Raisonné, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Art, 2000). In 1961 Bishop transformed her printmaking practice through the introduction of aquatint, which became a major element in the remainder of her oeuvre in the graphic arts.

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Nell Blaine, Untitled, 1947. Etching, plate: 8 5/16 × 5 15/16 in. (21.1 × 15.1 cm); sheet: 7 13/16 × 5 9/16 in. (19.8 × 14.2 cm). Worcester Art Museum, Mass. Gift from the Estate of Nell Blaine.

Nell Blaine (1922–1996)
Born into a working-class family in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine was afflicted with terrible eye problems—extreme nearsightedness and cross-eyes—that gave her an introspective focus and fueled her determination to acquire basic drawing skills. In 1939 she entered the Richmond Professional Institute’s School of Art, made possible through a work-study scholarship. Among her teachers was Worden Day, a guest instructor and fellow Virginian who had spent several years studying and working in New York. Their meeting was kismet. The two shared similar family backgrounds, both having fairly religious parents who disapproved of their artistic activities. Given their ten-year age gap, Blaine looked up to Day as a mentor, and Day enjoyed serving in this role, one of the first indications of her inclinations toward feminist solidarity. According to Blaine, Day was a major early influence: “She activated a lot of strivings for me and urged me to read, among other things, Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own.’ It was Worden who got me interested in landscape painting.”12Quoted in Martica Sawin, Nell Blaine: Her Art and Life (New York: Hudson Hills, 1998), 18. Day also urged Blaine to move to New York, which she did in 1942. Blaine thrived there, attending class with Hans Hofmann while working part-time—sometimes in office jobs, sometimes as a monitor in Hofmann’s studio—to make ends meet. In 1946 Blaine applied the funds from a fellowship awarded by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to pursue instruction at Atelier 17, almost certainly at the suggestion of Day.13Blaine had some previous printmaking experience through Will Barnet’s Saturday etching classes at the Art Students League, which she attended just after arriving in New York. See ASL. She made six plates using a combination of engraving and etching, all of which showcase the type of organic abstraction that typified her style at this time. Blaine never printed more than a handful of impressions and never exhibited them much, keeping the proofs in a folder labeled “old etchings.”14Carolyn Harris, Nell Blaine’s partner, explained Blaine’s participation at Atelier 17 in a series of letters to David Acton, then serving as curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photography at the Worcester Art Museum. These letters, dated between July 1997 and May 2001, are in the Worcester Art Museum’s files. Blaine was a key part of the New York avant-garde during this period, as a member of the American Abstract Artists and the Jane Street Gallery, one of the first artist-run cooperatives. She was also part of the stable of artists at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Blaine returned to printmaking much later in her career, decades after recovering from the paralyzing effects of polio.

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Description: Trees by Brandt, Grace Borgenicht

Grace Borgenicht Brandt, Trees, ca. 1945–50. Etching, plate: 8 × 9¾ in. (20.3 × 24.8 cm); sheet: 8¾ × 11½ in. (22.2 × 29.2 cm). Estate of Grace Borgenicht Brandt, Baltimore.

Grace Borgenicht Brandt (1915–2001)
Grace Lubell was born in New York to a well-to-do Jewish family who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She attended New College, a short-lived progressive undergraduate division of Columbia University meant to prepare students for teaching careers. New College students were encouraged to study abroad, and Lubell spent part of 1934 in Paris at the studio of André Lhote. In 1938 she married Jack Borgenicht, with whom she had three daughters (the couple later divorced). Working as an artist throughout the 1940s, she focused on watercolor and had several solo shows at the Laurel Gallery (two in 1947 and one in 1950). Although her watercolors were mostly representational—depicting the environs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where her husband had a dress-manufacturing factory—they were robust and expressively executed, often incorporating splatters and added textures such as sand or sawdust.15A. R., “Grace Borgenicht,” Art News 49 (March 1950): 50. Lois Borgenicht recalled her mother had self-doubt about working in watercolors and being labeled a “lady watercolorist.” Lois Borgenicht, telephone conversation with Christina Weyl, February 2, 2017. Borgenicht studied at Atelier 17 sometime in the mid- to late 1940s but produced few prints. Examples include natural subjects such as a gnarly old tree that fills the plate area, or a scene of a rural barn and silo. Around the same time, Borgenicht became a co-director of Laurel with owner Chris Ritter, and her membership to Atelier 17 was likely the catalyst for the workshop’s group show there in 1949 (though she did not exhibit any of her own prints). She increasingly transitioned away from art-making toward gallery management and opened her own gallery in 1951, just after Laurel closed. Shortly after the inaugural show featuring Jimmy Ernst’s work, Grace Borgenicht Gallery held a group exhibition by Atelier 17 members, which traveled to the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and Michigan State College. Borgenicht married the painter Will Brandt in 1960, and her gallery remained open until the 1990s.

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Cynthia Brants, Venus, 1943. Engraving and soft ground etching, plate: 4 × 4⅞ in. (10.2 × 12.4 cm); sheet: 8⅞ × 11¾ in. (22.5 × 29.8 cm). Courtesy Cynthia Brants Trust, Granbury, Tex.

Cynthia Brants (1924–2006)
Cynthia Brants, a lifelong Texan, was born into a prominent Fort Worth family. At nine years old she realized she wanted to be an artist after sitting for a portrait with Dickson Reeder, a local artist who had coincidentally studied at Atelier 17 in Paris from 1936 to 1937 alongside his soon-to-be wife, Flora Blanc.16Margaret Blagg, Beyond the Circle: Cynthia Brants (Albany, Tex.: Old Jail Art Center, 2007), 5. In her teens Brants pursued instruction from other local artists including Blanche McVeigh, Evaline Sellors, and Wade Jolly. She attended Sarah Lawrence College beginning in 1941, where she met her lifelong mentor, Kurt Roesch. He had a profound impact on Brants’s career, introducing her to European modernism and arranging for her to attend Atelier 17 during her junior year. She jumped at the opportunity to study with Hayter and dove into printmaking studies with characteristic pluck. Prints such as Venus show her exploring two of Atelier 17’s core processes—engraving and soft ground etching—and foreshadow her rigorous technical experimentation at the printmaking studio she established in Granbury, Texas, in the 1970s.17For more on Brants’s work as a printmaker, see Mark L. Smith, Off the Edge: The Experimental Prints of Cynthia Brants (Austin: Flatbed Galleries, 2009). After a short, post-college trip to Europe, Brants returned to Texas, where she became a member of the Fort Worth Circle of modernist artists and taught at various institutions. Her paintings and prints reflect a lifelong engagement with cubism and use of geometry to animate nature.

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Description: Abstraction by Cilento, Margaret

Margaret Cilento, Abstraction, 1947. Etching, plate: 10 1/16 × 13 1/16 in. (25.6 × 33.2 cm); sheet: 10 1/16 × 13 1/16 in. (25.6 × 33.2 cm). National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gordon Darling Australasian Print Fund, 1993.

Margaret Cilento (1923–2006)
Margaret Cilento was the eldest daughter and second child born to Sir Raphael and Lady Phyllis Cilento, both prominent doctors and policy advocates in Australia. Cilento suffered from deafness as a child, which contributed to her early gravitation toward the visual arts. She began formal art studies in high school at Sommerville House in Brisbane and continued at the East Sydney Technical College, from which she graduated in 1945.18The most complete record of Cilento’s career can be found in Jude Savage, “Atelier 17 and Australian Women Artists in New York: Margaret Cilento at Home and Abroad, 1946–1965” (MA thesis, Australian National University, 1995). The Australian art scene was divided at this moment between the conservative, government-backed Australian Academy of Art and more progressive opposition groups such as the Contemporary Art Society and Sydney Group, founded in 1938 and 1945, respectively. Although Cilento exhibited with the former group on several occasions, her in-depth exposure to avant-garde styles did not occur until she reached New York in 1947. Fellow Australian and Atelier 17 member Anne Wienholt encouraged Cilento to come to New York, where her father was serving as the United Nations Director for Refugees and Displaced Persons. Cilento won the Wattle League Scholarship funded by the Half Dozen Group, Brisbane, which covered her tuition expenses at Atelier 17 but did not provide for travel and lodging, and so she lived with her family. After a two-year introduction to the city’s postwar art community—studying at Atelier 17, the Subjects of the Artist School, and Rufino Tamayo’s class at the Brooklyn Museum of Art—in 1949 Cilento departed with her family for Europe. She worked as a monitor in Atelier 17’s newly reopened Paris studio before returning to Australia in 1951, suffering from hepatitis. From 1954 to 1965 she lived abroad again in London, where she studied at the Central School of Art at Goldsmith’s College and met her husband, Geoff Maslen, whom she married in 1963. The couple returned to Australia shortly thereafter, and Cilento continued to work as an artist, with a particular focus on portraiture of her children and expressive representations of the human body. She maintained a printing press in her home studio but worked mostly in oil paint.19Geoff Maslen to Christina Weyl, 24 January 2018.

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Ruth Cyril, Tailspin, 1950. Etching and engraving, plate: 14½ × 10¾ in. (36.8 × 27.43 cm); sheet: 19⅞ × 12 in. (50.5 × 30.5 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass. Louise E. Bettens Fund, M12866.

Ruth Cyril (1920–unknown)
Ruth Goldfarb was the oldest of three daughters born to Charles and Esther Goldfarb. The working-class family lived in the Bronx’s University Heights neighborhood. While attending Walton High School, Goldfarb took art classes at the Greenwich House, a former settlement house offering after-school enrichment programs. After graduating in 1937 Goldfarb studied at several local institutions: Hunter College (1939), the New School for Social Research (1940–42), studio schools of Hans Hofmann and Vaclav Vytlacil (roughly 1943–45), and the School of Contemporary Art, an as-yet-unidentified institution.20In résumés, Cyril said she studied with Vytlacil at the Art Students League, but there is no official record of her enrollment. Her student record card (filed under “Goldfarb”) lists one summer course in 1939 with Nathaniel Dirk; see ASL. At the last school, she learned jewelry design, which provided steady employment in years to come.21In applications to the Guggenheim Foundation, Cyril listed many jewelry design jobs for Tiffany and Co., Trabert and Hoeffer, Charles Valliant Inc., and others. Guggenheim Foundation archives, New York. By 1947, when she joined Atelier 17, Goldfarb had changed her last name to “Cyril,” and she eventually dropped “Ruth” in favor of simply “Cyril,” an androgynous pseudonym.22She never married, and thus it is unclear where “Cyril” came from. Anti-Semitism may have been at play. It appears that Cyril’s parents adopted the surname as well. In her 1960 application for a Guggenheim grant, Cyril indicated her next of kin were Charles and Esther Cyril; Guggenheim Foundation archives, New York. According to Fred Becker, who taught Cyril’s introductory class at Atelier 17, her initial prints were highly influenced by Hayter.23Fred Becker, recommendation letter for Cyril’s 1953 application for a Guggenheim fellowship. Guggenheim Foundation archives, New York. Eventually, she developed unique ways of achieving sculptural depth by introducing techniques she practiced in jewelry design. She exposed her plates to violent open-biting in the acid bath, soldered wires onto plates, as seen in Tailspin, and scratched stiff wire brushes to create semi-abstract and atmospheric effects. Cyril traveled to Paris in June 1950 to hone her printmaking skills at Paris Imprimeurs, and she remained a member of Atelier 17 until its closure in 1955, serving as workshop monitor in May 1952. She earned a Fulbright grant in 1957–58, through which she traveled to France, studied at the Sorbonne’s Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie, and joined the print publisher La Guilde Internationale de la Gravure.24For more information on La Guilde Internationale de la Gravure, see entries L.1110b and L.4670 in Frits Lugt, Les Marques de Collections de Dessins et d’Estampes, www.marquesdecollections.fr. Cyril staked her professional reputation on printmaking and in 1959 organized a major traveling exhibition of prints, which toured to the Addison Gallery of American Art, McNay Art Museum, and Portland Art Museum, among other venues.25Cyril continued to market this exhibition into the 1960s. She also earned a prestigious solo show at the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of Graphic Arts in spring 1963.26The file for Ruth Cyril in SEF provides a major resource of career information. Despite her important contributions to experimental printmaking and her constant professional activity, Cyril’s further career details remain fuzzy. She was loosely affiliated with the art dealer Leo Castelli from the mid-1940s onward, and also showed prints with Knoedler and Company.27Stanley William Hayter to Helen Phillips, “Friday” [no date, likely mid-1940s], says: “Castelli promoting with who would you think . . . your young friend Cyril,” HPP. Leo Castelli Gallery Records, AAA/SI, also has a smattering of information about Cyril (box 44, folder 17 and box 106, folder 18). As a result of her name change, her birth date is usually given inaccurately as 1938, and her death date cannot yet be confirmed.28Cyril’s life dates are often given as 1938 to 1988, based on another person named Ruth Cyril.

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Description: Composition 13 by Dienes, Sari

Sari Dienes, Composition 13, 1949. Etching, plate: 13⅝ × 11 in. (28 × 34.6 cm); sheet: 18 × 14¾ in. (46 × 37.3 cm). Sari Dienes Foundation, Pomona, N.Y.

Sari Dienes (1898–1992)
Sarolta Maria Anna Chylinska was born in Debreczen, Hungary.29The Sari Dienes Foundation, Pomona, N.Y., is an excellent source of information about the artist’s career and work. Thank you to Barbara Pollitt and Rip Hayman for sharing memories of Dienes. In her teens, Sari (pronounced, as the artist explained, “sh” as in sugar, “a” as in art) pursued dance lessons in Budapest with Valéria Dienes, who was married to poet and mathematician Paul Dienes. Sari and Paul became romantically involved and married in 1922. The couple moved frequently for his work, living at times in Austria, Wales, and London. Beginning in the late 1920s through 1935, Sari Dienes—the name she used professionally—studied painting in Paris with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne and with André Lhote. In 1936 she became the assistant director of the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts, London, and was in charge of recruiting new students, who included Leonora Carrington and Stella Snead. In 1939 she voyaged to New York at Ozenfant’s invitation, but the escalation of hostilities in Europe prevented Dienes from returning to England. She instead resettled in New York, and her studio in the Sherwood Studios building on Fifty-Seventh Street was a meeting point for the avant-garde. Her first solo show of drawings occurred in 1942 at the New School for Social Research, and this exhibition may be where she initially encountered Hayter and Atelier 17. She worked at the studio between 1949 and 1952. Always a consummate networker, Dienes befriended many Atelier 17 members and exhibited her prints regularly with the studio (at the Laurel Gallery, Peretz Johnnes Bookshop and Gallery, Milwaukee-Downer College, and Highfield Gallery).30Dienes’s 1952 application to the artists’ colony Yaddo provides a fairly complete record of her education, exhibition, and other professional activity. Courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation, Pomona, N.Y. Her prints are highly finessed, featuring heavily encrusted passages of aquatint and deeply engraved markings produced with the scorper. They are largely abstract with metaphorical references to the primordial unknown and personal transitions. Dienes viewed the production of each print individually and consistently rotated the orientation of impressions pulled from the same plate. The experience of printing these highly textural plates spurred her interest in frottage, a process of rubbing graphite or crayon on paper over an uneven surface.31In discussing her frottage work, Dienes said, “My work in graphics was of great help to me.” Sari Dienes and M. C. Richards, “Sari Dienes: Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” Craft Horizons 16, no. 2 (March 1956): 36. Starting in 1952 Dienes began to make rubbings from nature (wood, bark, grass, and flowers), from man-made urban features (manhole covers, subway grates), and from ancient petroglyphs. Besides the inspiration she drew from making prints, Dienes’s experimental work in a neo-dada aesthetic was also fostered through friendships with artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Ray Johnson (Cage and Johnson shared her interest in Zen Buddhism). In 1961 she moved her studio to the utopian cooperative called the Land in Stony Point, New York, and lived there until her death.

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Description: Gigantic Shell by Engler, Christine

Christine Engler, Gigantic Shell, 1947. Engraving, plate: 10¾ × 8 15/16 in. (27.3 × 22.7 cm); sheet: 13¾ × 11 13/16 in. (34.9 × 30 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Dorothy Noyes Arms and John Taylor Arms Memorial Collection, Gift of the Society of American Graphic Artists Inc., 1955 (55.553.198).

Christine Engler (1919–2004)
Born in New York, Christine Engler was the only child of Gustave and Grace Engler and had a working-class upbringing, living just north of Morningside Park.32Thanks to Mathea Rubin for speaking with me about her mother’s life and career. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father—though he worked full-time as a waiter to support his family—was a passionate photographer and inventor. Engler attended Birch Wathen School, an independent school in Manhattan, and her art teacher there, Victoria Hudson Huntley, played a significant role in fostering her artistic development and career ambitions. After graduation, Huntley arranged for Engler to teach art at Birch Wathen and, in the mid-1940s, she followed Huntley to Pomfret, Connecticut. (Huntley taught at the Pomfret School and Engler at the Rectory School.) Engler also studied at the Art Students League, primarily with Arthur Lee and William McNulty. She began exhibiting intaglio prints in the mid-1940s, showing mostly with the Society of American Etchers, the forerunner to the Society of American Graphic Artists.33It is unclear who taught her how to etch. Victoria Hudson Huntley was an accomplished lithographer. By 1947 Engler found her way to Atelier 17, where she mastered engraving under Hayter. Her prints were largely representational, focusing on circus imagery, nature, animals, and dancers. She exhibited them widely during the late 1940s and mid-1950s and earned recognition through numerous purchase awards and a Tiffany Foundation grant in 1950. Engler formed a close friendship with Hayter, and he wrote the introductory text for her first solo exhibition of engravings and etchings at the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery (now the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art). He praised her work for its technical accomplishment: “It is . . . quite difficult to execute such lines as Christine Engler employs. . . . When such results are seen there is only an impression of ease . . . the lines seem inevitable . . . they just seem to have come that way.”34Stanley William Hayter, Engravings of Christine Engler (Memphis: Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, 1957). Sometime in the late 1950s, Engler married Edward S. Rubin, a tobacco and pipe salesman who had served in the Navy. After the birth of their only child in 1961, Engler gave up printmaking but continued creative work, producing small-scale metal and clay sculptures. Engler and Hayter saw each other again in the early 1980s, when her daughter was studying abroad at Parsons Paris, and this reunion was quite meaningful to Engler.

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Description: Beachcombers by Felsenthal, Francine

Francine Felsenthal, Beachcombers, 1949. Etching and engraving, plate: 7 × 8¼ in. (17.8 × 21 cm); sheet: 10 × 13⅛ in. (25.4 × 33.3 cm). Dolan/Maxwell, Philadelphia.

Francine Felsenthal (1922–2007)
Francis Felsenthal was born in Chicago in 1922. By 1930 she was living in a boardinghouse with her sister and mother, who worked in a dry goods store. She graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1940 and likely attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).35Unfortunately, SAIC’s archives do not hold student records dating back to this era. She exhibited prints with the Vanguard Group, founded in 1945 by Chicago-based architect Robert Vale Faro, and primarily produced screen prints but also painted, drew, and made etchings and woodcuts. Felsenthal became associated with Atelier 17 around 1947, after entering into a heated debate with Hayter on the pages of the Serigraph Quarterly. In his article “The Silk Screen,” Hayter suggested that the medium was serviceable for reproduction rather than original expression. Revealing her spunkiness, Felsenthal’s letter recounts her initial reaction upon reading his words: “‘Wotthehell does this Hayter guy do for a living,’ I growl. Then I calm down, turn the page and observe that Mr. Hayter wants some backfire . . . so I figured I better jump in with both feet.”36Francine Felsenthal, “Department of Interesting Letters,” Serigraph Quarterly 2, no. 1 (February 1947): 2. Hayter’s article appeared in the previous issue: Stanley William Hayter, “The Silk Screen,” Serigraph Quarterly 1, no. 4 (November 1946): 1. Out of personal curiosity or perhaps through a direct invitation from Hayter, Felsenthal began working at Atelier 17 shortly thereafter and continued through Peter Grippe’s tenure, appearing in his student ledger book for 1952–53. One intaglio print, Beachcombers, was part of Hayter’s estate collection, and several other prints with marine titles appear on a list of Atelier 17 prints found in Helen Phillips’s papers.37Titles on Phillips’s list include Beachcomber (1949), Boatyard (1952), and Bather (1952). See untitled and undated list, HPP. The National Serigraph Society published several of Felsenthal’s screen prints, all completed in 1946: A Lonesome George, Observing Person, and Portrait of John Scott. Thanks to correspondence Felsenthal initiated in 1969 with Ellen Lanyon and Roland Ginzel—presumably classmates from the SAIC—we now know Felsenthal stopped painting in the mid-1950s for about twelve years, married (and divorced), taught art at a public middle school in New York, and attended New York University for her master’s degree.38Francine Felsenthal to Ellen Lanyon and Roland Ginzel, 3 July 1969, 8 February 1970, 4 April 1970, reel 1234:218–28, Ellen Lanyon Papers, AAA/SI. Felsenthal, who also went by Francine Fels, was an original member of the March Gallery, one of the artist-run cooperatives, which was open from 1957 to 1960.39Joellen Bard, Tenth Street Days: The Co-Ops of the 50’s (New York: Education, Art and Service, 1977), 32–33.

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Description: With Abandon by Fine, Perle

Perle Fine, With Abandon, ca. 1945. Etching, aquatint, and engraving, plate: 7 × 4⅞ in. (17.8 × 12.4 cm); sheet: 14¾ × 13⅛ in. (37.5 × 33.3 cm). Dolan/Maxwell, Philadelphia.

Perle Fine (1905–1988)
Perle Fine was born in Boston and grew up in nearby Malden, Massachusetts, where her family operated a dairy farm. Displaying artistic tendencies from a young age, Fine left high school early and enrolled in the School of Practical Art in Boston, studying illustration and commercial art.40For more on Fine’s life and career, see Kathleen L. Housley, Tranquil Power: The Art and Life of Perle Fine (New York: Midmarch Arts, 2005). Around 1927 or 1928 she moved to New York and pursued training at Grand Central School of Art, the Art Students League, and Hans Hofmann’s school. While on fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1943–44, Fine joined Atelier 17’s classroom at the New School and befriended Sue Fuller, among others. She initially produced a handful of black-and-white intaglio prints with biomorphic shapes, two of which were exhibited with Atelier 17’s group show at MoMA (1944). She returned to the studio around 1946 to experiment with color printmaking. These small and intricately executed prints feature automatic, surrealistic markings set against geometric shaded or color-block elements.41Several of Fine’s Atelier 17 prints are reproduced in Wide to the Wind: Works on Paper by Perle Fine (Chicago: McCormick Gallery, 2014), 13–15. Fine’s prints achieved wide circulation in two additional Atelier 17 shows—at Leicester Galleries (1947) and Laurel Gallery (1949)—along with standalone group shows such as annuals at the Brooklyn Museum and Society of American Etchers. Fine’s career took off in the late 1940s with a sequence of critically successful solo exhibitions at the Willard Gallery, Nierendorf Gallery, and Betty Parsons Gallery. At the invitation of Willem de Kooning, Fine became a member of The Club and was, in general, a very networked member of the New York art community. She taught at Hofstra University between 1962 and 1973 and continued to work, primarily in paper collage, until her death in 1988.

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Jean Francksen, Bouquet, 1946. Etching, plate: 9 × 5⅞ in. (22.9 × 14.9 cm); sheet: 12½ × 9⅜ in. (31.8 × 23.8 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with the Thomas Skelton Harrison Fund, 1952 (1952–31–16).

Jean Francksen (1914–1996)
A lifetime resident of Philadelphia, Jean Francksen attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she followed a program for art education and, by special arrangement, took supplemental art courses at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now University of the Arts). After graduating in 1937 she taught at Beaver College (now Arcadia University) in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, while simultaneously pursuing art education at the Barnes Foundation (1943–44). Printmaking was a major focus from the outset of her career, perhaps due to the influence of Benton Spruance, a colleague at Beaver. By 1939 she was showing lithographs at the Philadelphia Print Club and, in 1943, contributed a lithograph titled The Final Exam, a parody of a ladies’ first-aid class, to the America in the War exhibition.42Ellen G. Landau, Artists for Victory (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1983), 40. An impression is now in the collection of the Library of Congress. In January 1945 Francksen enrolled in the Print Club’s new Wednesday-evening working group “for artists who are interested in technical research in graphic methods.”43“Artist’s Workshop” sign-up sheet, PPC Scrapbooks, 1916–82, reel 4232, AAA/SI. Stanley William Hayter, Will Barnet, and Ezio Martinelli (1913–1980) were the group’s technical advisors. Bouquet (1946), a semi-abstract still life, showcases technical skills learned under Hayter’s tutelage such as engraving and soft ground etching. Francksen’s style, which had initially tilted toward realism with seascapes, landscapes, and representations of the Pueblo Indians, became abstract and geometric through the 1950s. By the end of the decade, she designed several public murals in the greater Philadelphia area, and a 1964 profile in the Philadelphia Inquirer called her a “pioneer of public art.”44Woodmere Art Gallery, An Invited Exhibition by Eight Philadelphia Mural Painters (Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Gallery, 1958); “Phila. Builds with Artistry,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 26, 1964, 11. Francksen continued to produce and exhibit prints throughout her career, some of which are held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Woodmere Art Museum. In addition to Beaver College, she taught for many years at University of the Arts.

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Description: Untitled by Garáfulic, Lily

Lily Garafulic, Untitled, 1945. Print on paper, 20 × 15½ in. (50.8 × 39.4 cm). Courtesy the Private Collection of the Garafulic Family.

Lily Garafulic (1914–2012)
Lily Garafulic, a Chilean sculptor of Croatian descent, worked at Atelier 17 from 1944 to 1945 while on a Guggenheim fellowship. The youngest of nine children, she resisted her parents and pursued artistic studies at the University of Chile’s School of Fine Arts with the sculptor Lorenzo Domínguez, for whom she served as an assistant after her graduation in 1934.45For additional biographical information, see Gloria Garafulich-Grabois, Lily Garafulic: A Centenary Celebration (Washington, D.C.: Garafulic Family and Directorate of Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chile, 2014). In 1938 Garafulic traveled within Europe and met Constantin Brancusi, whose sculpture greatly influenced her thinking. After returning to Chile she began teaching but wanted to hone her understanding of three-dimensional forms. With a Guggenheim grant awarded in 1944, she arrived in New York planning to learn direct carving with José de Creeft at the Art Students League, but decided to pursue training elsewhere. She, like many sculptors, was attracted to Atelier 17 because of Hayter’s intense focus on understanding engraving’s relationship to volume and space. She worked intensely at Atelier 17 for approximately three months, recalling that the workshop was only a short distance from her apartment on Fourth Street.46Thank you to the artist’s niece, Gloria Garafulich-Grabois, for sharing her documentary about her aunt, Lily Garafulic—In Her Own Words (2014). The quoted text was translated by Garafulich-Grabois. Garafulic participated in Atelier 17’s group exhibition at Willard Gallery with Cellista (1945), an etching and aquatint. She remained active as a printmaker in Chile, making close to 350 prints and using the lessons of Atelier 17 to teach her own students about thinking in three dimensions. She is well known in Chile for her massive sculptures executed in wood, marble, terra-cotta, and bronze and especially the cycle of Prophets she carved for the exterior of the Basilica of Lourdes in Santiago, designed by her brother, the architect Andrés Garafulic.

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Jan Gelb, Night Wind, 1947. Etching (printed in relief), third state, plate: 10 × 12 in. (25.4 × 30.5 cm); sheet: 12 × 15⅝ in. (30.5 × 39.7 cm). Syracuse University Art Collection, New York. Gift of Ms. Jan Gelb (Mrs. Boris Margo).

Jan Gelb (1906–1978)
Jeannette Gelb was the oldest of Louis and Sarah Gelb’s five children. Although the Gelbs lived initially in Manhattan, the family settled in West Haven, Connecticut, where Louis was a door-to-door salesman. Jan Gelb attended the School of Art at Yale University, graduating in 1927. She moved to New York to continue art studies at the Art Students League while supporting herself as a public-school teacher. Although she took painting and life class, she developed a primary focus on etching with Eugene Fitsch and George Picken.47Gelb’s school records are in JG/BM, unmicrofilmed “business correspondence.” Her prints from the 1930s represent cityscapes, portraits, and scenes of laborers, and by the 1940s her style became deeply influenced by surrealism and dream imagery.48Jan Gelb and August Freundlich, Jan Gelb: Her Voice (Syracuse: Syracuse University Lubin House, 1972). Gelb donated a nearly complete collection of her prints to the Syracuse University Art Galleries. Gelb was always intellectually curious and developed a particular interest in psychoanalysis, the profession of her youngest brother, Lester. She produced a series of dream-inspired etchings, printed in relief with black ink, while working at Atelier 17 in the late 1940s.49Irvin Haas, “The Print Collector,” Art News 46, no. 6 (August 1947): 8; “Legends by Gelb,” Art Digest 22 (May 1, 1948): 11. Gelb’s mature prints, made from the 1950s until the early 1970s, are fully abstract but still closely linked to nature and particularly her favorite place, the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Boris Margo, maintained a beach shack. Likely through the influence of Margo, creator of the cellocut, she devised new methods for achieving textural effects on these abstract intaglio plates including spraying them with lacquer from aerosol cans or scratching them with granular materials such as sugar or carborundum.50“Statement for Lois Tracy to insert or excerpt from in her forthcoming book,” JG/BM, reel 998:375. Gelb exhibited her paintings and prints often and had solo shows at galleries such as Delphic Studios (1940), Weyhe Gallery (1948, 1950), and Ruth White Gallery (several between 1957 and her death).

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Description: Battle against Death by Haass, Terry

Terry Haass, Battle against Death, ca. 1948–49. Engraving, plate: 13 15/16 × 16¾ in. (35.4 × 42.6 cm); sheet: 18⅜ × 22 5/16 in. (46.6 × 56.7 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand Scharf, 1987 (1987.1030.2).

Terry Haass (1923–2016)
Terezie Goldmannová was born in 1923 in Český Těšín, Czechoslovakia, a region dominated by Germanic influences. In the wave of growing anti-Semitism, ethnically German classmates terrorized Goldmannová for her Jewish ancestry, forcing her to leave the school she had been attending.51Ferdinand and Emily Scharf, Haass’s half-brother and his wife, kindly shared their memories of Haass on April 12, 2017. With her mother and half brother, she fled Czechoslovakia in 1938. By way of Switzerland, they settled in Paris, where she took fashion and art courses at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with a teacher she referred to as “Madame Zucker.”52“Madame Zucker” might be Nina Wohlman Zucker, who was married to artist Jacques Zucker. The Nazi invasion of Paris cut short this relative period of calm, and the family fled to the South of France. Eventually, they were smuggled through Andorra to Portugal and secured passage to New York in April 1941. Soon thereafter she married Walter Haass, a German refugee and fellow lodger in the Upper West Side building where she lived with her family.53Walter Haass had fled Germany because of political persecution—his father was a socialist—and served in the Office of Strategic Services. For reference to Haass’s service, see Joseph E. Persico, Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents during World War II (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 118–19, 219–21, 223, 285. She used “Terry Haass” as her professional name, despite divorcing in the early 1950s. Between 1941 and 1944 she registered for many classes at the Art Students League and focused on printmaking study with Will Barnet and Harry Sternberg.54Haass’s student record card at the Art Students League is alphabetized under “Teresa Goldman.” See ASL. She also made many friends there, including Robert Blackburn and Helen DeMott. She worked at Atelier 17 beginning in 1947 and excelled in creating sculptural depth by soldering wire to her plates’ surfaces or removing geometric pieces from them. Her innovative Atelier 17 prints earned her solo exhibitions at Wittenborn and Company in 1951 and at the Smithsonian Institution in 1952.55Terry Haass, Special Exhibition, November 2–December 7, 1952, SEF. She participated in many graphics shows during this period and was included in two Atelier 17 shows: Laurel Gallery (1949) and Grace Borgenicht Gallery (1951). She briefly co-directed Atelier 17 in spring and summer of 1951 with Harry Hoehn. In the early 1950s she earned a Harriet Hale Woolley scholarship for study in Paris, where she took classes in archeology at the École du Louvre and worked at Atelier Lacourière-Frélaut, a printmaking establishment.56Online biographies for Haass state she won a Fulbright grant as well, but no record of this award exists in the Fulbright databases. After frequent travel between New York and Paris, she permanently settled in France and acquired citizenship in 1963. From the 1960s onward, her work—still mostly graphics but with the addition of sculpture in stainless steel, wood, and Plexiglas—focused on time and space, influenced heavily by science and Albert Einstein’s theories.57For more on her prints, see Ole Henrik Moe et al., Terry Haass: Graphisches Werk = L’œuvre Graphique = The Graphic Work (Bochum: Peter Spielmann, 1997). The Olomouc Museum of Art in Olomouc, Czech Republic, received over seventy sculptures by Haass in October 2016. Extensive travel for archeological excavations in Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, and Afghanistan also influenced her art.

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Description: The Table–Study No. 5 by Hillsmith, Fannie

Fannie Hillsmith, The Table–Study No. 5, 1947. Etching and aquatint, plate: 10¾ × 14⅞ in. (27.3 × 37.8 cm); sheet: 13 × 20 1/16 in. (33.1 × 51 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Gift of Reba and Dave Williams, 2008.115.2495.

Fannie Hillsmith (1911–2007)
Fannie Hillsmith was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended four years at the Boston Museum School, following in the footsteps of her grandfather Frank Hillsmith, a respected artist in the area.58Additional biographical details in Doris A. Birmingham, “The Art of Fannie Hillsmith,” in Fannie Hillsmith, ed. Robert Doty (Manchester, N.H.: Currier Gallery of Art, 1987). Seeking greater exposure to modernism, she earned a coveted out-of-town scholarship to the Art Students League and studied with Alexander Brook, William Zorach, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and John Sloan during the 1934–35 academic year. Hillsmith’s career accelerated in the early 1940s as she exhibited her cubist-inspired canvases and earned positive reviews from critics such as Clement Greenberg. Norlyst Gallery hosted her first solo exhibition in 1943, which propelled her inclusion in important group exhibitions, such as the Spring Salon for Young Artists (1943–44) and The Women (1945), both at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, and Sidney Janis’s Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (1944). Through her affiliation with Charles Egan Gallery, Hillsmith received an invitation from Josef Albers, a fellow Egan artist, to teach at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1945.59Hillsmith noted that many of her students at Black Mountain were teachers looking for summer refresher courses. Margaret Balzer, then a teacher at Berea College, overlapped with Hillsmith (Hillsmith’s dates were July 2–August 4 and Balzer’s were July 9–August 19). Balzer did not take classes with Hillsmith, but they likely socialized together, and interestingly both started at Atelier 17 not long after leaving Black Mountain. Black Mountain College Papers, Western Regional Archives State Archives of North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Asheville; James Thompson, Black Mountain College Dossiers: Fannie Hillsmith (Asheville: Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, 1996), 16–17. Soon after her return to New York, she became a member of Atelier 17, working there from approximately 1946 until 1950. In addition to forming close friendships with Harriet Berger Nurkse and Alicia Legg, she valued the opportunity to work side-by-side with established European artists at the workshop’s communal tables. Prints such as The Table–Study No. 5 (1947) offer some of the best examples of her mature style, which interpreted personally significant Victorian-era domestic settings through the language of cubist structure. She showed with Atelier 17 on numerous occasions and exhibited her prints independently at venues such as the Brooklyn Museum and Philadelphia Print Club. Hillsmith continued to paint and exhibit throughout her lifetime, and her work is represented in many major public collections.

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Lotte Jacobi, Untitled, ca. 1951. Copper engraving, plate: 7 × 5 in. (17.8 × 12.7 cm); sheet: 13 × 10 in. (33 × 25.4 cm). Milne Special Collections and Archives Department, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham.

Lotte Jacobi (1898–1990)
The much-noted photographer Lotte Jacobi was involved with Atelier 17 during two distinct moments when the studio was in New York. Jacobi, born in West Prussia (now Poland), had a robust career as a portrait photographer in her family’s Berlin studio before immigrating to the United States in 1935. She first visited Atelier 17 around 1946 with her husband, Erich Reiss, when he was in ill health and seeking a stress-free hobby. Leo Katz, who had joined Atelier 17 in 1944, worked with Jacobi and Reiss on “photogenics.” For these camera-less photographs, Jacobi and Reiss shone a flashlight onto photosensitive paper, producing abstract effects.60Jacobi first exhibited her photogenics at Norlyst Gallery in 1948, and Leo Katz wrote the introductory text to the catalogue. Jacobi evolved her process and eventually passed light over glass or twisted pieces of cellophane. Peter Moriarty, Lotte Jacobi: Photographs (Boston: David R. Godine, 2003), 50–52. After Reiss’s death in 1951, Jacobi returned to Atelier 17 at the urging of Katz, who wanted to alleviate her mourning.61Kelly Wise, Lotte Jacobi (Danbury, Conn.: Addison House, 1978), 12. She made a handful of copper-plate engravings, which are preserved in her papers at the University of New Hampshire.62See thirty-five preserved engravings in Series XII: Miscellaneous, box 63, Lotte Jacobi Papers, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham. None of the engravings are signed or dated, so it is impossible to say definitively when they were made. Jacobi apparently worked in intaglio into the 1960s, one of which is illustrated in Wise, Lotte Jacobi, 13. Her name does not appear in the Grippe ledger, which likely means she was not officially a student in the 1952–54 period, but visited socially. All are abstract and appear to be test plates, in which she experimented with techniques and methods of inking. She continued to visit Atelier 17 throughout the early 1950s, and she offered some studio members shows at her newly opened gallery space at 46 West Fifty-Second Street. Louise Nevelson, for example, exhibited her innovative Atelier 17 prints for the first time in January 1954 at Lotte Jacobi Gallery, and Jacobi also hosted a group show of Atelier 17 engravers in late 1954. Jacobi remained friendly with Stanley William Hayter, visiting the Paris workshop in 1963 and taking his portrait in 1973.63Stanley William Hayter to Helen Phillips, 17 April [1963], HPP.

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Description: Heavy Bird by Zegart, Mar Jean Kettunen

Mar Jean Kettunen Zegart, Heavy Bird, 1950. Engraving, 17⅞ × 19⅜ in. (45.4 × 49.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, New York. Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 50.25.

Margaret Jean Kettunen Zegart (born 1926)
Raised in East Lansing, Michigan, Margaret Jean (or Mar Jean) Kettunen was slated to become a home economics teacher but shifted course and moved to New York, where she took a job as assistant to Glamour’s art editor. Hearing about Atelier 17 through a colleague at Condé Nast, Kett—as she became known professionally—attended Hayter’s classes in the evenings and became a masterful engraver. She won a purchase prize at the 1950 Brooklyn print annual for Heavy Bird and showed in the museum’s next four annuals. Heavy Bird, a relatively large plate for this period, features biomorphic shapes carefully filled with intricately engraved and etched textures. She earned the respect of Hayter, whose terse statement “she is good” counts as rare enthusiasm by the standards of his prose.64Stanley William Hayter to Peter Grippe, 3 October 1952, AAM/GC. She was the only woman included in a small show of Atelier 17 engravings held at the Lotte Jacobi Gallery in late 1954, surrounded by the men who dominated the field of engraving: Hayter, Joseph Hecht, Roger Vieillard, Pierre Courtin, Leo Katz, and Gabor Peterdi.65Exhibition announcement in Series XIII: Oversized Material, oversize box 3, Lotte Jacobi Papers, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham. Like so many married women of her generation, however, Kett faded from professional prominence because of family commitments and economic necessity. She moved to Northern California in 1953 and married in 1954. Although she continued to work as a printmaker, she concentrated for some period on raising four children and teaching art at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley. Kett worked as a printmaker into her eighties and produced about two hundred plates.

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Description: Untitled portrait by Leaf, Ruth

Ruth Leaf, Untitled portrait, ca. 1945. Etching and aquatint, plate: 6⅞ × 4 15/16 in. (17.5 × 12.5 cm). Private collection, New York.

Ruth Leaf (1923–2015)
Ruth Leaf was born and raised in Brighton Beach, New York. At nineteen, she enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, a decision her parents—both immigrants from Russia—had mixed feelings about, given the profession’s economic challenges. At the League, she honed her practice in the graphic arts by studying with Harry Sternberg, for whom she served as a studio monitor. In the early 1940s Leaf married Hersch Lerner; Sternberg was unsupportive of Leaf’s decision to start a family (the couple had two daughters, born in 1943 and 1947). Given Sternberg’s attitude, she decided to pursue further studies in printmaking elsewhere and became a member of Atelier 17 around 1945–46. She worked during the day while her mother watched her young daughter, later recalling that the studio was a bustling hub of activity and reporting that she learned a tremendous amount through both direct instruction from Hayter and collaboration with others.66Ruth Leaf, interview by Christina Weyl, September 7, 2011. She showed with Atelier 17 twice at the Leicester Galleries (1947) and Laurel Gallery (1949) and exhibited in other national print competitions. During the 1950s her prints were expressionistic woodcuts that featured jazz musicians—she frequented the city’s jazz clubs—and the amusement parks and beaches of Coney Island, near where she had grown up.67Artist file, Williams Collection Research Files, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In the late 1960s she founded the Ruth Leaf Studio in Douglaston, Queens, which she operated until the 1990s. Classes were structured around three primary exercises: aquatint, soft ground etching, and color viscosity printing, which Hayter had been developing during Leaf’s time at Atelier 17 (in fact, Leaf’s students called their viscosity prints “Hayters”). Success in a student’s first plate was key to Leaf’s approach, and she made sure to instruct about even the smallest details, such as the necessity of removing grease from the plate surface before applying grounds, as reflected in her comprehensive 1976 printmaking manual.68Ruth Leaf, Intaglio Printmaking Techniques (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1976). Leaf practiced printmaking well into her eighties, even after her relocation to Venice, California, and reserved several hours per day for studio time. Her prints from the 2000s were mostly abstract and vibrantly colored.

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Alicia Bell Legg, Plant, ca. 1947. Engraving, plate: 11 × 6⅞ in. (27.9 × 17.5 cm); sheet: 14⅞ × 10⅞ in. (37.8 × 27.6 cm). Dolan/Maxwell, Philadelphia.

Alicia Bell Legg (1915–2002)
Alicia Bell Legg was born into a well-to-do family in Hackensack, New Jersey. Her father was a stockbroker who died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1929 (luckily, the family was not affected by the stock market crash).69Much of the information for this biography comes from Legg’s oral history interview by Sharon Zane, June 5 and October 17, 1991, MoMA Archives, New York. She attended the Ogontz School for Girls, an elite finishing school for young women in Philadelphia, and there began to learn the basics of art history by perusing the wares a bookseller brought to the school at lunchtime.70Penn State University purchased the Ogontz School’s campus in 1950. Thank you to Lillian A. Hansberry of Penn State Abington Library for confirming Legg’s enrollment and searching through school yearbooks. Legg had been interested in art from an early age—in her youth, she took art lessons from a local artist in Hackensack—and she went to the Art Students League after graduating from Ogontz in 1935. While working full-time as a secretary, she studied in life classes led by Peggy Bacon, George Bridgman, and Robert Brackman, and she shifted to printmaking at the League with Harry Sternberg and Will Barnet. Harriet Berger, a good friend of Legg’s—their mothers were neighbors and friends in New Jersey—was also enrolled in Sternberg’s and Barnet’s graphic arts classes. Prints by Legg found in Berger’s estate show she was adept in intaglio and woodblock printmaking. In approximately 1946 Legg went to Atelier 17 along with Berger and another friend, Fannie Hillsmith. There, Legg engraved a still life of a pothos plant, attempting several different types of engraved lines. Although Legg exhibited her work in a few group shows, she realized she needed to pursue another career path. In 1949 she joined the staff of MoMA and rose from the library to a full curatorship. She was also responsible for designing the museum’s garden in 1953.71Fran Schumer, “A Curator, Her Garden and Her Art,” New York Times, June 10, 1987. Legg retired from the museum in 1987.

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Description: Untitled by Martinelli, Sheri

Sheri Martinelli, Untitled print from 15 Original Etchings and Serigraphs, 1946. Soft ground etching, plate: 5⅞ × 4 in. (14.9 × 10.1 cm); sheet: 6 7/16 × 4⅜ in. (16.4 × 11.1 cm). Dolan/Maxwell, Philadelphia.

Sheri Martinelli (1918–1996)
Shirley Brennan was born in Philadelphia but grew up in Wildwood, New Jersey. Having changed her first name to Sherry, she moved back to Philadelphia by the late 1930s to attend the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now University of the Arts), studying ceramics under John Butler. Either in Philadelphia or on the Jersey Shore, she met the painter and printmaker Ezio Martinelli (1913–1981), whom she married. Together, the couple briefly attended classes at the Barnes Foundation in fall 1940, but withdrew due to the financial strain of commuting to Merion from Atlantic City, where they lived with his parents.72Correspondence from Azio Martinelli (note variant spelling), Sherry Brennan/Sherry Martinelli, 1940 and 1946, Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspondence, Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, Pa. One daughter, Shelley, was born in 1942, and the Martinellis divorced sometime before the spring of 1945.73Shelley’s birth year is often incorrectly given as 1943. Ezio remarried Marion R. Wilson in September 1945. Sheri Martinelli, the name she used professionally (note the altered spelling of her first name), moved to New York by December 1945.74Anaïs Nin mentions Martinelli in her diary, which helps date her movements. Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, vol. 4, 1944–1947 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1972), 107–8. It was around this time that Ezio and Sheri came in contact with Stanley William Hayter—though totally independently and in different cities. With Hayter and Will Barnet, Ezio co-taught the Philadelphia Print Club’s Wednesday evening working group, which launched in 1945. Sheri began taking classes at Atelier 17’s studio in New York. In January 1946 she had five totally abstract soft ground etchings included in the portfolio 15 Original Etchings and Serigraphs, published by Joseph Luyber Gallery, along with artists Frank K. Bacher and Judith Rothschild.75Josephine Gibbs, “A Modern Portfolio,” Art Digest 21, no. 6 (December 15, 1946): 11. She kept a printing press in her apartment, and a collection of prints and plates in her papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Library suggests she produced many experimental prints.76The prints are in boxes 27 and 29, Sheri Martinelli Papers, YCAL MSS 868, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. Thanks to Lisa Hodermarsky, Yale University Art Gallery, and research assistant Evelyn Davis for accessing these prints on my behalf. Martinelli remained deeply engaged with the literary avant-garde, becoming Ezra Pound’s companion during his incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and serving as muse to countless other poets and writers.77Several poets’ collections at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library contain mention of Martinelli. See also Steven Moore, “Sheri Martinelli: A Modernist Muse,” Gargoyle Magazine, no. 41 (June 5, 1998).

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Description: Impossible from Maria by Martins, Maria

Maria Martins, Impossible (plate, folio 6) from Maria, 1946. Soft ground etching, aquatint, and engraving, plate (irreg.): 6⅞ × 5⅞ in. (17.5 × 14.9 cm); sheet: 13⅛ × 10 3/16 in. (33.3 × 25.8 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Maria Martins (1894–1973)
Maria Martins, or Maria as she preferred to be known professionally, was born in Campanha, Brazil.78Francis M. Naumann, Maria: The Surrealist Sculpture of Maria Martins (New York: André Emmerich Gallery, 1998). At twenty-one she married Octávio Tarquínio de Souza, a Brazilian historian and intellectual, but the couple separated in 1925. Soon after Maria married Carlos Martins Pereira e Souza, a career diplomat. During the first fifteen years of their marriage, the couple traveled extensively for his postings to Ecuador, France, the Netherlands, Japan, and Belgium, where Maria began her artistic studies at the age of forty with the sculptor Oscar Jespers. Maria worked prodigiously once she relocated to Washington, D.C., where Carlos served as Brazilian ambassador to the United States. She had her first solo show of sculptures at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in October 1941, which received positive reviews. That winter, Maria rented an apartment in New York, where she continued to produce innovative sculptures. Her work initially dealt with themes of religion and folklore from her native Brazil, but she shifted to surrealism after meeting André Breton, who admired her exhibition at Valentine Gallery in 1942. Through contact with the greater surrealist circle living in New York, she likely learned of Atelier 17.79It was during this time that Maria began an affair with Marcel Duchamp and modeled for his last major work, Étant donnés (1946–66). Duchamp’s letters to Maria were published in Michael R. Taylor and P. Andrew Lins, Marcel Duchamp: Étant Donnés (Philadelphia: PMA, 2009). Although Maria’s student work from Atelier 17 is unknown, she independently produced a portfolio in conjunction with her third and final show with Valentine Gallery in 1946, which demonstrates mastery of intaglio printmaking. Alongside Maria’s four-page, handwritten poem, the portfolio included engraved and etched translations of the sculptures from this 1946 show, some of which became her most critically acclaimed works. After another quick move to Paris in 1948, Maria continued to make sculpture upon the couple’s permanent return to Brazil in 1949.

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Description: Turning Forms by Morgan, Norma

Norma Morgan, Turning Forms, 1950. Color engraving and aquatint on wove paper, plate: 6 × 3¾ in. (15.2 × 9.5 cm); sheet: 9 × 5⅞ in. (22.9 × 14.9 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 2010.134.1.

Norma Morgan (born 1928)
Norma Morgan was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduating from high school, she attended the Art Students League and also took classes with Hans Hofmann. Around 1950 she became a member of Atelier 17 and is the only known female African American member. Her engraving Turning Forms shows the studio’s impact on her style and technique. Dense and deeply engraved lines fill the abstract composition, which is punctuated by areas of scorper relief and highlights from red and yellow stencil. Morgan specialized in the graphic arts throughout her career and had a particular affinity for engraving, which she explained in an interview for the members’ newsletter of the Society of American Graphic Artists (SAGA): “I always painted slowly, so engraving seemed like a solution for me. I engrave from my sketches and my imagination. My work has always been a combination of both sources. You have to be patient to engrave. My fingers got sore.” Morgan participated in Atelier 17’s exhibitions at Grace Borgenicht Gallery (1951) and Peretz Johnnes Gallery (1952). A year after joining Atelier 17, she won a one-year fellowship from the John Hay Whitney Foundation for study abroad in England and Scotland. Prints made during this fellowship period and just afterward represent a major shift in her style. Instead of abstraction, she now concentrated on landscape and representing the moors of the Scottish Highlands. Morgan managed to fill these plates with an enormous variety of textures and tonal variation. In the same SAGA interview, she explained, “Engraving is appropriate for doing rocks, cliffs and trees . . . I am especially attracted by erosion and objects affected by it.”80E. Exler, “Norma Morgan: Romanticism and Printmaking,” Sagaletter (Autumn 1990): 5. Morgan wanted her art to speak to all audiences, and her focus on landscape and natural subject matter was part of an effort to appeal broadly.81Nico Slate, The Prism of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 129–30. Morgan exhibited her work extensively, and she received a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in 1962.82Basic biographical information is compiled in Ten Negro Artists from the United States: First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar, Senegal: October House, 1966). Eventually, Morgan maintained a studio in New York’s Catskills region, where she continued to practice and care for her elderly mother.83Pamela Conacher, “The Highlands in New York City,” April 21, 2009, http://northings.com.

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Description: Crystalline Head by Morrison, Jean

Jean Morrison, Crystalline Head, 1947. Engraving, plate: 6⅞ × 5½ in. (17.5 × 14 cm); sheet: 11⅝ × 9¼ in. (29.5 × 23.5 cm). Dolan/Maxwell, Philadelphia.

Jean Morrison Becker (1917–1995)
Born in Cranford, New Jersey, Jean Morrison matriculated to Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied the performing and visual arts between 1935 and 1938.84Published biographies and even Morrison’s own CV inaccurately date her attendance at Sarah Lawrence to 1938–41. The registrar’s records show she enrolled from September 1935 to May 1938, earning a two-year degree in 1937 and staying on for 1937–38 as a “special student.” Kurt Roesch was her most influential professor, teaching her about the interplay between color and line to the exclusion of subject matter.85Grace Glueck, “Jean Morrison Becker, 1917–1994,” Massachusetts Review 45, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 665–72. Roesch became a member of Atelier 17 shortly after Morrison left Sarah Lawrence, and he advised other students to attend Atelier 17. After leaving Sarah Lawrence (she completed her bachelor’s degree in 1973), Morrison joined the New York arts scene, exhibiting at the Riverside Museum with the “Bombshell” group and organizing the “Heterous” group, which showed at the Pinacotheca Gallery. With the American entry into World War II, Morrison departed for Europe in 1943, volunteering for the American Red Cross. After VE Day, she spent time in Paris—pluckily visiting Gertrude Stein without an appointment and hoping for an introduction to Pablo Picasso—and also enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art.86Jean Morrison to Samuel Morrison, 14 December 1945, courtesy Carla Becker. Upon her return to the United States in February 1946, Morrison rented a studio space at 119th Street and Lexington Avenue, where Alice Trumbull Mason, another Atelier 17 member, had her studio. It was likely Mason or one of the building’s other studio renters—Carl Holty, André Racz, or Harry Hoehn—who encouraged Morrison to visit Atelier 17, which she did later in 1946.87According to Emily Mason Kahn, her mother’s studio was on the top of a garage that covered the entire block and was divided into three spaces. There, she used intaglio processes to expand her work in abstraction, and her prints combine human forms and architectonic structures. One such print was a linear portrait of Fred Becker, a fellow member whom she married in 1949 in St. Louis, where he had taken a job establishing the printmaking program at Washington University in St. Louis. Morrison only produced a handful of prints; painting and drawing were always her primary focus. She taught for many years in the continuing education division of Washington University. She and Becker moved in 1968 to Amherst, Massachusetts, and Morrison grew more involved with activism, working at the Everywoman’s Center (now the Center for Women and Community) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and becoming a member of the Amherst Public Art Commission.

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Description: Figure in Space by Phillips, Helen

Helen Phillips, Figure in Space, 1941. Engraving, plate: 6¾ × 5⅛ in. (15.2 × 13 cm); sheet: 11½ × 9⅛ in. (29.2 × 23.1 cm). Dolan/Maxwell, Philadelphia.

Helen Phillips (1913–1995)
Born in Fresno, California, Helen Phillips commenced art studies at the age of fifteen at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and enrolled there full-time in 1931, learning direct carving with Robert Stackpole. She had a banner year in 1936: she won a purchase prize from the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) for her stone sculpture Young Girl and received the Phelan Traveling Fellowship from the San Francisco Art Association, which provided $2,000 for travel abroad.88News of both awards earned coverage in local and national press: H. L. Dungan, “San Francisco Art Association’s 56th Annual Opens in S. F. Museum,” Oakland Tribune, February 2, 1936, 79; “She’ll Travel Now: Girl Sculptor Awarded Trip,” Oakland Tribune, June 3, 1936, 6; “S. F. Sculptress Wins $2,000 Trip Abroad,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 1936; “Montalvo’s Maecenas,” Time, June 15, 1936; and “Young Americans: Helen Phillips,” American Magazine of Art 29, no. 8 (August 1936): 532–33. She spent three years in Paris—summer 1936 until the outbreak of war in 1939—where she interacted with the surrealists, discovered Atelier 17, and met her future husband, Stanley William Hayter. Phillips was attracted to the sculptural qualities of engraving and liked that printmaking allowed her to experiment more quickly than sculpture.89Helen Phillips, interview by David Cohen, May 4, 1989, HPP. The experience of incising copper with the burin sharpened her understanding of positive and negative space and altered the way she dealt with sculptural volume. Of the roughly twenty-five plates she produced in Paris, many feature biomorphic forms and headless stick figures—a recurring form she described as “two joined wishbones” and which suggests motion and dance. While living in New York during the 1940s, Phillips maintained a studio in the family’s brownstone and exhibited her sculpture in important exhibitions, but she regretted not having more time to work regularly at Atelier 17.90Phillips remembered hosting New York studio members for coffee at her home on Waverly Place: “I knew much of what was happening in the workshop, although I hadn’t the time and baby-sitters necessary to work there regularly.” Helen Phillips to Fred [Becker], n.d., HPP. Among the more important sculpture shows were: The Women, Art of This Century (1944); Bloodflames, Hugo Gallery (1947); Sculpture annual, Whitney Museum of American Art (1948); and Artists: Man and Wife, Sidney Janis Gallery (1949). Her engraving Figure in Space (1941, alternately titled Figure in Box), which reflects her sculpture’s sinuous, twisting limbs, was exhibited in New Directions in Gravure at MoMA in 1944. Phillips earnestly resumed printmaking activity during the 1950s, once her family resettled in Paris, and produced many deeply carved plates printed using the workshop’s signature color viscosity process.91Many were exhibited in Prints by Stanley William Hayter and Helen Phillips (San Francisco: Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, 1956). Phillips and Hayter divorced in 1972, and she made sculpture well into the 1970s, but shifted to working in wire, plaster, and wax after a severe back injury hampered her in the late 1960s.

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Description: Ecstatic Dance by Phillips, Patricia

Patricia Phillips, Ecstatic Dance, 1946. Engraving and aquatint, plate: 11⅝ × 8 11/16 in. (29.5 × 22 cm); sheet: 11 15/16 × 13 in. (46.5 × 33 cm). Collection of Carla Esposito, Rome.

Patricia Phillips (1916–1946)
Patricia Phillips was born in New York and attended Atelier 17 in 1945 and 1946, when it was affiliated with the New School for Social Research. Between 1933 and 1937 Phillips was enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with Kurt Roesch.92Dates of attendance confirmed with the Registrar’s Office, Sarah Lawrence College. They conflict with the dates given in the only comprehensive source about Phillips’s life and work: Patricia Phillips: 1915–1946 (New York: Pinacotheca, 1947). Roesch, who was an Atelier 17 member himself, made similar introductions for other students from Sarah Lawrence to work at the studio. Based on a listing of known works compiled at the time of her death, Phillips made at least seven intaglio plates during her affiliation.93Patricia Phillips. One titled Ecstatic Dance, formerly in the collection of Stanley William Hayter, conveys her semi-abstract style and desire to communicate universal ideas and experiences in forms that would be understandable to viewers. During her short lifetime, Phillips received four solo shows—one at Bonestell Gallery (1941) and three at the Pinacotheca (1943, 1944, and 1945)—which received favorable reviews for her color-filled and emotionally charged canvases.

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Description: The Last Judgment by Schapiro, Miriam

Miriam Schapiro, The Last Judgment, 1950. Aquatint with etching and soft ground, plate: 16 5/16 × 19⅞ in. (41.4 × 50.5 cm). Saint Louis Art Museum. Gift of Henry V. Putzel (228:1950).

Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015)
Influential feminist artist Miriam Schapiro had early and important engagement with midcentury printmaking. Born in Toronto, Canada, but raised in Brooklyn, New York, she enrolled in 1943 in the art program at Hunter College and transferred after one year to the University of Iowa, where she earned several degrees (BA, 1945; MA, 1946; and MFA, 1949). Toward the end of her time at Iowa, Schapiro held an assistantship with Mauricio Lasansky, the Argentinean-born Atelier 17 alumnus who established Iowa’s printmaking program, and she helped to organize the Iowa Print Group. She actively entered her prints—mostly intaglio with a few woodcuts—into group shows during the late 1940s, exhibiting in the first, third, and fifth Brooklyn Museum print annuals, along with annuals in several other American cities. Prints also factored prominently in her first solo exhibition at Illinois Wesleyan University in 1951.94See group show chronology in Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 157. Notice of her solo exhibition can be found in “Art Exhibit Opens Sunday at Wesleyan,” Pantagraph, March 4, 1951, 6. Judy Brodsky, Schapiro’s friend and estate’s executor, shared images of many early prints found in the artist’s studio. When Schapiro and her husband, the artist Paul Brach, moved to New York in 1951, she briefly worked at Atelier 17.95Rachel Rosenthal remembered meeting Schapiro at Atelier 17. Rachel Rosenthal, oral history by Moira Roth, September 2, 1989, AAA/SI. The timing of Schapiro/Brach’s move to New York is given as either 1951 or 1952. The couple most likely moved in fall 1951, after Brach’s teaching appointment ended at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Complicating the timeline, however, a review of Schapiro’s solo exhibition at Illinois Wesleyan stated she had “studied printmaking under Mauricio Lasansky. Later, she continued study in this field in New York City under Stanley Hayter at his Atelier 17”; “Art Exhibit Opens Sunday at Wesleyan,” 6. Given that Schapiro had family in New York, it is possible she set out to New York before Brach. The apartment Brach and Schapiro rented at 51 West Tenth Street was only a short walk away from Atelier 17’s location on East Eighth Street. Interestingly, not much has been published about Schapiro’s early activity in printmaking, despite the fact that it clearly allowed her to build a network of similarly independent-minded women artists. She also continued to make prints throughout her career, including the beautiful Anonymous Was a Woman portfolio (see fig. 61).96Robert A. Yassin, Miriam Schapiro: Works on Paper. A Thirty Year Retrospective, ed. Paul Brach (Tucson, Ariz. : Tucson Museum of Art, 1998).

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Description: Luna Composition No. 3, City by Seidler, Doris

Doris Seidler, Luna Composition No. 3, City, 1952. Etching and aquatint, plate: 16¾ × 14 in. (42.5 × 35.6 cm); sheet: 22⅝ × 18 in. (57.5 × 45.7 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with the Thomas Skelton Harrison Fund, 1952 (1952–31–29).

Doris Seidler (1912–2010)
Born in London, England, Doris Falkoff was the oldest child of Jenny and Isadore Falkoff.97Susan Stedman, manager of Seidler’s estate, has facilitated access to important archival materials and the artist’s work. In 1935 she married Bernhard Seidler, a Jewish immigrant almost eighteen years her senior who had established himself as a fur trader. Two years later, in 1937, the couple welcomed the birth of their only child, David. Fearing the spread of the continental conflict to England, the Seidlers sailed for the United States in June 1940, shortly after the Battle of Dunkirk. The family tried living in England following the end of the war, but returned to the United States in 1947 and settled permanently in Great Neck, New York. Seidler, who had dabbled as an amateur artist, found her way to Atelier 17 in 1950 and remained affiliated with the studio until 1953. Her earliest intaglio prints combine the fractured planes of cubism with the dreamlike visions of surrealism. As she gained technical competence, she excelled at building layers of textures to produce abstractions, cityscapes, and “moonworlds,” the latter a particular fascination. The camaraderie among Atelier 17’s members and their shared sense of purpose served as great motivators for Seidler.98Lisa Weinberg Rabinowitz, “The Web of Experiences: Printmaking in the United States” (EdD diss., Columbia University Teachers College, 1977), 37. She formed friendships with Dorothy Dehner, Minna Citron, and Jan Gelb, among others, and participated in a loose network of printmakers based in the Great Neck area that included Dolly Perutz, Pauline Astor, and Agnes Karlin Mills. After Atelier 17, Seidler turned her attention to woodcuts. She very actively exhibited her prints during the 1950s and 1960s, including many group shows and her first solo show of prints at Wittenborn and Company in 1954.

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Description: On Such a Night by West, Pennerton

Pennerton West, On Such a Night, 1946. Etching, aquatint, and soft ground etching, printed in black (intaglio), sheet: 25 9/16 × 9½ in. (65 × 49.5 cm); plate: 17⅜ × 13 11/16 in. (44.2 × 34.7 cm). Baltimore Museum of Art. Gift of Désirée Hayter, Paris, 2013.44.

Pennerton West (1913–1965)
Pennerton West, a descendant of the American history painter Benjamin West, was born in New York. Not much is known about her early personal life, since both West and her husband, Dr. John Herma, a psychologist who studied human resources at Columbia University, died in their fifties and had no children.99An amusing syndicated newspaper article profiles the twenty-four-year-old West, who was then driving a taxi in New York and wrangling drunken passengers. Mary Margaret McBride, “Do Unexpected Thing,” Decatur Daily Review, August 23, 1935, 15. Her artistic training took place in the 1930s at the Art Students League, Cooper Union, and Hans Hofmann’s school. West came to Atelier 17 around 1946 and became proficient with the studio’s key techniques. In Hayter’s introduction to the studio’s show at Leicester Galleries in March 1947, he praised West for exploiting biting out, a technique in which areas of the plate are left unvarnished and exposed to strong acid bite.100“Exhibition of Atelier 17, Leicester Gallery,” Apollo 45 (April 1947): 9. The resulting effect was quite expressive and produced high, white relief markings on the printed sheet, as seen in On Such a Night (1946). During this period West also earned a name for herself as an abstract artist. Her first solo exhibition at the Norlyst Gallery in March 1947 included paintings, drawings, and Atelier 17 prints.101J. K. R., “Pennerton West Abstracts,” Art Digest 22 (October 15, 1947): 34; and “Pennerton West,” Art News 46 (November 1947): 58. Although the Norlyst show was not a resounding critical success, West received another solo show in September 1951 at the newly founded Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and critics praised her expressive painting style. As a result of this show, MoMA’s International Council purchased her impressive seven-print portfolio made at Atelier 17.102MoMA deaccessioned the portfolio in 2000 and donated it to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, New Brunswick, N.J., where it is the only known complete set in existence. At some point, West and Herma moved to a home near Mohegan Lake in Westchester County, New York, where her family owned property. West remained close with a few Atelier 17 colleagues, especially Worden Day, whom she let work in a barn on her property and store several large tree logs that Day used for her mandala prints.103Worden Day to Una Johnson, 2 August 1959, BMK-DPDP. West also offered her barn to the young artist Paul Resika, who grew up in nearby Mohegan Lake. Before her death in 1965, West had a few additional solo shows at Tibor de Nagy (1953), Condon Riley (1958), and Willard-Lucien Gallery (1960).

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Description: Wind, Bird, and Other Northern Fauna by Wienholt, Anne

Anne Wienholt, Wind, Bird, and Other Northern Fauna, 1948. Etching and aquatint, 9¾ × 17⅞ in. (24.8 × 45.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, New York. Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 50.35.

Anne Wienholt (1920–2018)
Born in Leura, Australia, Wienholt received her earliest art training with William Dobell at the East Sydney Technical College (also Margaret Cilento’s alma mater) between 1938 and 1941.104The best source of information about Wienholt is in Savage, “Atelier 17 and Australian Women Artists.” After graduation, she developed a unique expressive style of portraiture and figure painting that won critical notice. Wienholt exhibited widely, having her first solo show in 1942 at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney, and wrote and illustrated stories for several Australian magazines and newspapers. She lived for some time at Merioola, a bohemian artists’ colony located in Woollahra, and in 1945 she won the New South Wales Traveling Art Scholarship, which provided a generous three-year stipend. Arriving in New York in January, she enrolled in Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s life class at the Art Students League and learned of Hayter’s downtown workshop, which she joined shortly after VE Day. Wienholt’s prints garnered critical praise: she was included in the Brooklyn Museum’s National Print Annual Exhibition in 1948, and later won purchase prizes at Brooklyn for Rock Pippit and Wind, Bird, and Other Northern Fauna in 1949 and 1950, respectively.105She received positive press coverage at home, too. Sydney Ure Smith, “Recent Prints by Anne Wienholt,” in Art and Design (Sydney: Ure Smith Pty., 1949), 20–21. In the latter, a semi-abstract bird rises powerfully from a mountainous landscape, surrounded by other bird-like forms. Influenced by both Hayter and Rufino Tamayo, another of her teachers in New York, she remained committed to figurative abstraction. While in New York, she had a solo show of paintings at the Carl Ashby Gallery (1948). Wienholt married the Japanese cabinetmaker Masato Takashige, and the couple settled in Marin County, California, where she practiced painting and sculpture.

1 Thomasin Countey kindly shared information about her mother’s career. »

2 See SEF for biographical information about Aronson. “Aronsohn” appears to have been the original spelling of the artist’s surname, but she used the Anglicized “Aronson” or, later, “Anderson” while living in the United States. »

3 Aronson exhibited a gouache and ink drawing of a costume design in MoMA’s fifteenth anniversary exhibition, Art in Progress (1944). »

4 Mary Jane Moore, “She Puts Circus Life on Canvas,” Long Island Daily Press, April 17, 1953. »

5 Dore Ashton, “Irene Aronson,” Art Digest 26 (September 1952): 22; and Irvin Haas, “The Print Collector,” Art News 49 (May 1950): 13. »

6 The artist’s daughter, Esha Neogy, was helpful in filling in many biographical details. Thank you also to Chessa Nilssen and Peri Swaniger for their genealogical assistance. »

7 Three examples of her jewelry can be found in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt, New York. »

8 Lyonel Feininger to Josef Albers, 17 September 1945, Summer Institute 1945, Margaret Balzer application file, Black Mountain College Papers, Western Regional Archives State Archives of North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Asheville. »

9 Quoted in Janice Carter Larson, Painting the Halls of Heaven: Life and Works of Margaret Balzer Cantieni (Bethlehem, Pa.: Payne Gallery of Moravian College, 2004). »

10 Thank you to Dennis Nurkse for speaking with me about his mother’s career. »

11 For Bishop’s engravings, see entries 7A, 12A, 30, 33, and 44 in Susan Teller and Alan Hyman, Isabel Bishop: Etchings, Engravings and Aquatints. A Catalogue Raisonné, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Art, 2000). »

12 Quoted in Martica Sawin, Nell Blaine: Her Art and Life (New York: Hudson Hills, 1998), 18. »

13 Blaine had some previous printmaking experience through Will Barnet’s Saturday etching classes at the Art Students League, which she attended just after arriving in New York. See ASL. »

14 Carolyn Harris, Nell Blaine’s partner, explained Blaine’s participation at Atelier 17 in a series of letters to David Acton, then serving as curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photography at the Worcester Art Museum. These letters, dated between July 1997 and May 2001, are in the Worcester Art Museum’s files. »

15 A. R., “Grace Borgenicht,” Art News 49 (March 1950): 50. Lois Borgenicht recalled her mother had self-doubt about working in watercolors and being labeled a “lady watercolorist.” Lois Borgenicht, telephone conversation with Christina Weyl, February 2, 2017. »

16 Margaret Blagg, Beyond the Circle: Cynthia Brants (Albany, Tex.: Old Jail Art Center, 2007), 5. »

17 For more on Brants’s work as a printmaker, see Mark L. Smith, Off the Edge: The Experimental Prints of Cynthia Brants (Austin: Flatbed Galleries, 2009). »

18 The most complete record of Cilento’s career can be found in Jude Savage, “Atelier 17 and Australian Women Artists in New York: Margaret Cilento at Home and Abroad, 1946–1965” (MA thesis, Australian National University, 1995). »

19 Geoff Maslen to Christina Weyl, 24 January 2018. »

20 In résumés, Cyril said she studied with Vytlacil at the Art Students League, but there is no official record of her enrollment. Her student record card (filed under “Goldfarb”) lists one summer course in 1939 with Nathaniel Dirk; see ASL. »

21 In applications to the Guggenheim Foundation, Cyril listed many jewelry design jobs for Tiffany and Co., Trabert and Hoeffer, Charles Valliant Inc., and others. Guggenheim Foundation archives, New York. »

22 She never married, and thus it is unclear where “Cyril” came from. Anti-Semitism may have been at play. It appears that Cyril’s parents adopted the surname as well. In her 1960 application for a Guggenheim grant, Cyril indicated her next of kin were Charles and Esther Cyril; Guggenheim Foundation archives, New York. »

23 Fred Becker, recommendation letter for Cyril’s 1953 application for a Guggenheim fellowship. Guggenheim Foundation archives, New York. »

24 For more information on La Guilde Internationale de la Gravure, see entries L.1110b and L.4670 in Frits Lugt, Les Marques de Collections de Dessins et d’Estampes, www.marquesdecollections.fr. »

25 Cyril continued to market this exhibition into the 1960s. »

26 The file for Ruth Cyril in SEF provides a major resource of career information. »

27 Stanley William Hayter to Helen Phillips, “Friday” [no date, likely mid-1940s], says: “Castelli promoting with who would you think . . . your young friend Cyril,” HPP. Leo Castelli Gallery Records, AAA/SI, also has a smattering of information about Cyril (box 44, folder 17 and box 106, folder 18). »

28 Cyril’s life dates are often given as 1938 to 1988, based on another person named Ruth Cyril. »

29 The Sari Dienes Foundation, Pomona, N.Y., is an excellent source of information about the artist’s career and work. Thank you to Barbara Pollitt and Rip Hayman for sharing memories of Dienes. »

30 Dienes’s 1952 application to the artists’ colony Yaddo provides a fairly complete record of her education, exhibition, and other professional activity. Courtesy of the Sari Dienes Foundation, Pomona, N.Y. »

31 In discussing her frottage work, Dienes said, “My work in graphics was of great help to me.” Sari Dienes and M. C. Richards, “Sari Dienes: Unconventional Use of Print Techniques,” Craft Horizons 16, no. 2 (March 1956): 36. »

32 Thanks to Mathea Rubin for speaking with me about her mother’s life and career. »

33 It is unclear who taught her how to etch. Victoria Hudson Huntley was an accomplished lithographer. »

34 Stanley William Hayter, Engravings of Christine Engler (Memphis: Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, 1957). »

35 Unfortunately, SAIC’s archives do not hold student records dating back to this era. »

36 Francine Felsenthal, “Department of Interesting Letters,” Serigraph Quarterly 2, no. 1 (February 1947): 2. Hayter’s article appeared in the previous issue: Stanley William Hayter, “The Silk Screen,” Serigraph Quarterly 1, no. 4 (November 1946): 1. »

37 Titles on Phillips’s list include Beachcomber (1949), Boatyard (1952), and Bather (1952). See untitled and undated list, HPP. The National Serigraph Society published several of Felsenthal’s screen prints, all completed in 1946: A Lonesome George, Observing Person, and Portrait of John Scott. »

38 Francine Felsenthal to Ellen Lanyon and Roland Ginzel, 3 July 1969, 8 February 1970, 4 April 1970, reel 1234:218–28, Ellen Lanyon Papers, AAA/SI. »

39 Joellen Bard, Tenth Street Days: The Co-Ops of the 50’s (New York: Education, Art and Service, 1977), 32–33. »

40 For more on Fine’s life and career, see Kathleen L. Housley, Tranquil Power: The Art and Life of Perle Fine (New York: Midmarch Arts, 2005). »

41 Several of Fine’s Atelier 17 prints are reproduced in Wide to the Wind: Works on Paper by Perle Fine (Chicago: McCormick Gallery, 2014), 13–15. »

42 Ellen G. Landau, Artists for Victory (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1983), 40. An impression is now in the collection of the Library of Congress. »

43 “Artist’s Workshop” sign-up sheet, PPC Scrapbooks, 1916–82, reel 4232, AAA/SI. »

44 Woodmere Art Gallery, An Invited Exhibition by Eight Philadelphia Mural Painters (Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Gallery, 1958); “Phila. Builds with Artistry,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 26, 1964, 11. »

45 For additional biographical information, see Gloria Garafulich-Grabois, Lily Garafulic: A Centenary Celebration (Washington, D.C.: Garafulic Family and Directorate of Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chile, 2014). »

46 Thank you to the artist’s niece, Gloria Garafulich-Grabois, for sharing her documentary about her aunt, Lily Garafulic—In Her Own Words (2014). The quoted text was translated by Garafulich-Grabois. »

47 Gelb’s school records are in JG/BM, unmicrofilmed “business correspondence.” »

48 Jan Gelb and August Freundlich, Jan Gelb: Her Voice (Syracuse: Syracuse University Lubin House, 1972). Gelb donated a nearly complete collection of her prints to the Syracuse University Art Galleries. »

49 Irvin Haas, “The Print Collector,” Art News 46, no. 6 (August 1947): 8; “Legends by Gelb,” Art Digest 22 (May 1, 1948): 11. »

50 “Statement for Lois Tracy to insert or excerpt from in her forthcoming book,” JG/BM, reel 998:375. »

51 Ferdinand and Emily Scharf, Haass’s half-brother and his wife, kindly shared their memories of Haass on April 12, 2017. »

52 “Madame Zucker” might be Nina Wohlman Zucker, who was married to artist Jacques Zucker. »

53 Walter Haass had fled Germany because of political persecution—his father was a socialist—and served in the Office of Strategic Services. For reference to Haass’s service, see Joseph E. Persico, Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents during World War II (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 118–19, 219–21, 223, 285. »

54 Haass’s student record card at the Art Students League is alphabetized under “Teresa Goldman.” See ASL. »

55 Terry Haass, Special Exhibition, November 2–December 7, 1952, SEF. »

56 Online biographies for Haass state she won a Fulbright grant as well, but no record of this award exists in the Fulbright databases. »

57 For more on her prints, see Ole Henrik Moe et al., Terry Haass: Graphisches Werk = L’œuvre Graphique = The Graphic Work (Bochum: Peter Spielmann, 1997). The Olomouc Museum of Art in Olomouc, Czech Republic, received over seventy sculptures by Haass in October 2016. »

58 Additional biographical details in Doris A. Birmingham, “The Art of Fannie Hillsmith,” in Fannie Hillsmith, ed. Robert Doty (Manchester, N.H.: Currier Gallery of Art, 1987). »

59 Hillsmith noted that many of her students at Black Mountain were teachers looking for summer refresher courses. Margaret Balzer, then a teacher at Berea College, overlapped with Hillsmith (Hillsmith’s dates were July 2–August 4 and Balzer’s were July 9–August 19). Balzer did not take classes with Hillsmith, but they likely socialized together, and interestingly both started at Atelier 17 not long after leaving Black Mountain. Black Mountain College Papers, Western Regional Archives State Archives of North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Asheville; James Thompson, Black Mountain College Dossiers: Fannie Hillsmith (Asheville: Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, 1996), 16–17. »

60 Jacobi first exhibited her photogenics at Norlyst Gallery in 1948, and Leo Katz wrote the introductory text to the catalogue. Jacobi evolved her process and eventually passed light over glass or twisted pieces of cellophane. Peter Moriarty, Lotte Jacobi: Photographs (Boston: David R. Godine, 2003), 50–52. »

61 Kelly Wise, Lotte Jacobi (Danbury, Conn.: Addison House, 1978), 12. »

62 See thirty-five preserved engravings in Series XII: Miscellaneous, box 63, Lotte Jacobi Papers, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham. None of the engravings are signed or dated, so it is impossible to say definitively when they were made. Jacobi apparently worked in intaglio into the 1960s, one of which is illustrated in Wise, Lotte Jacobi, 13. Her name does not appear in the Grippe ledger, which likely means she was not officially a student in the 1952–54 period, but visited socially. »

63 Stanley William Hayter to Helen Phillips, 17 April [1963], HPP. »

64 Stanley William Hayter to Peter Grippe, 3 October 1952, AAM/GC. »

65 Exhibition announcement in Series XIII: Oversized Material, oversize box 3, Lotte Jacobi Papers, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham. »

66 Ruth Leaf, interview by Christina Weyl, September 7, 2011. »

67 Artist file, Williams Collection Research Files, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. »

68 Ruth Leaf, Intaglio Printmaking Techniques (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1976). »

69 Much of the information for this biography comes from Legg’s oral history interview by Sharon Zane, June 5 and October 17, 1991, MoMA Archives, New York. »

70 Penn State University purchased the Ogontz School’s campus in 1950. Thank you to Lillian A. Hansberry of Penn State Abington Library for confirming Legg’s enrollment and searching through school yearbooks. »

71 Fran Schumer, “A Curator, Her Garden and Her Art,” New York Times, June 10, 1987. »

72 Correspondence from Azio Martinelli (note variant spelling), Sherry Brennan/Sherry Martinelli, 1940 and 1946, Presidents’ Files, Albert C. Barnes Correspondence, Barnes Foundation Archives, Merion, Pa. »

73 Shelley’s birth year is often incorrectly given as 1943. Ezio remarried Marion R. Wilson in September 1945. »

74 Anaïs Nin mentions Martinelli in her diary, which helps date her movements. Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, vol. 4, 1944–1947 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1972), 107–8. »

75 Josephine Gibbs, “A Modern Portfolio,” Art Digest 21, no. 6 (December 15, 1946): 11. »

76 The prints are in boxes 27 and 29, Sheri Martinelli Papers, YCAL MSS 868, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. Thanks to Lisa Hodermarsky, Yale University Art Gallery, and research assistant Evelyn Davis for accessing these prints on my behalf. »

77 Several poets’ collections at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library contain mention of Martinelli. See also Steven Moore, “Sheri Martinelli: A Modernist Muse,” Gargoyle Magazine, no. 41 (June 5, 1998). »

78 Francis M. Naumann, Maria: The Surrealist Sculpture of Maria Martins (New York: André Emmerich Gallery, 1998). »

79 It was during this time that Maria began an affair with Marcel Duchamp and modeled for his last major work, Étant donnés (1946–66). Duchamp’s letters to Maria were published in Michael R. Taylor and P. Andrew Lins, Marcel Duchamp: Étant Donnés (Philadelphia: PMA, 2009). »

80 E. Exler, “Norma Morgan: Romanticism and Printmaking,” Sagaletter (Autumn 1990): 5. »

81 Nico Slate, The Prism of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 129–30. »

82 Basic biographical information is compiled in Ten Negro Artists from the United States: First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar, Senegal: October House, 1966). »

83 Pamela Conacher, “The Highlands in New York City,” April 21, 2009, http://northings.com. »

84 Published biographies and even Morrison’s own CV inaccurately date her attendance at Sarah Lawrence to 1938–41. The registrar’s records show she enrolled from September 1935 to May 1938, earning a two-year degree in 1937 and staying on for 1937–38 as a “special student.” »

85 Grace Glueck, “Jean Morrison Becker, 1917–1994,” Massachusetts Review 45, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 665–72. Roesch became a member of Atelier 17 shortly after Morrison left Sarah Lawrence, and he advised other students to attend Atelier 17. »

86 Jean Morrison to Samuel Morrison, 14 December 1945, courtesy Carla Becker. »

87 According to Emily Mason Kahn, her mother’s studio was on the top of a garage that covered the entire block and was divided into three spaces. »

88 News of both awards earned coverage in local and national press: H. L. Dungan, “San Francisco Art Association’s 56th Annual Opens in S. F. Museum,” Oakland Tribune, February 2, 1936, 79; “She’ll Travel Now: Girl Sculptor Awarded Trip,” Oakland Tribune, June 3, 1936, 6; “S. F. Sculptress Wins $2,000 Trip Abroad,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 1936; “Montalvo’s Maecenas,” Time, June 15, 1936; and “Young Americans: Helen Phillips,” American Magazine of Art 29, no. 8 (August 1936): 532–33. »

89 Helen Phillips, interview by David Cohen, May 4, 1989, HPP. »

90 Phillips remembered hosting New York studio members for coffee at her home on Waverly Place: “I knew much of what was happening in the workshop, although I hadn’t the time and baby-sitters necessary to work there regularly.” Helen Phillips to Fred [Becker], n.d., HPP. Among the more important sculpture shows were: The Women, Art of This Century (1944); Bloodflames, Hugo Gallery (1947); Sculpture annual, Whitney Museum of American Art (1948); and Artists: Man and Wife, Sidney Janis Gallery (1949). »

91 Many were exhibited in Prints by Stanley William Hayter and Helen Phillips (San Francisco: Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, 1956). »

92 Dates of attendance confirmed with the Registrar’s Office, Sarah Lawrence College. They conflict with the dates given in the only comprehensive source about Phillips’s life and work: Patricia Phillips: 1915–1946 (New York: Pinacotheca, 1947). »

93 Patricia Phillips. »

94 See group show chronology in Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 157. Notice of her solo exhibition can be found in “Art Exhibit Opens Sunday at Wesleyan,” Pantagraph, March 4, 1951, 6. Judy Brodsky, Schapiro’s friend and estate’s executor, shared images of many early prints found in the artist’s studio. »

95 Rachel Rosenthal remembered meeting Schapiro at Atelier 17. Rachel Rosenthal, oral history by Moira Roth, September 2, 1989, AAA/SI. The timing of Schapiro/Brach’s move to New York is given as either 1951 or 1952. The couple most likely moved in fall 1951, after Brach’s teaching appointment ended at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Complicating the timeline, however, a review of Schapiro’s solo exhibition at Illinois Wesleyan stated she had “studied printmaking under Mauricio Lasansky. Later, she continued study in this field in New York City under Stanley Hayter at his Atelier 17”; “Art Exhibit Opens Sunday at Wesleyan,” 6. Given that Schapiro had family in New York, it is possible she set out to New York before Brach. »

96 Robert A. Yassin, Miriam Schapiro: Works on Paper. A Thirty Year Retrospective, ed. Paul Brach (Tucson, Ariz. : Tucson Museum of Art, 1998). »

97 Susan Stedman, manager of Seidler’s estate, has facilitated access to important archival materials and the artist’s work. »

98 Lisa Weinberg Rabinowitz, “The Web of Experiences: Printmaking in the United States” (EdD diss., Columbia University Teachers College, 1977), 37. »

99 An amusing syndicated newspaper article profiles the twenty-four-year-old West, who was then driving a taxi in New York and wrangling drunken passengers. Mary Margaret McBride, “Do Unexpected Thing,” Decatur Daily Review, August 23, 1935, 15. »

100 “Exhibition of Atelier 17, Leicester Gallery,” Apollo 45 (April 1947): 9. »

101 J. K. R., “Pennerton West Abstracts,” Art Digest 22 (October 15, 1947): 34; and “Pennerton West,” Art News 46 (November 1947): 58. »

102 MoMA deaccessioned the portfolio in 2000 and donated it to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, New Brunswick, N.J., where it is the only known complete set in existence. »

103 Worden Day to Una Johnson, 2 August 1959, BMK-DPDP. West also offered her barn to the young artist Paul Resika, who grew up in nearby Mohegan Lake. »

104 The best source of information about Wienholt is in Savage, “Atelier 17 and Australian Women Artists.” »

105 She received positive press coverage at home, too. Sydney Ure Smith, “Recent Prints by Anne Wienholt,” in Art and Design (Sydney: Ure Smith Pty., 1949), 20–21. »

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