Date: Fri 27-Mar-1998

Publication: Ant

Author: JUDYC

Quick Words:

Orbit

Full Text:

Eccentric Orbits

w/4 cuts

NEW YORK CITY -- Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc, will host the exhibition

"Eccentric Orbits: Stanley William Hayter, Charles Howard, Knud Merrild, and

Kay Sage" from Thursday, April 9, to Friday, May 29.

The exhibition focuses on these four artists' contributions to the Surrealist

movement in America and abroad from 1930s to 1960s, and will feature more than

50 works in a variety of media, including oils, drawings, gouache, prints, and

constructions.

All four of the artisits are important but often overlooked. Their work and

careers, although highly idiosyncratic, followed trajectories shaped by a

shared concern with Surrealist theories and methods. Each brought to their

endeavors notably different intellectual approaches, and pursued their ideas

through varying media and techniques. Yet common to all four was a passionate

belief in art as an instrument for the investigation of the unconscious and

the means for attaining a higher reality.

English-born Hayter (1901-1988), who was at the center of the Surrealist

movement in Europe, developed an experimental approach to printmaking based

upon theories of automatic drawing. His work explored the landscape of the

unconscious, which Hayter believed was not limited by a person's own life

experiences, but rather, encompassed a universal memory animated by the

struggle of conflicting elemental forces.

Hayter was the founder of Atelier 17, the reknowned experimental graphic

workshop in Paris, and moved to New York at the outbreak of World War II. At

Atelier 17, displaced European and American artists worked side by side in a

studio atmosphere at once both disciplined and freely inventive, guided by

Hayter's belief that "there were two elements in the making of a work of art -

the unconscious element from which inspiration comes, and extremely rational

control of the methods of execution."

American-born Howard (1899-1978) divided his career between London and the San

Francisco Bay area. In London, Howard participated in "The International

Surrealist Exhibition" at New Burlington Galleries in 1936, a landmark event

organized, in part, through the efforts of Hayter and Andre Breton.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Howard joined the exodus of artists

returning to America and settled in San Francisco. He considered his

biomorphic abstractions to be an ongoing exploration of self-discovery. "They

are in fact all portraits of the same general subject, of the same idea,

carried as far as I am able at the time," he said.

Merrild (1894-1954) was born in Denmark and emigrated to Los Angeles in 1923,

where he would become an integral figure in the development of West Coast

surrealism. Merrild was exposed to the European avant-garde movements of

Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism as a young adult, and each of these had an impact

upon his work.

The exhibition includes one of Merrild's rare and influential constructions

from the 1930s, meditations on time and space that inspired a generation of

assemblage artists who followed. His work expressed a belief both in the power

of the unconscious and in the Eastern metaphysical concept of change as the

fundamental law of nature.

Sage (1898-1963), along with Hayter, was a member of the circle of Surrealist

artists who were active in Paris in the late 1930s. Her introduction to the

group came in 1938 when one of her compositions, included in the annual

exhibition of the Salon des Surindependants, was singled out by an admiring

Andre Breton. On that occasion, Breton was accompanied by the painter Yves

Tanguy, whom Sage later married.

Sage's career as an artist has long been overshadowed by that of her famous

husband. Her work is often compared to that of Tanguy's, but through the

exploration of her own dreams and memories, she developed a uniquely powerful

and often haunting imagery that is hers alone. In paintings filled with

mystery -- landscapes occupied by bare scaffolding and strangely human-like

draped forms - we recognize today Sage's rightful place among the masters of

Surrealist painting in America.

The gallery is at 21 East 70th Street and is open Tuesday through Friday, 9:30

am to 5:15 pm, and Saturday, 9:45 am to 4:45 pm. For information,

212/535-8810.