A group of seven prints by Stanley Hayter, plus two each by Joan Ellis and Merlyn Evans, one each by Patrick Heron, Michael Kennedy, Cecil Mary Leslie and Marion Mitchell, and three by an unknown artist (18 prints in total) were transferred to the Gallery’s Prints and Drawings Study Room from a store in the Witt Library containing archival material of notable art historians with Courtauld Institute connections. They were discovered in a file of images (mostly photographic reproductions) of the work of twentieth-century British artists formed by R. H. Wilenski (1887-1975), art critic and historian, and author of the polemical book, The Modern Movement in Art (1927).

Wilenski was acquainted with many of the artists about whom he wrote, including Hayter. Most of the prints in the collection are in the form of greetings cards inscribed by the artists to Wilenski, indicating close friendships. Regarded as one of the most significant British printmakers of the twentieth century, Hayter was associated with Surrealism in the 1930s. His prints in this collection date from the early years of the artist’s career: from a woodcut street scene of 1927 made during the years in Paris at his legendary Atelier 17 studio, to an abstracted copper plate engraving from 1935 inscribed ‘to Wilenski/Good Luck/see you at the Surrealist show / May (?)’ A further greeting card by Hayter, dated 1931, was sent to Wilenski the following year, inscribed by Margaret Gardiner, founder of the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney.

Transferred to the Samuel Courtauld Trust in 2017

The Prints of Stanley William Hayter; a Complete Catalogue
undescribed