Dolan/Maxwell
It gives us great pleasure to present Gabor Peterdi’s post-war paintings on paper and canvas, alongside prints—chiefly etching & engravings, created through a parallel practice. Spanning the years from 1948 to 1985, our selection demonstrates Peterdi’s evolution from the Surrealist engravings he developed in Paris in the 1930s at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, to the more observational and representational art he produced in the aftermath of WWII. This transition reflects Peterdi’s growing focus on depicting the world around him and drawing endless inspiration from nature.
Peterdi commenced a long and distinguished teaching career at Brooklyn College in 1948, followed by a position at Hunter College in the 1950s, and ultimately, at Yale University, where he served as a professor from 1960 until his retirement. An early 1950s move to Connecticut led him back to the observed landscape as subject, one that had been meaningful and essential to him since his precocious childhood in suburban Budapest.
Peterdi’s masterful abilities are evident in the making of his paintings, where color passages in oil paint become informed by, and equal to his engraved line. The paintings exude confidence, testament to the forethought required to produce rich, elegant prints as combined with the assured focus of burin engraving. Peterdi is part of the grand tradition of painter-engravers, a lineage that includes Albrecht Dürer and extends through his contemporaries, Hayter and Joan Miró. Like those renowned artists, Peterdi’s printmaking and painting practices were deeply intertwined.
We at Dolan/Maxwell are deeply honored to share this extraordinary body of work.
Nervous Lobster 1948 Johnson 35 etching & gaufrage, edition 3o image 14 5/8 x 17 5/8” sheet 22 1/4 x 3o 1/8” signed, titled & dated recto
Awakening 1948 Johnson 39 etching & engraving, edition 3o image 13 3/4 x 21 3/4” sheet 18 1/2 x 23 1/4” signed & dated recto
(Green) 1948
watercolor & ink
image/sheet 14 x 1o” signed & dated recto
Visit 1948 Johnson 43 relief etching edition 3o image 14 3/4 x 19 5/8” sheet 22 1/4 x 3o 1/8” signed, titled & dated recto
The Lost City 1951 watercolor & ink image/sheet 22 1/4 x 3o signed, titled & dated recto annotated verso: the Lost City; age of fear
Green Spawning 1952
watercolor & ink
image/sheet 22 1/4 x 3o” signed recto; titled verso
Germination 1951-52 Johnson 63 engraving, etching, aquatint with 4 color stencils
edition 3o image 19 3/4 x 23 7/8” sheet 22 5/16 x 23 1/2” signed, titled & dated recto
Triumph of Stones 1955 Johnson 127 hard & soft ground etching with 4 stenciled colors, edition 2oo image 11 7/8 x 17 5/8” sheet 15 1/4 x 19 1/2” signed recto
published by International Graphic Art Society
Bloody Sky 1954 Johnson 1o6 color engraving, open-bite etching & aquatint, edition 35 image 8 7/8 x 11 7/8” sheet 12 7/8 x 18 1/8” signed & titled recto
Cathedral 1954 oil on canvas, 3o x 4o” signed & dated recto; signed & titled verso
Wounded Darkness 1954 Johnson 132 engraving, etching, aquatint with 2-color stencils, edition 35 image 17 7/8 x 23 3/4” sheet 21 1/4 x 27 1/2” signed & dated recto
Dark Garden 1956 watercolor image/sheet 3o 1/2 x 22 1/2” signed & dated recto
These are landscapes, pure and simple. But not of particular locations, it seems. We don’t find ourselves standing on a particular patch of ground. They are not landscapes in the naturalist tradition of the sublime in which the onlooker is coaxed out of himself into the limitless space ‘out there’ and is occasionally touched by a sense of infinity.
The human content of landscape painting is that of the viewers imagination. The mind moves out, searching for the horizon and in its search absorbs vastness into itself. Constable’s sky —his ‘organ of feeling’ —is the avatar of all landscape experience: what we see ‘out there’ are the shapes of our feelings, the sites of our terrors and our resting places. Movement from here to there is movement from one state of mind to another. Space is anticipation and memory, … the fantasy is enacted here in the immediacy of his touch, his lightning runs on the surface of the canvas, each phrase articulated so clearly, pausing, turning back on itself, running on, hooking, flickering, running on — hand and eye driven forward as if memory, wonder and an irrepressible sense of life came together under the compulsion to reconstruct how it was.
Heavy Seas 1958 Johnson 153
drypoint, edition 35 image 22 3/4 x 28 3/4” sheet 15 1/4 x 31 3/8” signed & dated recto
Burning Bushes 1959 watercolor image/sheet 27 x 32” signed & dated recto
Triumph of the Weeds 1959 Johnson 175 etching, engraving, edition 25o image 17 7/8 x 23 1/2” sheet 19 7/8 x 26 1/4” signed & dated recto published by Associated American Artists
Forever a traveller, Peterdi has visited Mexico, Yucatan, some South American countries and in 1963 he took part in a seminar at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. A flight over the arctic regions provided him with a new experience in landscape. It was a landscape where the ice glistens with harsh blue light, where the forms are jagged and the colors intense. The experience reflected in his work ‘Arctic IX’ where the forms are angular, the colors, cold blues, blacks and shadowy purples.
Robert McDougall, Art Gallery, Christchurch, NZ, catalog entry, 1978
Summer XVI 1967 oil on canvas, 24 x 3o” signed & dated recto; signed & titled verso
Red Desert 1968 Johnson 266
open-bite and soft ground etching with stenciled color, edition 15o image 19 7/16 x 23 3/4” sheet 22 x 28 7/8” signed & dated recto
Pele I 1965 Johnson 273 relief etching with simultaneous color printing, edition 75 image 19 3/4 x 23 13/16” sheet 19 3/4 x x 27” signed, titled & dated recto
Traveling to a warmer climate in 1968, Peterdi was artist in residence at the Honolulu Academy of the Arts. His reaction to the luxurious tropical growth with its fabulous color densities was immediate. Ten or more prints represent the Hawaiian series. … the vibrating sensors color of Red Lanikai are two examples of a great heightened color palette, conveying a mood of the rich flamboyance of a tropical environment. Peterdi returned to Hawaii in 1973.
edition 75
image 13 3/4 x 21 3/4” sheet 18 1/2 x 23 1/4” signed, titled & dated recto
Red Lanikai 1969 Johnson 271 open-bite etching with color viscosity
edition 75
image 19 5/8 x 23 5/8”
sheet 22 1/2 x 29 7/8” signed, titled & dated recto
Peterdi created the bright orange shapes here by cutting 2o thin-gauge copper plates that were inked and printed on top of the etched main plate. This innovation is cited in David Acton’s, A Spectrum of Innovation, Color in American Printmaking, 1890-1960.
Pele II 1973
open bite etching & color viscosity
AP 1, unique proof image/sheet 23 3/4 x 35 3/8” signed & dated recto, titled verso
Haleakala (House of the Sun) 1973 Peterdi 337 engraving & color etching, edition 1oo image 24 x 36” sheet 29 3/8 x 41 1/2” signed, titled & dated recto
After Peterdi immigrated to the US he had the good fortune to reconnect with Hayter and Atelier 17. Charismatic Hayter was well-connected in the New York art scene by war’s end and Peterdi benefited from a connection to established European artists, specifically Joan Miro’s NY visit in 1947 where he and Hayter, Fred Becker and Ruthven Todd worked to discover William Blake’s method for creating the flowing handwritten words of Blake’s prints. (Lessing Rosenwald lent his fragment of a Blake plate as a primary source and tool). And he was ensconced amid the great changes happening in painting in New York—away from content and narrative, and towards formalist structure. All through the 1950s Peterdi successfully experiments with formal concerns over subject, or, finding subject within form. Jackson Pollock’s no-content, all over compositions would seem to especially inform Peterdi’s early 1960’s paintings. Peterdi does not pour paint, but creates sensation of natural phenomena and exuberant beauty by way of a kind of handwriting or calligraphy with the brush. By the 1980s this way of working has strengthened and the handwriting-with-paint creates paintings that are rich with nature-like views that are about light and atmosphere and yet epitomizes the very pure and formal understanding of chosen materials. The joy and empathy Peterdi feels within the natural world is subject on his own glorious terms.
Stormy Wetland 1 198o oil on canvas, 26 x 3o” signed & dated recto; signed & titled verso
Vertical Wetland 1979 oil on canvas, 6o x 5o” signed & dated recto; signed & titled verso
Yale-Norfolk studio c. 1960
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Ernst Museum, Budapest, 193o
Julian Levy Gallery, New York, 1939
Philadelphia Art Alliance 195o, 1955, 196o, 1967
Brooks Memorial Art Gallery 1952, 1953, 1955, 1962
Yale University Art Gallery 1964
Art Institute of Chicago 1955
Minneapolis Institute of Art 1957
The Brooklyn Museum 1959
DeCordova Museum 1959
Smithsonian Institution 1961
Oakland Art Museum 1962
Cleveland Museum of Art 1962
Corcoran Gallery of Art 1964
MSU Broad Museum of Art 1964
Borgenicht Gallery, New York, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1961, 1962, 1966, 197o, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1978, 1982
High Museum of Art 1965
Nelson Atkins Museum 1965
Honolulu Academy of Art 1968
Achenbach Foundation 1971-72
Collections
Achenbach Foundation, Addison Gallery of American Art, Univeristy of Alberta, Albright-Knox Gallery, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MFA Boston, British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Museum of Budapest, Bruce Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Columbia Museum of Art, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Currier Gallery of Art, De Cordova Museum of Art, Ezkenazi Museum of Art, Flint Institute of Arts, Harvard Art Museums, High Museum of Art, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Kansas City Institute of Art, Kunst Par Arbitplasser, Norway, Kunsthalle, Bremen, Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf, LA County Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MSU Broad Museum of Art, Museum de Arts Moderno, Sao Paulo, MoMA, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Newark Museum, Norton Simon Museum, Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Prague, Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Rijksmuseum, National Gallery of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Oakland Museum of Art, Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Victoria & Albert Museum, National Gallery of Victoria, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Walker Art Center, Wadsworth Atheneum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Wright Museum, Yale University Art Gallery
