Stanley William Hayter was a British surrealist painter and printmaker born in London in 1901 and died in Paris in May 1988. He is recognized as one of the major masters of printmaking in the twentieth century, and as the instigator of an important revival of printmaking in Europe and the United States.

After studying physics and organic chemistry, Stanley William Hayter moved to Paris in April 1926 and studied printmaking at the Académie Julian under the artist Joseph Hecht. Hecht recognized his talent and inventiveness very early on: he followed him in his project to create a printmaking studio which first opened in Paris in April 1927, on rue du Moulin-Vert, in the 14th arrondissement.

Fascinated by the paintings of the Surrealist movement, particularly those of Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico, William Hayter quickly became close to some of the members of the group and befriended André Masson and the poet Paul Éluard, whose poems he would later illustrate. While being related to surrealism by its contacts and interests, Hayter nevertheless keeps a lot of independence from the group and refuses its application of psychoanalysis to the understanding of art. Hayter considers, like the surrealists, that his work must be a journey into the imagination, but he refuses that the drawing of a line is necessarily linked to the psychology of the creator: the forms, colors and lines have an existence of their own in his practice, which brings him closer to the non-figurative painters.

In 1932, Hayter moved his printmaking studio, now called "Atelier 17", to 17 rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse, where he began to attract such famous artists as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti and Yves Tanguy. Atelier 17 was a hybrid place: a space for training in printmaking, for production, for living and meeting young artists, for discussions and artistic experimentation.

In 1939, as the Second World War broke out in Europe, Hayter closed the Paris studio and left for the United States where he taught at the New York School for Social Research, a meeting place for surrealists and European intellectuals in exile. Atelier 17 opened its doors again in New York, where it was from the beginning a Mecca for art in the making: Jackson Pollock, for example, recognized in Hayter a master of the line who facilitated his own use of the "dripping" technique. Robert Motherwell, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Mark Rothko, who had free access to the studio, also declared that they had learned a lot about automatism from Stanley William.

During the war, he became famous for consolidating a new printmaking process, the "viscosity method", also called the "Hayter method". This method combines two engraving processes that were previously impossible to combine in the same image and at the same time: the ink can be applied in the hollows cut into the support, but now the ink can also be applied in the raised areas of the image, directly on the surface and without the ink spreading into the hollows that the artist does not want to fill.

He uses this technique to create burin and etchings, drypoints where the image has an infinite number of lines, characters that intermingle and thus it acquires a great visual depth. Hayter also applies numerous networks of lines in his paintings that he realizes spontaneously in the fulgurating of the gesture with a great variety of vivid colors. His work from the war years is still marked by surrealism and its subjects mixing the plant or animal world with the historical and heroic sphere, but Hayter moves away from it after the war, where he continues to use dynamic and light lines with joyful colors to create a visual symphony, especially in his painting.

The 1950's were marked by gesturality and lyrical abstraction that did not deny its figurative origins. From the 1960s until the end of his career, Hayter drew on developments in science and his original training as a physicist for his paintings and prints. He created works that were as much studies of the mechanisms of vision as they were explorations beyond the boundaries of the surrounding reality, the reality in which we live but which the limited faculties of our senses prevent us from fully grasping.

His works are held in many prestigious collections and museums around the world. In 1988, the year of the artist's death, the British Museum in London acquired all of his engraved work. All of his work can be found in the catalog raisonné established by Peter Black and his wife, published in 1992 by Phaidon.

Numerous books and exhibition catalogs have been published on his work both during his lifetime and after his death. His paintings continue to be highly sought after by collectors worldwide.