Taught Technique to Leading Artists : Printmaker William S. Hayter, 86

William Stanley Hayter, an English-born painter who is considered among the most significant graphic artists of his time and who taught his innovative printmaking techniques to such fabled stylists as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, died of cardiac arrest at age 86, it was reported Friday.

Hayter, who died Wednesday in Paris, was a leading figure in the Paris art scene for more than half a century.

The Paris-based International Herald Tribune noted that Hayter was credited with turning engraving into a lively and experimental form that brought many famous artists to work alongside him in his studio in Montparnasse.

Visits to Studio

Among those artists who visited him at the studio he founded in 1927, known as Atelier 17, were Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Dali, Miro and Picasso.

Hayter was born in London and graduated from Kings College in London with honor degrees in art and chemistry. He worked in Iran from 1922 to 1925 for the Anglo-Iranian oil company, but his first interest was art.

“My father was a painter and a lot of people in my family before, so I was messing about with painting fairly seriously when I was a child. I was painting all the time when I was in the (Middle) East,” Hayter once said. “I didn’t do much with prints till I came to Paris.”

He quickly discovered and revolutionized the vanishing art of original printmaking, bringing new techniques to the medium, including a method of color printing from a single plate instead of having a separate plate for each tone.

Hayter wrote two books that are considered essential reading for printmakers, “New Ways of Gravure” (1949) and “About Prints” (1962).

He lived in Paris from 1926 to 1939, then went to New York, where he established his studio at the New School and gave an impetus to American printmaking. He returned to Paris in 1950.

Exhibit in L.A.

Twenty years ago he was in Los Angeles for an exhibition of his work at the Esther Robles Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard.

Here he discussed such Pop artists as Warhol and Lichtenstein, finding much of their work “conceptual and therefore regressive” and describing his own paintings as having to do with the interference of rhythms.

But then, after a lengthy discussion of himself and his contemporaries, he chided the overabundance of conversation and writing that accompanies modern painting. He concluded that “in teaching art and in the wake of art there is too great a mass of talk.”