ABSTRACT

This chapter explores Louise Nevelson's first prints-thirty etchings-made at Atelier 17, the avant-garde printmaking workshop located in New York City between 1940 and 1955. It provides three aspects of Nevelson's experimentation highlight her unwillingness to concede to gendered post-war expectations for female artists: first, her use of fabric to mark the plate; second, her expressive inking; and third, her application of color. Atelier 17's founder, relocated the print workshop from Paris to New York City in 1940 to escape the European wartime conflict. Renowned as a skilled engraver, Hayter had opened Atelier 17 in 1927 on Paris's Left Bank as an informal printmaking workshop. The studio soon became an important meeting point for the Parisian avant-garde and especially its surrealist community. Finally, it considers the foundation of scholarship about Nevelson's Atelier 17 etchings in an effort to explain why the later and more uniformly printed Hollander editions eclipsed the early and much more experimental Atelier 17 proofs.