Amerique - (from the 'Atlas' portfolio of 7 images illustrating a poem by André Suarès)

Joseph Hecht

Joseph Hecht collaborated with poet Andre Suares (1868-1948) to illustrate his poem "Atlas" of 1928, for which Hecht created seven engravings. "Amerique" is the sixth of seven images in the series of Surreal landscapes. Hecht managed to incorporate both North and South America in this composition.

At the top right a group of North American Inuit hunters drag a huge walrus carcass across the ice with the aid of dogs. In the lower foreground Hecht adds a line of South American Gentoo and Humboldt penguins as a sea eagle swoops in toward the immature youngsters.

Joseph Hecht was born on December 14, 1891, in Lodz, Poland. With his family’s support he studied at the Académie Beaux-Arts in Krakow between 1909 and 1914, where he was awarded annual prizes.

Hecht traveled throughout Europe until the beginning of WWI when he went to live in Norway. He remained in Norway until 1919, living in the coastal town Asker near Oslo, and during those years he painted and worked in drypoint, engraving, and woodcut. Once the war ended, Hecht traveled to Italy and two years later to Paris where he connected with other artists and was assigned a studio at the Hotel Villa Falguière.

In 1920, Hecht gained membership in the Salon d'Automne and later in the Salon des Indépendents. The year 1926 proved to be pivotal for Hecht. He illustrated Blaise Cendrars’ L’Eubage aux antipodes de l’unité with five engravings and a solo exhibition of his work was presented at the gallery of Berthe Weill. He also published a portfolio of six prints, l’Arche de Noë, with a forward by Symbolist Gustave Kahn, which was the basis for his solo exhibition at the Galerie le Nouvel Essor.

That same year Hecht met Stanley William Hayter whom he instructed in the art of engraving and the technicalities of printmaking. He also encouraged Hayter to open a cooperative printmaking studio, which became Atelier 17.

Hayter commented about Hecht: “He possessed an extreme sensitivity to all the qualities of a line - rigidity, flexibility, resilience - and saw the character of life in the line itself, not the description of life by means of the line. An examination of the prints of Hecht...will show that there is not a limp or dead line in them.”