Recumbent Blonde

Stanley William Hayter

"Recumbent Blonde" is an oil painting on canvas by Stanley William Hayter. It is signed in the lower right "Hayter / 48". It is titled on the verso on the top stretcher bar.

The "Recumbent Blonde" was done while Hayter was living in New York and had re-established Atelier 17 there in 1940. Anais Nin, author and wife of Atelier 17 engraver Ian Hugo described Hayter and his work in her 1943 "Diary of Anais Nin":

"He was always in motion, cyclonic. His lines were like projectiles thrown in space, sometimes tangled like an antenna caught in a windstorm....to me he was a wire sculpture, a man of nerves."

Hayter was one of the Surrealist group in Paris, choosing to quit the group for personal reasons. He carried the gestural Surrealist concept of the "automatic line" to his work in both printmaking and painting, it was a basic concept of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s in America.

In 1948 Hayter's painting, such as this example, explored the interaction of the solid figure and ambiguous, fluid space, also explored in other paintings, including "Femme au Poisson", "Ceres" and "Antwerp".