The Print Fair opens November 3 at the Park Avenue Armory.  Organized by the International Fine Print Dealers association, the IFPDA, this is the fair’s 21st annual incarnation in New York.  Ninety galleries or independent dealers from around the world offer high-end impressions from across historic and stylistic spectrums, with old master prints of Rembrandt or Dürer rubbing shoulders – or embossments at least – with Ukiyoe prints from Edo, Hoppers and Beckmanns, and contemporary artists such as Kiki Smith, Jasper Johns and John Baldessari. (The fair runs from noon to 8pm through Saturday, and noon to 6pm through Sunday.  The Armory is at Park Avenue between 66 and 67th Streets.)

Contemporary printmaking and multiples have a fair of their own, however, with the Editions and Artists Books Fair down in Chelsea. Running the same dates, E/AB 2011 is staged at the old Dia Center on 22nd Street.  This fair was founded in 1998 and is free in a bid to forge new audiences for contemporary multiples.  They recoup their generosity, however, in the limited edition catalogue, sporting a cover by Fred Tomaselli, offered at $200. (548 West 22nd Street, between 10th & 11th avenues,  11 to 7pm through Saturday, and 11 to 4pm on Sunday.)

And as with art fairs around the world, New York’s November fairs see a veritable print week with a slew of satellite fairs and with galleries focusing events and programming upon the frenzy for multiples.  Art International Fairs, for instance, present their second annual Fine Print & Drawing Fair, opening Thursday night, at the Lighthouse International Conference Center.  Describing itself as a “boutique event,” the fair has a dozen or so exhibitors, mostly from around the United States.  (111 East 59th Street, between Lexington and Park avenues, Friday and Saturday, 10-7pm, Sunday 10-5pm.)

The International Print Center, New York, opens their fortieth presentation of their New Prints Program Thursday night, running through January 7, 2012.  This juried exhibition includes new works by several dozen artists including Polly Apfelbaum, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Whitfield Lovell, Ed Ruscha and Jessica Stockholder. (508 West 26th Street, Room 5A, betweeen 10th and 11th avenues, regular gallery hours.)

And in Bushwick, recession-friendly for the budget-conscious collectors, The Cannonball Press presents Prints Gone Wild, in which everything is under $50 .  (389 Melrose Street, between Flushing and Knickerbocker avenues, Friday, 6pm to midnight, and Saturday, noon to 6pm.)

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To Hayter Lovers – a phonetically oxymoronic group to which this reviewer is a signed-up subscriber – Francis Naumann’s exquisitely installed, judiciously selected exhibition that focuses on Stanley William Hayter’s American decade deserves a double dose of “at last,” not to mention sincere gratitude.

“At last” because this doyen of modernist printmaking has lacked anything remotely resembling his due of recognition: either in America, where his legendary experimental workshop, Atelier 17, played a pivotal role not just in the renaissance of the artist-print but, as crucially, in the transmigration of ideas from Europe to America that blossomed as Abstract Expressionism; or in France, whence he returned from his American exile as soon as the economic circumstances permitted, in 1950.  And “at last,” also, because Mr. Naumann has had the courage and good taste to break the medium barrier between Hayter’s experiments in printmaking, drawing and painting by presenting his work chronologically, regardless of – and mixing up – medium and support.

This hang is very refreshing, and vindicating, to those afficionados sick to the hind teeth of Hayter being dismissed as a “technical wizard” in the etching studio, but therefore not, by extension, a “real” artist outside of it.  The British critic Sir Herbert Read, in the preface to Hayter’s influential textbook, New Ways of Gravure, (1949) rightly called printmaking the “Cinderella of the arts” very much for this reason.  The bounce between paper and canvas at Naumann’s makes for visually lively walls.  It encourages the images to be seen as that, as images.  At the same time, ironically, when you come across an etching, say, next to a painting, you do focus on the specificity of the medium of etching, but as the means to convey an image, not as a formal end in itself.

Hayter’s personal language self-consciously straddled the divide of the pre-war Paris avantgarde of which he was a member between abstraction and surrealism.  He was neither a purist, nor a literary artist, but a modernist with something to express, making him a perfect conduit for the synthesis of these two, dialectical sides of the modern movement to artistically progressive Americans.  As Deborah Rosenthal notes in the catalogue, leading New York School artists, including Jackson Pollock and David Smith, passed through his workshop, whether in Paris or New York, which was run on experiment, cooperative lines, in marked contrast to the almost medieval hierarchy typical of print shops at that time, at least in France.

A full-scale retrospective of Hayter would reveal a fearless and stylistically wayward artist (which partly explains his historic marginalization) with themes and concerns that nonetheless unite his disparate efforts, which ranged from surreal landscapes and cityscapes of the 1920s to lyrical action paintings of the 1950s to op art experiments of the 1960s to a late period of personal allegories fusing figuration and abstraction, and informed by ideas of new mathematics.

The forties, however, has a strongly unified flavor, and was very much his decade of figure, of tortuous, menaced, threatening personages that often read as sexualized automata tautly constructed in space.  Earlier images like the arresting engraving and etching Terror (1943), focus on the figure, which dominates a tight, awkwardly vertical plate that is around three times high as it is wide.  Hayter was working at a time of war restrictions on metal plates, but the expressive bonus of this odd format is serendipitous.  The figure is worked in deeply gouged engraved and etched lines, the ground largely denoted by areas of softground.  As the decade progresses, images move from figure on neutral ground to situations, as in the untitled canvas from 1944 that serves as the exhibition announcement card, where an equally dynamic, spatially deconstructed environment augments the structural complexity of the figure.

Hayter’s palette in this period was fearless and deeply unpretty.  He could give us strident primaries, as in Ceres (1948) where the gray figures occupy space demarcated in cutout shapes of red, yellow and blue.  Or he could embed virulent orange, green, purple and blue in a murky swamp of brown, as in the ink and watercolor study, Airport (1945).

The show is drawn from a single, and very extensive, private collection of Hayters from this period.  Consequently, there are omissions of key images one would expect from a curated exhibition of this period.  But equally there are surprises.  Hayter’s most technically significant, breakthrough print of this period was Cinq Personages (1946), which occupies a seminal position in the history of engraving as the first image printed in multiple colors from one plate in a single pulling—a technical feat involving screens described in exacting detail by Hayter inNew Ways. The impression here, however, is in black and white.  But this serves to reinforce the almost fugal relationship of structure and color in Hayter’s art of this decade.  The image is compelling enough without color: the space is complex through shade and texture alone.  Color, as Unstable Woman (1947), an image close at hand demonstrates, can reinforce a sense of spatial vortex, sucking the eye into a central vanishing point, but it can also disrupt the depth of an image with an abrasive, intentionally jarring flatness that electrifies the surface.

The catalogue contains an Introduction by Ms. Rosenthal along with an extensive interview with Hayter which she conducted in Paris in 1980 and which is published here for the first time.

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