Despair II (mistitled as III by the artist)

Gabor Peterdi

Despair II is Peterdi's twelfth etching/engraving, done in 1938 at Atelier 17 in Paris. Peterdi had left Hungary for Paris in 1930 at age 15 on a Prix de Rome. In 1933 he started working with S.W. Hayter at Atelier 17. He did a series of 5 intaglios, all titled "Despair" and numbered from I through V. This impression is titled with a III but the catalog raisonné illustrates it as II. This image is a portrait of despair, a large hand holding a cloth to a person's face, beads of moisture fall from the kerchief, perhaps tears. It conveys the fear, horror, and utter despair that people were experiencing in 1938 Europe. A monster was lurking and desparation was found everywhere.

Peterdi commented: "My experience with the graphic arts started with engraving. I fell in love with it and I engraved for several years before I made my first etching. This self-imposed limitation had no other reason than the fascination to explore thoroughly this pure and powerful technique. When I started to work with the various methods of etching, I became aware of the immense range of this medium and plunged into a period of feverish experimentation." (Gabor Peterdi, "Printmaking." Macmillan Company, NY, 1959).

Gabor Peterdi was born on 17 September 1915 in Pestújhely, Hungary. He began his art studies at the Hungarian Academy in 1929 at the age of fourteen. His first solo exhibition was mounted at the Ernst Museum in 1930 and that same year Peterdi won a Prix de Rome scholarship for painting which allowed him to continue his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti. The following year he went to Paris where he attended the Académie Julian and the Académie Scandinave. He joined Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris in 1933 where he explored the techniques of engraving.

Peterdi immigrated to the United States in 1939 and, later that year, his first American solo exhibition of paintings opened at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. He soon became a US citizen and joined the military serving in Germany. After his military service, Peterdi resumed his printmaking career at Atelier 17 in New York. He found working with the copperplate cathartic after his military experiences. His first prints reflected the horrors and destruction of war, but he soon began representing natural awakenings and biblical beginnings in such works as Adam and Eve.

He began teaching at the School of the Brooklyn Museum in 1948, organizing the graphic arts workshop there. Peterdi’s creative approach to intaglio continued to expand as he invented new techniques and printed from larger plates. In 1952, he became Associate Professor of Art at Hunter College in New York, where he taught until 1959. In 1953, he began teaching at the Yale-Norfolk summer school, and he joined the art faculty of Yale University as a visiting professor, gaining a full-time appointment in 1960.