Etching, engraving and aquatint, 1948. 378x445 mm; 15x17 1/2 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 16/30 in pencil, lower margin. A superb, richly-inked, proof-like impression.
In 1945, Karl Schrag (1912-1995), at Hayter's invitation, began to work at Atelier 17. Schrag excelled working alongside artists like Miró, Pollock, Lasansky, Peterdi, Sue Fuller and Anne Ryan,mastering a wide array of print media. Schrag said in an 1970 interview with Paul Cummings, then curator at the Whitney Museum: 'there is something in the atmosphere when you are working together with such enormously creative people which is inspiring. But also beyond that the enormous widening of your grasp of the possibilities of graphics in general gives you not so much the possibility of using all of them but of understanding what would really fit your own needs.'
Schrag taught printmaking at Brooklyn College from 1953 to 1954 and at Cooper Union from 1954 to 1968. In 1950, Schrag became director of Atelier 17 when Hayter returned to Paris. Schrag said, 'I think most of my work all through my life has had some autobiographical meaning, not in the sense that I wanted to draw my own biography in a literary way or literally, but rather that what I lived through and what I saw and what I thought at a certain time is somehow reflected in my work. It is always in close contact with what goes on in my own experiences at that time.' His paintings and prints of gently rolling pastorals, with their cascading strokes and visionary demeanor, are inspired by his many summers in Maine.
