“Poissons”

Year:	1962
Medium:	Etching
Dimensions:	28,5 x 25,5 cm
Printer:	Lacourière et Frélaut, Paris
Signature:	Bottom right in pencil

Czech, 1923–2016. Terry Haass is one of the most outstanding modern printmakers, whose mastery of colour etching has been widely admired. Terry Haass trained under S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17, and understudied him as chef d'école. In The Artist and the Book in France, W. J. Strachan writes of the etchings of Terry Haass, "her designs – abstract but always possessing some link with reality – are controlled but full of verve; the colour, subdued when necessary, is often rich and glowing… the sheer technical accomplishment is overwhelming and one is not surprised at the success of her exhibitions of these works and separate prints.” Terry Haass was born Tereza Haass, into a Jewish family in Cesky Tesín, Moravia, in what was then Czechoslovakia. By 1939, having fled the Nazis, Terry Haass was studying art in Paris, and by 1941 was in New York, a scholarship student of the Art Students' League. From 1947 Terry Haass worked with Hayter at Atelier 17, taking over the direction in 1950. In the 1950s Terry Haass also studied archaeology, and took part in digs across Mesopotamia; this informed her great work, Inanna. Her exhibition "Homage to Albert Einstein" travelled Europe in the late 1970s. Her closest personal and artistic allies were Hans Hartung and his wife Anna-Eva Bergman. Although largely abstract in style, the art of Terry Haass is infused with spirituality, and a sense of the building blocks of the cosmos and space-time. See: Peter Spielmann, Terry Haass: The Graphic Work, 1997 (catalogue of a huge retrospective at the Bochum Museum).