Gabor Peterdi

Gabor Peterdi (Pestújhely, Hungary, 1915 – Stamford, Connecticut, 2001) was a Hungarian-American painter and printmaker who became a notable figure in American printmaking. Born to poet parents in a recently developed northern suburb of Budapest, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he began making art at an early age and at fifteen won a Prix de Rome to study painting in Italy.

After a year in Italy he moved to Paris, where he studied with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, and also attended the Académie Julian and the Académie Scandinave. Around the age of twenty-four, as World War II began in Europe, he emigrated to the United States in 1939. He settled in New York, served in the US Army in Europe, and after the war established and directed the Graphic Workshop at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. He taught at Hunter College (1952–60) and at the Yale School of Art (1960–87), and he had a strong influence on younger American printmakers.

His work kept its interest in the natural world even during the years when New York was the centre of Abstract Expressionism. In 1963 he travelled to Alaska, and the paintings and prints that followed from that experience earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. His work is held by institutions including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.