In “A Biography of My Landscape” published in Art in America (June 1963), Peterdi wrote, “I have all this in me…The flowers of my garden, and the arid rocks of the West. The sea, the sun, the wind and the rain. All miracles of nature and behind it all the lingering terror of the atomic age. I want to paint all this, and say, A man was here.”
Born in Pestujhely, Hungary, Peterdi studied at the Academia de Belle Arti in Rome, and later in the 1930s, at Atelier 17 in Paris. He was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1930. Peterdi has worked alongside such artists as Joan Miro, Alberto Giacometti, and Max Ernst. The artist was a great innovator in printmaking techniques. He devised elaborate ways of color printing by collaging copper plates. Peterdi devoted his life to his art and to teaching, working at such renowned Institutions as the Brooklyn Museum of Art School in New York, and Yale University.
