Abstract Composition #1

Doris Meyer Chatham

A gestural Abstract Expressionist lithograph, done by Doris Meyer Chatham while studying art in Paris in the late 1950s. Doris Meyer travelled to France to study printmaking with Stanley William Hayter, who had returned to Paris and re-opened Atelier 17 in 1950, and with whom she continued to correspond with Hayter throughout the fifties and sixties. Following her time in Paris, in early 1955, she and Heinrich Meyer divorced and Doris started driving to parts unknown, ending up in the Pacific Northwest. In Seattle she studied printmaking at the University of Washington with Glenn Alps who taught her lithography and collagraphy. After graduation she landed a job teaching art at Everett Junior College in Washington.

This appears to be a scarce impression, as we as yet have been unable to find one in this colorway and of this particular caliber of mid-century abstract sensibility. Chatham "registered" her screenprints by cutting the register marks into the paper; as such, the margins sometimes present slight tears at the ends of the cuts. One presents at the cut in the lower margin but does not reach the image nor the annotations.