Blitzed Gothic

 

Doris Seidler

  1912 - 2010 (biography)

1951  

lucite engraving 

21 x 12 1/8" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

proof 

titled, lower left; dated after signature; inscribed verso: Coll. British Museum 1990. Lib. of Congress Wash DC. Pallant House. 

 

slick ivory wove 

published 

artist 

DOS121 

SOLD

English-born, New York-based artist Doris Seidler left Britain after the fall of Dunkirk to the Germans in 1940, with her husband, Bernard, and her son, David. It’s unknown if she’d studied art prior to leaving England, but when she arrived in New York she discovered the workshop of famed printmaker Stanley William Hayter, Atelier 17. There, she took courses for several years in the art of experimental intaglio printmaking, including this technique of lucite engraving, before returning once again to England with her family in 1945.

Seidler’s experience upon arriving in London was a sombre one. The city as she’d known it was gone, altered drastically by warfare. Among the most oft-recorded images of post-war Britain and Europe were the bombed-out structures of centuries-old cathedrals, powerful reminders of the indifferent nature of weaponry. In “Blitzed Gothic,” Seidler captures the Coventry Cathedral using an angular Modernist lens. Destruction, and the beauty that can be found within, is powerfully laid out on the paper, the shards of broken stained glass shown contained within the still-standing frame of the structure, engraved with delicate precision in Lucite.