Untitled abstract

Doris Seidler

This ink drawing was done by Doris Seidler on her 90th birthday. Seidler and her family arrived in the US in 1940 from England where she began to study printmaking with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York and spent almost 10 years working there.

Most of the printmakers at Atelier 17 were concentrating on immediacy, spontaneity combined with various intaglio techniques to create the composition. In her 80s Seidler began tearing up some of her earlier works that had not made the cut and assembling them as collages. This drawing, done in ink, mimics her collages, carefully curated shapes and linear elements that all tie together as a unit, while leading the viewers attention through a maze.

Doris Seidler, painter and printmaker, was born Doris Falkoff in London, England in 1912. Little is recorded of her early life but her father owned a leather goods shop on London’s West End. In her early twenties, Doris married Bernard Seidler, an international fur broker, and they lived in London for the first few years of their marriage. With the French and English defeat at Dunkirk, England was in peril of invasion from Germany. Bernard Seidler made the decision to leave England and accompanied by Doris and their son, David, sailed to New York in 1940.

Bernard continued to work as a fur broker and Doris’ world widen with her discovery of Hayter’s Atelier 17. Stanley William Hayter, also an evacuee from war-torn Europe, reopened his Atelier 17 at the New School in New York and Doris worked at the atelier learning the techniques of printmaking. The Seidler family returned to England in 1945 finding life austere and London’s buildings devastated by the bombing. Seidler recorded the damage to the Coventry Cathedral and featured it in her 1951 lucite engraving, Blitzed Gothic.

After three years in England, the Seidlers immigrated to New York. Doris resumed her work at Atelier 17 until Hayter closed its doors in 1950 and returned to Paris. She eventually had studios in Manhattan and Great Neck, New York, and worked in the intaglio processes as well as woodcut, lucite engraving, and paper collage.

Doris’s son, David Seidler, won an Academy Award for his screenplay The King’s Speech. His other credits include Tucker: The Man and His Dream; The King and I; Quest for Camelot; Son of the Dragon; and Come On, Get Happy: The Partridge Family Story.