Blitzed Gothic

Doris Seidler

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 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 chaotic 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.

Doris Seidler left England and arrived in the United States in 1940. She began to study printmaking with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York and spent almost ten years working at the atelier. Much of Seidler’s earlier work was delicately rendered, if explosive, meditating on war, religion, and the fractured landscape of post-World War II England.

Seidler 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. She married Bernard Seidler and together with their son, David, they sailed to New York in 1940. Seidler soon discovered Stanley W. Hayter's Atelier 17 where she learned the techniques of printmaking. She worked in the intaglio processes as well as woodcut, lucite engraving, and paper collage.

Doris accompanied her husband on a trip to Leningrad in the summer of 1958. She met a few of the city’s artists and later recorded her visit in “Report from Leningrad” which was published in the first issue of Artist’s Proof. In 1963, Seidler and fourteen other artists were commissioned by Business Week to create color woodcuts depicting U.S. cities. Her contribution was the city of Cleveland and her woodcut is illustrated on page 15 in “Woodcuts of Fifteen American Cities from the Business Week Collection.”

Doris Seidler, witty and charming, was creating and promoting her art well into her nineties. She passed away in New York on 30 October 2010 at the age of ninety-seven years old.

Doris' son, David Seidler, went on to become a screenwriter, winning an Oscar for his screenplay "The King's Speech", based in his own experiences with stammering which developed when the family came to America by ship during WWII.