Exodus

Doris Seidler

Doris Seidler used three plywood blocks to create this woodcut, the olive colored block had a deep, distinct grain to the wood which she used to create the ripples of the water. Two figures on what appear to be stilts, cross a body of water; in the lower left an object, perhaps a ship, enters the water from a canal. In the right foreground an abstracted figure can be seen running to the water, all escaping an unidentified threat.

The work 'exodus' is from the Greek word for departure and "Exodus" is the title of the second book of the Old Testament in which the Israelites escape slavery in Egypt. The Oxford Dictionary defines exodus as “a mass departure of people, especially emigrants.” According to World101 Global Era Issues, “More than 250 million people – roughly one out of every thirty people currently live in a county in which they were not born. With more people than ever on the move, it’s important to understand what drives migration because it’s increasingly likely that people will encounter–or become–migrants in their lifetime. People move for a lot of reasons, which are often called push and pull factors. Some people are pushed to leave their countries because of conflict, natural disaster, or persecution. The conflicts ongoing in Ukraine and Syria, for example, have displaced millions of people. The majority of migrants, however, are pulled to countries that offer better economic prospects for themselves or their families. It’s quite common that a mix of push and pull factors affects a person’s decision to migrate. In the past thirty years, the number of international migrants rose by over 80 percent.”

Doris Seidler, painter and printmaker, was born Doris Falkoff in London, England in 1912. Little is recorded of her early life but it's known that her father owned a leather goods shop in 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 and Bernard made the decision to emigate to the United States and move the family out of the country. Bernard, Doris, and their son, future playwright David Seidler, sailed for New York in 1940.

By this time Doris Seidler was an amateur artist, seemingly self-taught. While Bernard continued to work as a fur broker, Doris’ world widened with her discovery of Hayter’s Atelier 17. Stanley William Hayter, also an evacuee from war-torn Europe, moved his famed Atelier 17 from Paris to the New School in New York and Doris worked there as a student, learning the techniques of printmaking. The Seidler family returned to England in 1945 to find their homeland devasted by bombing, and life for Londoners depressed. The stark landscape moved Seidler to record her observations; among the works produced at this depicted the heavily damaged Coventry Cathedral, a 1951 lucite engraving titled 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, paper collage and collagraph.

Doris Seidler, witty and charming, was creating and promoting her work well into her nineties. She passed away in New York at age 97 on 20 October 2010.

Ms. Seidler was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists (SAGA), the Society of Canadian Painter-Printmakers and the Print Club of Philadelphia and exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum, the First Hawaiian National Print Exhibition, the Honolulu Academy of Arts; the Society of American Graphic Artists, the Kennedy Gallery, and many others. The Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institute, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Seattle Museum of Art currently hold her work.