Arkhaios XVII

 

Doris Seidler

  1912 - 2010 (biography)

1965  

open-bite relief etching from a copper plate, printed in toned white 

13 3/4 x 16 7/8" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

11 of 20  

pencil dated after the signature, titled in lower center, and editioned in lower left; further inscribed by the artist in the lower right margin: "Coll. of Post College / Smithsonian Inst. Wash. DC. / U.S.I.A. 

 

ivory Van Gelder wove 

published 

artist 

DOS184 

$2,500.00 

"Arkhaios XVII" is from a series of works Doris Seidler did in the 1960s. The word is of Greek origin and means 'ancient' or 'primeval', pertaining to the beginning of the world. Doris Seidler was one of a number of printmakers, many of whom were women, that worked at Hayter's Atelier 17 in New York, a workshop devoted to intaglio experimentation at all levels. One of the techniques she experimented with was using acid on copper to eat away the plate and create a dimensional, tonal surface which she printed adding only a gray-white ink. The overall effect is like incised Egyptian hieroglyphics. Seidler 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 (The King's Speach) 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. 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.