Black #1

Doris Seidler

English by birth, Doris Seidler began working with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York in 1940 and spent almost 10 years working there. This remarkable print is an example of Seidler trying to "destroy the plate" using multiple intaglio techniques, something Hayter encouraged.

Seidler chose a blank sheet of flocked paper, perhaps the type used to line jeweler's boxes, to emboss the shapes and textures of her matrix into. She then cut out additional embossed elements from a separate sheet and collaged them to the surface. The velveteen-like paper softens the hard edges of the matrix, creating a blurred, textural effect that reads like a bird's eye night view of a sleeping city seen through a shroud of fog.

Doris Seidler had been an amateur artist in England before her marriage and later, in her husband's business absences, Hayter accepted her as a participant in his wartime printmaking classes in New York in 1940, exposing her to the experimental approachs of Atelier 17. After returning to England in 1945 she emigrated to the US in 1948 and returned to working in the New York A-17 studio into the 1950s.

As an associate of Hayter's she learned not only the diverse techniques of gravure, but a philosophy centered on Hayter's overriding principle, "adequate motive", which meant that superb skills are not enough.

Doris's 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.