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 accompanied her husband on a trip 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.
Seidler was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists, Society of Canadian Painter-Printmakers and the Print Club of Philadelphia. She was award three fellowships to the McDowell Artists Colony and was a resident artist at the Tamarind Lithographic Workshop in Los Angeles. Her work was featured in numerous international solo exhibitions and, according to her curriculum vitae, garnered twenty-four awards. Collections holding her work include the British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Doris Seidler, witty and charming, was creating and promoting her artwork well into her nineties. She passed away in New York at age 97 on October 30, 2010.
Doris’ son, David Seidler, has been nominated for 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 to name a few.
