Moonlight & Structure is an intaglio created in 1952 by British-born American artist, Doris Seidler. After printing her intaglio, Seidler trimmed the paper and tipped it onto a support sheet of ivory wove paper. Then in pencil, she signed, dated, titled and numbered it 1/1 beneath the image on the support sheet. In the lower left sheet corner, she further inscribed it: Atelier 17 – Coll. DS. Burin/Etch/AT. Gouge. Moonlight & Structure was printed at Atelier 17, New York, and the image area measures 4 x 4-7/8 inches and the paper measures 11-7/8 x 8 inches.
This marvelous abstract color intaglio was created with engraving, etching, aquatint, and gouge, and was printed in color as a monoprint. It reminds one of stretching out and lying down to view the night sky away from ambient city lights. Layers and components of the sky become visible as our eyes adjust to the darkness. A waxing crescent moon hangs above a sky dappled with starlight while a vortex of dark masses parade as constellations. The rigid dark structure of grids and intersecting lines suggest the constraints of mankind compared to the unbounded flow of the natural world.
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. 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.”
Seidler was a member of and exhibited with the Society of American Graphic Artists, the Society of Canadian Painter-Printmakers, and the Print Club of Philadelphia. She was awarded three fellowships to the McDowell Artist 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. Doris Seidler’s work is represented in the collections of the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the British Museum, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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.
