Big City Blues is a color woodcut created in 1960 by British born, American artist Doris Seidler. It is pencil signed, titled, dated and editioned P 5/10. Big City Blues was printed by the artist on a fine, ivory laid paper and the image measures 20-3/4 x 18-1/8 inches.
Doris Seidler left England and arrived in the United States in 1940. She began to study printmaking with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York and spent almost ten years working at the atelier. Much of Seidler’s earlier work was delicately rendered, if explosive, meditating on war, religion, and the fractured landscape of post-World War II England. With Big City Blues, Seidler captures the frenzied pulse of New York’s Broadway. Skyscrapers loom over and provide a backdrop for the agitated beat of commerce, sound, light, and humanity.
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 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.
