Dorothy Seiberling, Influential Arts Editor, Dies at 97 (Published 2019)

Dorothy Seiberling, an influential magazine editor who championed modern artists, died on Saturday in Wilmington, Del. She was 97.

Her death was confirmed by her niece Mary Huhn.

As Life magazine’s art editor, Ms. Seiberling helped shape public opinion about the 20th century’s foremost avant-gardist artists, encouraging open-minded consideration of their importance.

Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe were already renowned by the time she produced feature articles on them, but their legacies were in question. Some art critics had written off Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist work, particularly his celebrated “drip paintings,” as chaotic and unintentional, and O’Keeffe’s as explicitly feminine — “a woman on paper,” as her husband, the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, said. (She didn’t see it that way.)

Ms. Seiberling’s articles and interviews instead posed questions and illuminated their painting processes in vivid photo essays. Rather than defaulting to statements about gender, Ms. Seiberling referred to O’Keeffe, who granted her a rare interview at her studio in Abiquiu, N.M., as “one of the most distinguished pioneers of modern American art.”

With her first husband, Leo Steinberg, regarded as one of the most important art historians of the 20th century, Ms. Seiberling amassed countless art prints, a handful of which the couple donated to the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Decades later, Ms. Seiberling gave dozens of pieces from her personal collection — including works by Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Claes Oldenburg — to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. Papers from her editorship at Life are in the archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.