Irv Docktor

Irving Seidmon Docktor was an American artist and educator best known for his work as a book and magazine illustrator in the 1950s and 1960s. An early work on the history of paperbacks identified Docktor and Edward Gorey as executing some of the most interesting and appealing cover designs in the field.

Irving Seidmon Docktor was born on July 10, 1918 and raised in Philadelphia. He graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia, and won a scholarship to the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) and the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. A weight lifter in his youth, Docktor performed in walk-on roles with Mary Binney Montgomery's ballet troupe while he was in college as a supernumerary actor, a job he obtained one day while sketching the dancers during their rehearsal. When Docktor noticed the male lead had trouble lifting his partner, he stepped in and was offered a position on the spot.

After graduating from art school, Docktor entered the army and was trained in photography. During World War II, he served as an aerial photographer in a map-making unit in the Technical Intelligence Team based in Australia and the Philippines. The sketches he made during this period served as visual referents for some of his later work.

During this period, Docktor also pursued a separate career as a fine artist. A mural commission in 1960 led him to relocate temporarily from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to New York City, and eventually to shift his emphasis from commercial illustration. By the late 1960s he had refocused on fine art, exhibiting paintings in numerous galleries and art shows in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. In additions to landscapes and nudes, Docktor also returned repeatedly to a sequence of paintings he called the "Heritage series," featuring juxtaposed figures and faces from village life in the old world. “With technical perfection, the mystic characteristics and pathos give his art an exquisite, aesthetic quality,” remarked one reviewer in 1963.

Docktor taught part-time at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. At age 60, he began teaching full-time at the High School of Art and Design in New York City, his first full-time job, which he held for 15 years.

Docktor married Mildred Sylvia Himmelstein.

In 1957, Docktor lived in a home overlooking the Hudson River. After receiving a commission in 1960 to do murals in New York City, he spent most of his time there. In 1975, they moved back to Fort Lee, New Jersey. They frequently went to museums, the theatre, the Metropolitan Opera, the Philharmonic, the American Ballet Theatre, and the New York City Ballet. During performances, Docktor sketched what he was seeing in his copy of Playbill.

Docktor died February 14, 2008.