Helen Siegl
(1924-2009)
Austrian-born Printmaker Academy (now University) of the Applied Arts in Vienna, the alma mater of Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoshka, but her passion for graphic art grew out of hours spent at the city’s Benedictine Monk David Steindl-Rast. For a time, she even considered becoming a cloistered nun at the Mount Saviour Monastery, a religious community of the Benedictine rule, where the family had gone on retreats since the 1950s. Her old friend and fellow Austrian émigré, Brother David Steindl-Rast was a senior member there. As long as her health allowed, Siegl made the one mile trek to the monastery each day through pastures and woods for morning Mass and evening Vespers, using the hours in between to work on prints in the signature style she had adopted early in her career, recalling both folk art prints and German Expressionist graphics.
Siegl lamented the fact that celebrated contemporary artists no longer felt a responsibility to the greater community. She considered art-making to be a form of Christian service and made her prints available for reproduction in church publications in special volumes like Clip Art of the Old Testamentand Clip-Art: Block Prints for Sundays, Cycles, A-B-C. The artist’s passionate concern for social justice, shaped by her experiences in war-torn Europe, comes through clearly in her illustrations for (Ecclesiasticus) 3:30, Isaiah 58:7, taken from the Old Testament clip art series.
For Siegl, art and religion shared a common quest for “mystic experience.” She believed the artist had a prophetic mission to “wake people out of numbness” and present life as a “new creation.” Her art-making revels in the complexities of nature but points to the New Heaven and Earth to come. In prints like Mystic Dance the boundaries between the physical world and the life of the spirit dissolve, and we catch a glimpse of the Peaceable Kingdom, where children form a ring with tortoise, toad and beetle and defy gravity in a line dance reaching toward the sun.
Siegl’s favorite themes come together in