Helen K. Siegl

Vienna, War, and Formation

From 1941 to 1945, Siegl studied at the Reichshochschule für angewandte Kunst Wien, now the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She began in fashion and textile work under Eduard Josef Wimmer before entering Oswald Haerdtl's specialist class for spatial, commercial, and industrial design. Her diploma project comprised working drawings for a table clock, three five-color printed linen upholstery fabrics, and a cut-glass drinking service. The examination committee rated the project “very good,” and she received her diploma on March 1, 1945, at the age of twenty. She later worked in Haerdtl's studio from 1946 to 1951. At the Albertina she studied European drawings and prints, attending closely to symbolism, composition, color, pattern, and line.

War remained part of the moral ground of her work. She experienced bombing, hunger, occupation, and the persecution of Jewish neighbors; the Philadelphia Inquirer later reported that she helped shelter Jews during the war. She answered those memories not by ignoring suffering, but by making images centered on dignity, kinship, and creative possibility.

Faith and Artistic Vocation

A devout Catholic, Siegl understood art as both spiritual inquiry and service to the wider community. Early in her career she contributed illustrations to a children's magazine founded by Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast. She considered entering the cloistered Benedictine community at Nonnberg Abbey before choosing marriage and family life.

She believed that artists should awaken people from numbness and help them see life as new creation. Her religious prints therefore avoid static piety: prophets dance, children move in circles, animals become companions, and minute natural forms are treated with reverence.

America, Family, and Printmaking

After emigrating to Canada and then settling in Pennsylvania, Siegl balanced family life with a serious artistic practice. She made relief prints from wood, linoleum, and plaster, sometimes combining processes in a single work. During wartime scarcity she devised plaster blocks as a substitute for difficult-to-obtain wood; the method became a distinctive part of her practice and brought wider attention to her work.

The plaster-block technique had an inherent weakness: the plaster could flake during printing and damage the impression. Surviving plaster blocks were varnished to help stabilize and protect their fragile surfaces.

Siegl also experimented with drypoint etching on plexiglass. Although she tried chemical etching, she did not favor the process. Instead, she incised the plexiglass directly, raising delicate plastic burrs that held the ink and produced a crisp first impression. The pressure of the etching press quickly wore those burrs down, however, so each successive impression became lighter. As a result, a plate might yield only two, three, or perhaps four strong impressions.

She also enjoyed working with collagraphs and, in a small number of pieces, combined collagraph, etching, and linocut elements. These adaptable, mixed approaches became especially valuable as arthritis gradually slowed her down, allowing her to continue exploring texture, line, and layered printmaking processes.

In 1975, Helen and Theodor's fourteen-year-old son, Michael, died after living with leukemia for a year. The loss profoundly affected Helen and deepened the spiritual and socially conscious direction of her creativity. Her faith found expression through compassion and advocacy, particularly for people living in poverty and for Black and Native American communities. For Siegl, creativity, spirituality, and social justice became inseparable.

Her illustrations appeared in children's books, religious publications, folktales, carols, and limited editions. Subjects ranged from Aesop's Fables and Mother Goose to Turkish and Nigerian folktales. Her illustrations for Barbara K. Walker's The Dancing Palm Tree and Other Nigerian Folktales were selected for The New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Books of 1990.

Publications and Exhibitions

Siegl's images reached readers through trade books, UNICEF calendars, liturgical publications, private-press works, and clip-art volumes made for church use. A 1962 review in The Harvard Crimson praised the imagination, draftsmanship, color, and technical command of approximately sixty woodcuts shown at the Paul Schuster Gallery.

Her 1995 exhibition Images from the Old Testament at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary presented colorful, intricately composed scenes including the Crossing of the Red Sea, Jonah, and the Garden of Eden. Her prints entered collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Gallery.

Mount Saviour and Later Years

Widowed in 1976, Siegl moved from Philadelphia to the Big Flats area in 1990, settling near Mount Saviour Monastery. Her family had visited the Benedictine community on retreat since the 1950s, and Brother David Steindl-Rast remained an important friend. As long as her health allowed, she walked through the countryside for Mass and returned for evening Vespers, working on prints between those rhythms.

The move brought prayer, studio work, hospitality, and close attention to nature into one daily pattern. Even as osteoporosis restricted her mobility, she continued to describe creativity as an affirmation of life stronger than suffering and death.

Style and Legacy

Siegl's prints combine strong black line, restrained color, simplified figures, and rhythmic or circular movement. Contemporary reviewers noted both their technical assurance and their affinity with children's imaginative life. Her work joins the familiar and mysterious: birds, beetles, flowers, children, saints, prophets, and angels coexist in a peaceable creation.

Her legacy also includes a public conscience. Shaped by wartime Europe, she opposed the Vietnam War, befriended Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and made her Philadelphia home a gathering place for antiwar activity. In art and life, she refused to separate faith from imagination, beauty from responsibility, or creativity from service.

In 2023, Siegl's Apex monotype press was donated to Brother François Fontanié, a young Franciscan friar and printmaker working at Saint Leopold Friary in Yonkers, New York. The gift placed one of her working tools in the hands of a new generation, extending the creative and spiritual legacy of her printmaking practice.