Artist Shaped by Tragedy and Faith
St. Anthony Messenger
May 2004
FROM BEHIND the yellowing forsythia, a raccoon followed by her little ones comes traipsing up the steps. Mourning doves, goldfinches and a blue bunting frequent the feeders. Chipmunks and mice hide in the woodpile. Squirrels scamper about the porch's beams. On the elbow of a downspout, a robin builds a nest.
Her aging bones slightly bent, the owner of this post-and-beam chalet obliges her guests by filling the empty aluminum pie tins with seed or food scraps. For two-legged guests such as this author, she serves up a slice of Linzertorte and a cup of dark, thick Viennese coffee.
Her name is Helen Haselberger Siegl, internationally renowned printmaker and illustrator, whose woodcuts, lithographs and etchings grace public and private collections throughout the world. The National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are among the institutions with examples of her work.
She has illustrated books ranging from Aesop's fables and Indian tales by Random House in the 1960s, to Nigerian and Turkish folktales issued by Texas Tech University Press in the last decade. Her clip art, published by Liturgical Press, appears frequently in worship aids and diocesan newspapers.
Along the way, she has earned a number of honors, including the 1990 New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book Award for The Dancing Palm Tree and Other Nigerian Folktales.
As evident as her hospitality to humans and beasts is her vision of peace and beauty, sculpted out of tragedy. As noteworthy as her artistic acclaim are her devotion and faith.
Cultural Beauty, Historic Horrors
To understand Helen Siegl's art is to appreciate her spiritual journey from war-torn Vienna, Austria, in the 1930s and 1940s to this present-day hillside in New York's southern tier.
Vienna resembled the apocalypse from Hitler's annexation of Austria in March of 1938 to the rumble of Russian tanks down the Ringstrasse in 1945.
Helen grew up amid food shortages coupled with civil strife, war and the nostalgic allure of Vienna's gilded past.
"Before the Anschluss [alliance between Germany and Austria], we lived off the charm of Mozart and Beethoven, our architectural feats and the brilliance of Freud and Jung," Helen muses in broken English. "But during the occupation it was the Eucharist that fed us hope and my art that gave me flight."
A wispy smile, a disarming candor and sudden pauses mark her recollections.
One moment she recalls with girlish delight the years before civil strife and Hitler. Those years included Sunday morning Mass at the Imperial Chapel with the Vienna Boys' Choir or evenings spent at the Musikvereinsaal (home of the Vienna Philharmonic) lost in a Brahms concerto or traveling across meadows of goldenrod and thistle in a horse-drawn wagon at her grandparents' farm in the vineyard country, northeast of Vienna.
With amusement, she reflects on the ironic juxtaposition of sin and forgiveness, the structural dignity of St. Stephen's Cathedral next to the seedy brothel of Madam Rosa. With sorrow, she remembers the day when her Jesuit confessor, Johannes Schwingshackel, an outspoken critic of the Third Reich, was dragged off to Dauchau by the SS. Helen and her brother had met with him just hours earlier.
Though faint, the eerie, echoing click of the Gestapo's boot is not far from her mind. Equally surreal are the cries of her fellow students trapped in the wine cellar of an abandoned Cistercian monastery-turned-school after an aerial bombing. Fighting over a dumpling to be shared with a cousin and boiling peas for hours to skim off the thick layer of bug infestation are remembrances that prompt a pensive frown and a survivor's incredulity.
The unsettling silence of night, the constant caution, the sight of children playing in the rubble of a gutted building while their mothers rummage for family heirlooms is never distant enough. Nor are the images of dead, bloated bodies or the forlorn faces of hunted Jews she helped shelter from the SS.
Worse is remembering saying something that would lead to another's arrest. "Such guilt was worse than death," Helen ponders. "After all, dying had lost its dread."
From Adversity to Compassion
Following liberation and the occupation of her district of Vienna by the Russian army, Helen reflects on her father's fate after being dragged off to a work camp: the panic of not knowing his whereabouts; candlelit appeals to St. Anthony for his safety.
"Only as I got older could I see how this awful adversity awakened our compassion," Helen says. "Suffering not only strengthened our faith by bringing us closer to God but also brought about a greater sincerity and mindfulness."
It was this dependence upon a greater good, this deepening of the senses and compassion that allowed Helen to rise above the horror of war through her drawings, etchings and woodcuts.
Art museums like Vienna's Albertina stirred her gift. But her faith-plus the cathedrals and chapels, the Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque architecture-contributed spiritual imagination.
"The Imperial Chapel or St. Stephen's Cathedral provided a visual escape and a hope of eternal things as opposed to the chaos and pain that surrounded us," Helen says.
Her brownish-green eyes brighten as she recalls the allure of the catacombs and the wooden carved statues of Christ, the saints and Mary:
"These churches were a union of religious and artistic expression, a spiritual and artistic refuge and release."
She adds, "It was easy to become overwhelmed by all the death and destruction and forget our creative urge. But these places of worship reminded us of what good we can aspire to. We can destroy cities or build churches and temples to praise God. We can kill each other or create symphonies. We can draw and reflect on the beautiful or destroy it .... Evil denies the creative act."
While Helen acknowledges the grace that difficult times often bestow, it is her desire to transcend tragedy to celebrate the sacredness of life that becomes apparent in her acts of creation.
Spontaneous, Spiritual Harmony
Out of nothing but a piece of pine or oak, Helen renders her magic. As the v-shaped gouge overcomes the wood's resistance, figures and themes-mythical, legendary or ordinary creatures but mostly biblical characters, scriptural events, saints and children-are given spirit. What she assembles from reality she spins with imagination.
With placid faces, her figures dance or find merriment while sitting atop a wildflower or riding a goose or popping out of the eyes of an owl or a cat.
Whether the figures are pirouetting like the winged seed of a maple, sailing with dried dandelions, hand in hand around the cross or swept away on the tiger-striped wings of a swallowtail butterfly, her woodcuts blend the exotic and the familiar.
"Seeking the mystery of God in all of life's creatures has given me a lifetime of grace. It also has become a healthy addiction," Helen grins while giving due credit to God.
Humbly, she adds, "Hopefully, my woodcuts, my art, reflect that gratitude."
After she inks a design and presses it onto rice paper, the natural beauty of the wood's grain harmonizes with her use of hue and symmetry. The quiet sense of color and the visual rhythms invite the viewer to step into her world, one of ineffable serenity.
Like that of the woodcut artist Albrecht Dürer, her work is slightly surreal. Simplicity and a nostalgic dreaminess create an illusory sense of place and time. Unlike her medieval predecessor whose blocks and prints are dense with detail, sharp and cold, Helen's pieces are spiritually inviting; where the subject has the emotional power to enchant, where ecumenism, peace and gentleness loom large.
Her fascination with every single feather or petal-a tortoise's scaly plates, the down of an owl or the white pattern of Queen Anne's lace-fuses an empirical eye for the real with metaphorical interpretation. It is the stuff of dreams, of hope: the gaiety of children, the kindness of beasts, the mysteries of the Immaculate Conception or the Transfiguration.
All are imbued with a singular or collective grace and insight. All her figures intuit wonder and inner peace. All reside in a mystical place where humans and nature coexist in harmony, suspended in time and untouched by external woes. There is no existential angst, no suspicion or fear.
Pondering her themes, the pattern of her images, the textural depths, the soft engaging colors and the rhythm in her work, a viewer leaves the familiar for an instinctive revelation of the internal, invisible sensation of feeling. No tension exists between visual content and interpretation. There is no sense of control; nothing seems measured.
Though fairy-tale in quality, her art does not evince a misty, bottle-bottom view. Tied to nature without being directly imitative, Siegl fashions a reality whereby one is in spontaneous, spiritual harmony.
Behind all Helen's work, a single dynamic emerges: the joy of God's mystery in everything and everyone. She acknowledges that life is a blur between the sacred and the secular. Her circular lines suggest a spiritual communion with God. Her interlocking patterns convey the kinship of all things in an imagined "natural" state. Round faces with minimal or shared facial features reveal freedom from pretense.
The rhythmic patterns imply resurrection: her dancing prophets, cats with flutes and children riding a goose celebrate their ascent from the humanly discernible, the mortally rational, into the mystery of the soul.
"Rather than package creativity or let the expectations and reactions of others limit it, we should be celebrating the creativity that is within all of us," Helen states. "There's an art to everything. There's an art to maintaining a garden or tending to God's creatures or how my father made everyone feel loved. The reward for creativity is to be in touch with God."
In a world where commercialism manipulates our individuality and rationalism's hold on our lives seems resolute, her world reaffirms the mystical, the spiritual. Her figures take a critical stand against the external, societal forces that condition our inner lives.
Often she inverts the obvious to allow a revelation of the extraordinary-a cat cuddling a little girl or a flower cradling a lady. As with the birds and beasts she feeds or the flowers and trees she tends on this knoll, it is her desire to delve beneath the surface of what is to show us what can be.
Passion for Justice and Beauty
In a city known for its neoclassical and Gothic edifices, Helen studied architecture and design at Academie Für Angewandte Kunst (Academy of Applied Art) under the distinguished Professor
Oswald Heardtl. But her passion for the woodcut as a medium of aesthetic expression remained.
"As a young girl I spent many long afternoons and evenings in Vienna's Albertina [Museum] studying drawings and prints from late Gothic to modern. Appreciating the symbolism, the subject matter, the symmetric or asymmetric composition, and the use of color, pattern and line in the work of individuals like [Michelangelo] Buonarroti, [Albrecht] Durer, [Hans] Holbein, [Rembrandt] Van Rijn and [Egon] Schiele."
After graduation, Helen worked in Heardtl's studio from 1946 until 1951. At this time, she began publishing her work in a children's magazine, Der Goldenewagen, founded by Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine bridge-builder between East and West.
After considering a religious life with the cloistered Benedictine nuns at Nonnberg, made famous by the 1965 movie The Sound of Music, Helen met and married Theodor Siegl. In 1952, Helen and Theodor left Vienna for Montreal. When her husband was appointed conservator of paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, they moved to Pennsylvania.
In Philadelphia, Helen resumed her artistic career, making relief prints from wood, plaster and linoleum blocks. It was her development of the plaster-block technique during the war, when wood was scarce, that brought her international attention.
Over the next 35 years, she honed her craft. Between raising a family of seven sons and one daughter, exhibiting her work around the world and illustrating books, she became an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam. She befriended the Berrigan brothers and her house became a gathering spot for local antiwar activity.
This modest artist who rarely speaks effusively about her work becomes animated at the mere mention of an economic or political injustice. She minces no words, spares no indignation.
The mid-1970s were especially difficult for Helen, after losing her father, her husband and her son Michael to cancer. Over the years, she has cultivated a close relationship with Mount Saviour Monastery, thanks to Brother David Steindl-Rast and the monastery's founder, Father Damasus Winzen. Renowned as a leader of the liturgical movement, Father Damasus died in 1971. Helen left Philadelphia in 1990 to settle in the wilds of upstate New York.
Helen's remaining sons live in the eastern and southern United States. One son, Andy, lives within a stone's throw of his mother. Helen's daughter lives in Vienna, Austria. Though all her children have an artistic flair and are acquainted with many media, none have chosen a career as artists.
Nature's Cloister Near the Benedictines
On this hillside, nature is not always kind. Winters are long and bitter, raccoons are sometimes rabid, and mosquitoes and ticks carry the potential for harm.
Despite the passage of time, Helen can still hear the siren's shrill, accompanied by the droning sound of a single bomber or the roaring quake of a fleet. At unexpected moments, forgotten looks of grief or panicky voices reappear.
Yet the daily reckoning with death that war rendered also brings to mind the gentle feel of her father's thumb as he marked the cross on her forehead, the warmth of her mother's hands cupping her face. At 79, osteoporosis threatens to rob Helen of her mobility. No longer can she take up her walking stick for the two-mile hike to Mount Saviour for morning Mass. But despite nature's uncertainty, memories of war and her failing health, Helen remains faithful to a larger vision.
Like the woodblock that takes shape in her hands, she is content with gouging out possibilities with her imagination and faith. It is a rejection of the "way things are" for the essence, the feel, of a finer nature.
"We all have experiences of tragedy, death and pain, as well as unity with nature, with love, with beauty, art, music, dance and, ultimately, with God. Awe and wonder, joy and ecstasy have greater power than death and suffering .... Being creative, recognizing God's mysteries, is our earthly vocation, our affirmation of life."
A possum comes seeking food. A visitor seeks solace. In this peaceable kingdom of Helen's making, she realizes that difficulties create the catalyst for emotional transcendence and spiritual joy. It is the ultimate religious aim.
Whether looking through the eyes of a child, a cat or an aging artist, she is willing to be present with life in its delight and sadness, its rawness and splendor. It involves an intimate appreciation, a compassionate understanding for everything and everyone in order to enter a more extraordinary world. It allows her to see our oneness with God.
It is this inseparability from God's creation that is embedded in Helen Siegl's life and art. It is her expression of this greater good that allows us a sense of the holy.