Helena Scigala

The Berlin graphic artist Helena Scigala has until now belonged to the so-called "lost women" of art, those women who were well-known and honored during their lifetime but who were excluded from public perception after their death - also for reasons of gender-hierarchical processes of tradition.

Her works touched and impressed people of all generations at the time, as evidenced by a multitude of letters to the artist (often sent to the publisher's address after a publication about her). The image motif "Mother and Child" was a central theme of the graphic artist, who herself was completely absorbed in her role as a mother. She created a wide range of human emotions, from intimate love to deadly fear.

Helena Scigala, who is counted among the most important visual artists of the former GDR, and whose works were contemporaneously appreciated as reminiscent of those by Käthe Kollwitz, did not have a life path that we would describe today as simple or barrier-free. While Helena Scigala was by no means alone in her generation in the 20th century and in the middle of Europe, she had to overcome several obstacles simultaneously to assert herself.

In biographical research about the artist, a perspective that younger historical scholarship calls intersectional can be usefully applied. This refers to the presence of multiple and overlapping underprivileges in one and the same person with regard to criteria such as gender, socialization, dominant role patterns, profession, religion, or citizenship.

Greatly abbreviated and only related to gender, profession, and nationality, it can be stated for Helena Scigala: she was underprivileged as a female orphan and later as a single mother in the 1950s; she was underprivileged as a woman in the visual arts, and she was underprivileged for a long time as a stateless person in the GDR.

Through her love relationship with a married man, the then art student found herself in the status of an unmarried pregnant woman; afterward became a late childbearer by contemporary standards, with her age of almost 31 being six years above the average of her generation group in Germany, and finally remained for almost two decades a working mother who was "single-parenting" in the full sense of the word.

The structural disadvantages and the obvious unequal treatment of women in the art business of the GDR (see also the gender-specific data under the point "Exhibition participations") applied equally to Helena Scigala. However, she also experienced mentoring in the male-dominated professional field, especially through her teacher Prof. Arno Mohr, as well as motivation and patronage from her older companion Herbert Tucholski. After the political upheaval of 1989 in Germany, the by then 68-year-old fell victim to the individual social disruptions of this event and is an example that "poverty in old age" particularly often affects women.

Additional investigations are still needed on the negative effects of statelessness, which ended only on the artist's 52nd birthday with the presentation of a GDR citizenship certificate. Her position as a non-academic in the circle of the artistic intelligentsia - as a youth she was only able to complete elementary school - would also deserve to be examined more closely.

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