“I don’t know why I stopped painting,” says Irene Siegel. “I may have had a feeling of not being appreciated. Who knows? But it isn’t that I went away from painting–I went on to other things.”
At one point, the city insisted she stop working on the fresco, and Siegel was forced to leave her paints behind as they closed the doors. “It was like Pompeii,” she said afterward. “I even left my cup of coffee in the room.”
Siegel was born Irene Yarovich 63 years ago. The daughter of Russian immigrants, she grew up on the south side in Gage Park. Early on she grappled with the conflict between her own desires and what was expected by others. “I’m an only child to foreign-born parents, and some of their dreams for me I found totally unacceptable at a very early age,” she says. “I couldn’t do what my mother dreamed I should do. I mean, you know, it had nothing to do with who I was.”
During those years, Irene Siegel was dedicated to raising her family while continuing to paint, draw, and exhibit. “I worked all the time,” she says. “It was quite a life. I don’t know when I slept.” She remembers Chicago’s art scene as being “much smaller than today. Most of the established galleries were owned by Winnetka women.” Yet she found the art community close-knit and supportive. When she had her first one-person show in 1968 at Lo Giudice Gallery on Ontario Street, “Claes Oldenburg came to the opening,” she says.
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Siegel was quickly gaining recognition. In 1967 she received a printmaking fellowship at the Tamarind Institute in Los Angeles. A year later, critic Lucy Lippard called her work “impressive . . . direct and honest.” Citing a series of drawings titled “Unmade Bed,” Lippard wrote that Siegel’s work had “a freshness that derives from more than innocence, a crudity with a touch of cruelty in its insistence on the graceless and awkward in people.” Lippard later included a piece on Siegel’s “brooding, blackly humorous approach” in her book From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art.
With the help of plasterers, she began work on the mural. The tale starts with Aeneas’s escape from the burning city of Troy and his descent into the underworld. Necessarily dark and dreary, this part of the mural was painted early on, Siegel says, so she could follow the narrative and move on to depict the more uplifting scenes of the saga.
“Sad to say, but the work’s strongest impact is that of visual logorrhea.”
