Halen, La Ciotat (Harbour Scene)

During the First World War Segal began to make optical experiments in his painting, developing a distinctive type of prismatic Cubism. La Ciotat is a port in the south of France near Marseilles. Painted in 1929, Segal’s dazzling image of a peacetime harbour shimmering in the sunlight gives no hint of the darker future. His artistic experiments sought to break with a single point of focus or dominance in painting and here he combines his knowledge of Impressionism (as a means of representing light) with his individual and striking variant of Cubism, dividing his canvas into eight carefully constructed and balanced schematic fields.