Lasar Segall Processes

This painting probably portrays the first wife of Segall, Margarete, who he met in Dresden in December 1913, just after his trip to Brazil.

The artist appears in the foreground, "as tall as the houses"—as he wrote in an autobiographical text—that populate the ghostly scene of Vilnius, his hometown, where a lonely little man wanders in the left corner of the image.

The Russian Village picture inaugurates, in Segall's painting, the move to geometrization in the compositions, visible in the engravings Vilnius and I (1910?) and Russian Village (1913?).

The historian and art critic, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, was the director of the Dresden Municipal Museum when they acquired the Eternal Wanderers painting, among other Segall works, in 1920.

1919 and 1920 in Germany represented a time of failure of all utopias. Men, lost and confused, roamed the great German cities, their dreams shattered.

Acquired in 1920 by the Dresden City Museum, then directed by art historian, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, this painting was taken from the collection by the National Socialist government—which rose to power in Germany in 1933, with Hitler at the helm—and was exhibited in Munich in 1937 at the celebrated Exhibition of Degenerate Art.

Segall pointed out three visual art styles for progressing from Impressionism: Cubism, Futurism, and Abstractionism.

"My Grandparents" was shown at the largest individual exhibition Segall held in Germany at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen in 1920.

This gouache seems to have a clear connection to "Eternal Wanderers" in terms of theme and composition.

Prostitution is a universal issue common to the urban centers of the Old and New World. This painting, which repeats the composition of a lithograph from the album Bubu (1921) shows a typical scene from Berlin from the 1920s.

The self-portrait "Encounter" is the first and strongest symbol of Segall's integration into Brazilian life.

In the period known as the "Brazilian phase," which began with his arrival in 1923 and extended until 1928, the presence of the colorful landscape of the tropics in Segall's work is striking.

"Old Olegario," a former slave weathered by old age, posed for Segall in front of the terrace of the farmhouse of Carolina da Silva Telles in the interior of São Paulo State.

"Boy with Lizards" is one of the paintings of Segall's "Brazilian phase." The name, given by the critic Mário de Andrade, refers to the artist's first work in our lands.

In many of the pictures created by Segall after his arrival in Brazil, the presence of pencil drawing is significant. In "Self-Portrait III," the artist stands before a blank canvas and holds a pencil, rather than a brush, between his fingers.

When Segall arrives in Rio de Janeiro at the end of 1923, he discovers the Mangue area.The impressions of this district of Carioca prostitution result in paintings, a collection of engravings made in metal and wood, from 1928 in France, and in the Mangue album of 1943.

Motherhood has been a frequent subject in Segall's work since his days in Germany.

The return to Europe, in 1928, ends Segall's "Brazilian phase." In the four years he lived with his family in Paris, until 1932, domestic tranquility inspired themes such as motherhood, landscapes and still lifes.

In 1935, Segall discovers Campos do Jordão and begins to portray this region known as "the Brazilian Switzerland."

In 1935, Mário de Andrade introduced the young painter, Lucy Citti Ferreira, to Segall. Lucy began to attend the artist's studio, working alongside him, and assisting in the documentation of his work.

Transposed to gray marble from the original clay model, the theme of the two friends undergoes a simplification of form, visible mainly in the draping of the garments wrapped around the figures.

Of all the methods used by Segall, sculpture was the one that allowed the best formal exploration of the theme of motherhood.

From 1937, under the impact of the tensions that led the world to World War II, Segall produced a series of large paintings depicting the dramatic events that had victimized humanity in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Segall's life story, in which he roams across enormous geographic, cultural, and emotional distances to become a Brazilian artist, crosses paths with the emigrants honored in this canvas, a great allegory of emigration.

A woman glimpsed behind shutters is a recurring image in Segall's works from the Mangue series. The women of this brothel district of Rio de Janeiro are almost always portrayed with both a touch of sensuality and of formal tension.

From his reflections on the uncertain fate of emigrants and the marginalization of prostitutes, the series that Segall called "Erradias" emerges in the late 1940s.

In the last years of his life, Segall resumes the "Erradias, Favelas, and Forests" series. It focused on the vertical constructions that punctuate the geography of Rio.

In the forests, the gray tones of memories of his past childhood in the woods of Vilnius were mixed with the ochers of Cézanne, the moss-greens, warm browns, and the colors of the Brazilian earth he admired.

The theme of forests occupied the last years of Segall's life, leading to the appearance of paintings, watercolors and drawings inspired by Campos do Jordão.