Lasar Segall

Biography

In 1937 ten works by Lasar Segall were shown in Munich at the Nazi-sponsored “Degenerate Art” exhibition. He had moved to São Paulo back in 1923; he had been born in Vilna, the son of a Torah scribe.

The date of his birth is uncertain: it is most often given as 21 July 1891 (9 July, Old Style), but 1889 and 1890 also occur.

In 1906, at fifteen, he arrived in Berlin and studied at the Royal Academy of Arts. By some accounts he stayed there until 1909 and then briefly studied in St Petersburg; by others, until 1910. Academic teaching did not suit him, and at the end of 1910 he moved to Dresden, where he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. There he joined the circle of German Expressionists, met Otto Dix and George Grosz, and was close to Die Brücke (The Bridge) and to the Free Secession. His early paintings show anxious figures in cramped space, with exaggerated features; in 1912 he made his first series in a home for elderly mentally ill people. At the end of 1912 Segall first travelled to Brazil, where several of his brothers and sisters already lived. In 1913 solo exhibitions of his work were held in São Paulo and Campinas, and the Brazilian public saw European Expressionism for the first time. Then he returned to Dresden. In 1919, together with Dix, Conrad Felixmüller, Otto Lange and others, he founded the Dresden Secession, Group 1919. In Dresden there appeared a book of five etchings, “Souvenirs of Vilna”, and two books with his lithographs, “Bubu” and “The Meek One”. In 1920 there was a large exhibition at the Museum Folkwang in Hagen, and a show in Frankfurt.

In 1923, when he still held Russian citizenship, Segall returned to Brazil, and soon obtained Brazilian citizenship. In 1925 he married Jenny Klabin. He travelled often to Europe, where his exhibitions took place, among them Berlin and Dresden in 1926. In his Brazilian years there appeared mulatto women, prostitutes, plantations and favelas, and from his impressions of the Mangue quarter in Rio de Janeiro grew drawings, prints and paintings to which he returned until the end of his life. “Banana Plantation” (1927) is built around the neck and head of a worker protruding from the bottom edge of the canvas. The harshness of his prostitutes and suffering figures provoked controversy.

In 1932 he returned to São Paulo and settled in a house built by the architect Gregori Warchavchik, a relative by marriage. At the same time Segall became one of the founders of the Sociedade Pró-Arte Moderna (SPAM), the Society for Modern Art, which existed from November 1932 to December 1934. It was conceived as a link between artists, intellectuals, collectors and the public, and it held two exhibitions and two costume balls, the “City of SPAM”. Its undoing was a series of disputes with the Integralists, the Brazilian fascists, among whom hostility to Jews was strong. In the 1930s he produced a series of landscapes of Campos do Jordão and portraits of Lucy Citti Ferreira.

In Europe his work was by then no longer shown, and in Germany it was banned. He turned to the themes of his Jewish childhood and the waves of emigration. In 1939–1940 he painted “Ship of Emigrants”: a crowd with impenetrable faces on the deck and the quay. To my mind it is the most direct of his works about forced migration. In the mid-1940s he published the “Mangue” series; in 1945 his works were shown in Rio at the exhibition “Art Condemned by the Third Reich”, and in 1948 there was an exhibition in New York. In 1943 a retrospective was held at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio.

From 1949 until his death he went on working on “Mangue” and made the cycles “Wandering Women” and “Forests”. In 1951 he was exhibited at the São Paulo Museum of Art. In 1957 a large retrospective was being prepared in Paris. Segall died on 2 August 1957 in São Paulo.

In 1967, on the initiative of his sons, his house and studio were turned into a museum with a library and a school of printmaking and photography.