The last time Lasar Segall received significant notice in a North American publication was nearly a half century ago, which perhaps gives some idea of the potential for rediscovery in the large retrospective exhibition at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art.
Some of Segall’s work was in the acclaimed 1991 show devoted to artists the Nazis had declared “degenerate,” but only now is his full career being revealed to viewers in the United States, and it was at once remarkable and remarkably solid.
He was born in the Jewish ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania, a circumstance that forever influenced his paintings, prints and drawings. As art historian Reinhold Heller has written in the exhibition catalog, Segall’s “sole subject was suffering humanity” during his avant-garde years in Germany, but the concern also surfaces in later, more pacific decades as a modernist in Brazil.
Segall’s father was a Torah scribe, so it was inevitable his art should touch upon specifically Jewish themes, and the exhibition is organized around the theme of wandering, which applied to the artist both literally and figuratively.
To escape Russian anti-semitism, Segall moved in 1906 from Lithuania to Berlin. After studies at the School of Applied Arts and Royal Prussian College of Fine Arts, he joined the Dresden Fine Arts Academy as a student teacher in 1910. Two years later, he visited Holland to see the vernacular subjects of Josef Israels, who influenced Segall, and made a first, yearlong sojourn with relatives in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Segall’s art changed relatively little despite these travels. At first he worked in an Impressionist style; then he became a moderate avant-gardist. But upon returning from Sao Paulo to Dresden, he found the artistic climate had altered considerably, favoring an expressionism that for some time had lain beneath the surface of his paintings.
Segall immediately threw himself into the expressionist milieu and in 1919 became a founding member of the Dresden Secession Group. Numbered among his friends were no less than Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky. When Segall is recognized in the United States today, it is invariably for the dark, angular, self-consciously primitive works from this period.
Soon enough, however, he turned to Magic Realism and Constructivism while retaining characteristic subjects of the disenfranchised and urban poor. These subjects resurfaced after 1923, when Segall resettled in Sao Paulo, even though his palette had lightened and strong rhythmic shapes began to dominate his compositions.
In Brazil Segall still was held in thrall by concepts of “the primitive,” but they showed a different character, and while he renewed contact with themes of social and political suffering, he never quite gave persuasive form to ideas of a purer, more benign primitivism until he became a nature painter with mystical leanings after World War II.
Some of the late pictures from the 1950s — Segall died in 1957 — unconsciously echo the animal symbolism of an expressionist such as Franz Marc from nearly a half century previous. But stronger works treat the motif of a virgin forest in such a way that it borders on the abstract, showing a connection with, say, modern stripe painting that is visually if not philosophically harmonious.
At last Segall seemed to have freed himself from the oppressiveness of the human condition, to meditate in a quiet, unpeopled world that preceded the folly of man and would probably outlast it. This final “emigration” is, then, purely imaginative and for the artist was possibly the most satisfying of all.
Every stage of his development, however, contained groups of strong pieces, and the exhibition complements them with photographs, letters, sketchbooks and exhibition catalogs that flesh out individual periods.
It’s an unusually full show for the Smart, some of it looking a little cramped in the temporary exhibition space, but the density pays off in a revelation of genuine power and accomplishment.
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“Still More Distant Journeys: The Artistic Emigrations of Lasar Segall” will continue at 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. through Jan. 4. A 284-page bilingual catalog is available from the museum at $39.95 paperbound.
