Lasar Segall

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Painting of Mário de Andrade by Lasar Segall

Lasar Segall (July 21, 1891-August 2, 1957) was a Brazilian painter of Lithuanian Jewish origin.

Segall was born in Vilnius, but moved to Berlin at the age of 15 and studied at the Royal Prussian College of Fine Arts. Frustrated with the academic school of painting in vogue there, he left for Dresden in 1910 and began developing his own style, which incorporated aspects of Cubism while exploring Segall's Jewish background. In 1912 he went to São Paulo, Brazil, where three of his siblings were already living. He returned to Dresden shortly thereafter, but had already been greatly influenced by his time in Brazil, which transformed both his style and his subject matter. Several of his paintings in this period feature the Brazilian jungle, often represented by a mass of green geometrical shapes. His painting Encounter shows an interracial couple, a common but socially complex Brazilian phenomenon.

In 1923 he moved with his first wife, Margarete, to São Paulo, where he organized a major solo exhibition the following year. Segall continued to spend time in Germany (where his first son, with his second wife Jenny, was born), but became a naturalized Brazilian citizen in 1927. The painting shown here, of the modernist poet and theorist Mário de Andrade, was painted that year; through Andrade, he would have had access to many of the major figures in the Brazilian modernist movement.

From 1928 to 1932 he lived in Paris, where he developed for the first time an interest in sculpture (even his bronzes of this period, though, reflect Brazilian themes). He returned to São Paulo permanently in 1932, to a combination house and studio designed by the modernist architect Gregori Warchavchik, where he lived for the rest of his life. The house is one of São Paulo's iconic modernist buildings, and is now a museum devoted to Segall's life and work.