Arthur Segal

Private Collection, Switzerland

Berlin, Kunsthandlung und Antiquariat Josef Altmann & Fraenkel & Co., Kollektivausstellung von Arthur Segal, 1921, no. 5
Berlin, Kunsthandlung und Antiquariat Josef Altmann, Arthur Segal, 1922

Wulf Herzogenrath & Pavel Liska (ed.), Arthur Segal 1875-1944, Berlin, 1987, no. 216, listed p. 337

Painted on board and on the artist's wooden frame. The board is stable but with a slight undulation to the centre of the upper and lower edges. There are a few scattered small spots of retouching in the composition mainly towards the centre of the left framing edge, and a few small areas of retouching on the frame, visible under UV light. There is some light craquelure mainly towards the centre of the left edge. This work is in good and stable condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue, although the colours in the lower part of the frame are less purple and more blue in the original. The whites are brighter in the original.
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The Romanian-born artist Arthur Segal lived in Germany at the end of the 19th Century, joining the Berlin Academy of Art in 1892. By 1904, his career as an artist was recognised: he was exhibiting at the Berliner Secession and later became one of the founders of the Neue Secession exhibiting alongside the German Expressionist painters Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. With the break of the war in 1914, Segal sought refuge in Ascona, Switzerland, where he lived until 1920. During this period he met Hans Arp and Alexis von Jawlensky, and continued to produce his most iconic and vibrant images.

It is in this Swiss setting that the primacy of vision and the close observation of nature become of central importance for Segal's formal development. The breaking down of the present picture into four parts and the extension of the central compositional work to the frame enhances its divisional element. As an avant-garde gesture, Segal attempts to erase any central focal structure. Segal's biographer Ludwig Hilberseimer explained: 'the eye has to deal equally with every part of the picture. There are no more differences... he searches through colourfulness- and bright differences to achieve a harmonious whole, equality with only painterly means. Also, the frame has a new significance. The frame doesn't finish, but continues – producing the relation to the cosmos...' (Wulf Herzogenrath & Pavel Liŝka, Arthur Segal 1875-1944, Berlin 1987, p. 148, translated from German).