Page 47 - Studio International - July-August 1969

spread from Berlin all over the country, than the term tends to imply, closer to dude colour as enrichment and as expressive
always with the basic intention of bringing Fauvism than to Die Brücke, but making power- charge; others are radiant with colour used
about the closest possible union of art and ful use of strong colour and firmly constructed constructively. He named the whole series
public. on the canvas. From 1914 to 1920 he lived `equivalents' : each area of the picture is given
German Cubism was well represented in this with his family at Ascona in order not to have the same pictorial presence, which means also
Group, in numbers and in its full stylistic to return to Rumania and go to war. There that each part of the subject is given the same
range, from naturalistically based painting he moved from his Expressionism to a personal value. His means to this aesthetic and ethical
incorporating a stylization process borrowed form of Cubism which he continued to egalitarianism was the basic modern one of
from such men as Marcoussis and Metzinger, develop after his return to Berlin in 1920. complementarity— light acting against dark,
to the sort of absolute geometrical art that From that year, until its breaking up in 1933, colour acting against contrasting colour. He
some thought the logical extension of Cubist he was one of the directors of the November resisted the assumption that a well-composed
theories. The Group did not stand for any Group. picture must have dominant passages, and
particular theories of art, like other German Segal's Cubism is not easily described. It saw in it a symbol of human conflict in all
groups (e.g. Die Abstrakten who described seems to have originated from the example of spheres. In his pictures, as in nature, every-
themselves as an international association of Delaunay in that it involves the more or less thing was to be equal : 'the eye of the spectator
Expressionists, Futurists, Cubists and Con- regular dividing of the canvas into rectangular had to give the same attention to all parts,
structivists), and so its members had full areas, and also, often, the spreading of divi- and the painted frame was meant to indicate
liberty of development. Among the Cubists sions and the colour and tonal shifts that that a picture is no limited section but con-
the general trend was pretty uniform: a mark them onto the frame itself. But Segal tinues into infinite space'.
gradual relinquishing, between say 1922 and was not as concerned as Delaunay was with These paintings, done between 1917 and
1927, of abstractness for the sake of more colour. He was very much concerned with 1927, are his main contribution to modern
direct representation. The reasons for this light, but this concern could be expressed in art and they deserve to be known much
apparent regression are complex and lie at the oppositions of light and dark as much as in better. Lissitzky and Arp admired them, and
heart of German consciousness. One simple colour oppositions. Some of his Cubist paint- included one in their highly selective survey
contributing factor was the growing denuncia- ings are tonal in effect, even when they in- of modern art, the book Kunstismen. Lissitzky's
tion of 'difficult' art as anti-social formalism:
left-minded artists, once denounced as bol-
shevists by the establishment, found them- Street 1924
selves attacked as bourgeois reactionaries by Oil on canvas, with painted frame
39 x 304 in.
the progressive cause they sought to serve.
2
Malevich's big retrospective show in Berlin, Chicago 1926
in 1927, was the last major manifestation of Oil on canvas, with painted frame
the constructive spirit in pre-1945 Germany. 3
Dutch harbour 1925
One of the best, and probably the most sym- Oil on canvas, with painted frame
pathetic, of German Cubists was Arthur 4
Segal. His fame has been obscured by his Still-life with flowers 1911
Oil on canvas
independence of galleries, by his later return
to a naturalistic style of painting (of high
quality), and by the fact that historians have
always confused him with a much less interest-
ing painter, Lasar Segall, who ended up in
South America. He was very active in the
progressive art movements of Germany: he
helped to found the New Secession in 1910
(and his wife Ernestine was its secretary), and
he played a leading role in the November
Group. He kept himself financially inde-
pendent by teaching; that is, he ran his own
painting schools, the last of which, in Hamp-
stead continues to function in the hands of
his daughter.
He was born in Rumania in 1875. At the age
of seventeen he moved to Berlin to attend the
Academy. For a while later he studied under
Adolf Hoelzel, the teacher also of Itten,
Schlemmer and Baumeister. He underwent
the major influences of his time: Impression-
ism and Neo-Impressionism, Munch, Van
Gogh and Segantini. After travels in Italy and
France he settled in Berlin and began to show
with the German Impressionists at the
Secession exhibitions.
The earliest paintings of his I have seen date
from the New Secession years, i.e. from the
time when the Secession selectors would no
longer accept his pictures for exhibition. They
are expressionist, more or less : rather calmer