SEGAL, ARTHUR

SEGAL, ARTHUR (1875–1944), German painter. Born at Jassy, Romania, he moved to Berlin in 1892 to study at the Academy of Art. In 1895 he continued his artistic training in Paris and Munich at the private school of Schmid-Reutte and Fehr. Segal began as an impressionist painter and started to create landscapes such as The Meadow, The Field of Wheat, or German Landscape in the period 1896–1903 (private collections) under the influence of the neo-impressionist Giovanni Segantini. In 1903 he married his cousin Ernestine Charas and returned to Berlin, where he exhibited various paintings at the Berliner Secession Gallery in 1907 and 1909, his style of painting now changed to Neo-Expressionism. In 1910 he and 27 other artists, among them Heckel, Tappert, Kirchner, Richter, and Schmidt-Rottluff, founded the organization Neue Sezession, a movement that revolted against German impressionism. Segal chose still life, landscapes or urban views as his motifs to express his new attitude to painting. From 1914 to 1920, deeply shocked and terrified of the brutality of World War I, he lived in Ascona, Switzerland with his family. Back to Berlin, his intellectual approach to painting then caused him to change his style again and to evolve an individual form of cubism, dividing many of his pictures into four equal parts. Most of these paintings stem from the period of 1922 to 1925 and show abstract compositions in cubistic forms with a prism-like scheme of intense colors. One of his most well-known paintings, is Prismatische Konstruktion (1923, Petit Palais, Geneva). When Hitler came to power, he left Germany for the Spanish island of Mallorca and in 1936 settled in London, where he founded "Arthur Segal's Painting School" for professionals and non-professionals, which became a synonym for therapy with the help of the arts. He died during the London "Blitz" in 1944 of heart failure. His books include The Objective Impersonal Laws of Painting (1929). -ADDED BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. Herzogenrath, P. Liška, Arthur Segal, 1875–1944 (1987; with catalogue raisonné). (Jihan Radjai-Ordoubadi (2nd ed.)