Segall Brazil 1913-2013

The group of works exhibited at the exhibition Segall Brazil, 1913-2013, is part of the celebration of the one hundred years of the exhibition presented by this artist in 1913; it offers an anthological selection of works from the trajectory of research by Lasar Sagall, a Lithuanian photographer living in Brazil.

A central part of this exhibition is a display case with graphic pieces from the first exhibition—invitations, catalog, visiting cards and gold book—showcased a documental corpus of great relevance for the consolidation of modern painting in Brazil.

The selection of works by the curatorial team at the Museo Lasar Segall took in account several periods of the artist's creations that depended on the interests of this immigrant who, living in Brazil since 1923, established themes that were intimately related to life; the Jewish Culture, Brazilian nature, the way of been and the dramas involving the human existence.

The Museo Lasar Segall, located in the building that housed Segall's former residence-studio, was founded in 1967 as a civil association. Is the result of the efforts of the Segall family and the Instituo Brasileiro de Museos, IBRAM, to consolidate an institutional project constituted by a group of works by the artist, a library and a center for cultural activities.

The group of initiatives for the commemorative edition of the one hundred years of the first exhibition in Brazil was presented alongside the exhibition entitled Segall Brazil, the project of a careful selection of images from the Archivo Fotográfico Lasar Segall. There are records of the artist's everyday life; friends, working spaces, and accounts of several periods of production.

The Project of the exhibition 60 Photographs from the Collection was divided into five segments that followed the format of the archive: Family Album, The Artist's Montage, Photography as Art, Photography as Exploration and Reflection about Reality, and Photography as Referent. Impressions by Segall about meaningful moments in his artistic trajectory, in Brazil and abroad.

Among the important records in the collection, the curatorship underscores the careful record by Segall of the Brazilian landscape through a decisively ethnographic gaze.

As an emblematic action, both the exhibition Segall Brazil and the exhibition 60 Photographs from the Collection, established a renewing dialogue with the life and the work of the artist. They were encounters with the manifestations of creative exploration committed to the human condition.

Segall Brazil included paintings and sculptures, lithographs, graphites, woodcuts, dry point, watercolors and washes, and invited visitors to survey five decades of artistic production. A sensitive gaze attracted an interest in the reality of the tropic, in the life in the favelas, in the drama of the social problems of the country.

From the collection of engravings, the exhibition highlighted Dos Mujeres del Mangue con Persiana (Two Women of the Mangue with Blinds, 1928) drypoint on paper, a reading of Segall's impressions after contacting the area of Mangue in Rio de Janeiro during the 1920s. With firm strokes, two figures behind blinds recreate the suffocating environment of the prostitution world.

Another equally important work about Segall's meaningful experiences in the area of Mangue: Two oil on canvas nudes from 1930, resume his attempt to capture a bohemian environment invaded by the cutting luminosity going through the blinds that reveal and hide the bodies.

Bosque Crepuscular (Forest at Sunset, oil on canvas from 1956), synthetizes a wide ranging series of explorations by the artist that are revealed in the cubist matrix of his works, the use of ocre and green colors over red dirt, in dir...