Background

Arthur Segal was born on July 13, 1875 in Iași, Iași County, Romania. He was the son of a banker.

Education

Arthur Segal 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.

Career

Arthur 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 under the influence of the neo-impressionist Giovanni Segantini.

In 1903 Arthur 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. 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.

In 1933 he was no longer welcome in Germany. Isolated from cultural life, which had been aligned with Nazi ideology, subject to antisemitic hostility and without the opportunity to exhibit his work or earn a living, he had no future as a painter or teacher. As a result Segal decided to leave Berlin with his wife and daughter and move to Mallorca, where his son was already working as an architect. Later, he immigrated to London and succeeded in opening painting school.

Besides his work as a painter, a painting teacher and his numerous functions in the artist community, Segal created woodcuts, wrote book-manuscripts, published numerous essays in art-journals ad newspapers. One of his book manuscripts is called The objective principles of painting (1937).

Achievements

• Arthur Segal was a distinguished painter. His prismatic painting was marked by maximum recognition. He was the founder of "Arthur Segal's Painting School" for professionals and non-professionals, which remained open until 1977. His works are held in thr Indianapolis Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, Jewish Museum in Prague, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Art of Romania, San Diego Museum of Art, Tate Museum, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

Works

More photos

• illustatration

  • Vom Strande. Page 5

    1913

• illustration

  • Vom Strande. Cover

    1913

  • Vom Strande. Page 1

    1913

  • Vom Strande. Page 3

    1913

  • Vom Strande. Page 7

    1913

  • Vom Strande. Page 9

    1913

  • Vom Strande. Page 11

    1913

  • Vom Strande. Page 13

    1913

• painting

  • Selbstbildnis

    1908

  • Weg nach Kynwasser (Riesengebirge)

    1908

  • Flori de salcie

    1909

  • Still Life with Fruits

    1911

  • Ascona im Herbst

    1915

  • Die Königin von Saba

    1918

  • Femme au Piano

    1918

  • Der Bildhauer

    1919

  • Schneeschipper (Snow Shovellers)

    1919

  • Heligoland

    1923

  • Street with church

    1924

  • Die Brücke in Rügenwaldermünde

    1925

  • Harbour on Bornholm

    1928

  • Still Life with Oranges

    1929

  • Still Life with Sunflower

    1931

  • Portrait of a Man Against the Light

    1935

  • Still Life and a Window

    1935

  • Still life with cucumber

    1937

  • Sunflower

    1940

  • Still Life with Bottles

    1943

  • Stilleben mit Gläsern

    1943

  • Der Sündenfall

  • Die Melkerin

  • Eliyahu

  • Figures in a wooded park

  • Flowers

  • Marseilles

  • Still Life of Flowers

  • Still life with banjo and clarinette

  • Still Life with Vegetables

  • Street in Heligoland II

  • The Artist in the Studio

  • Woodburning

  • Woodcut

Views

In addition to his work as an artist, Arthur Segal was interested in psychology and psychotherapy and conducted correspondence with many famous psychoanalysts and psychiatrists of the time. He especially researched the effects of painting in order to cure mental illnesses, and his attempts were acknowledged among psychologists and psychoanalysts alike.

Membership

Arthur Segal served as director of the "The November Group", a group of German expressionist artists and architects.

• Arthur Segal and 27 other artists, among them Heckel, Tappert, Kirchner, Richter, and Schmidt-Rottluff, founded this organization, a movement that revolted against German impressionism.

  New Secession , Germany

  1910

Interests

• psychology, psychotherapy

Connections

In 1903 Arthur Segal married his cousin Ernestine Charas. They had a daughter and a son.

Spouse:

Ernestine Segal

Daughter:

Marianne Segal

Son:

Walter Segal

Walter Segal was an architect. He developed the Segal self-build method.

References

• Arthur Segal 1875-1944
  1987
• Arthur Segal, 1875-1944 German Edition
  1987