MASP

Segall was greatly influenced by German expressionism. In 1913, he briefly visited Brazil, holding the first exhibition of avant-garde painting in São Paulo, which received positive reviews from the critics. In 1923, he moved definitively to the city. The house where he lived with his wife, Jenny Klabin (1899-1967), today houses the Museu Lasar Segall, in Vila Mariana. Born in a period tormented by wars and religious and racial persecutions, his artworks depict the suffering of common people, victims of historical conflicts. The painting Interior with Indigents (1920) uses gloomy colors to portray the miserable conditions of one of the many families of peasants and factory workers soon after World War I (1914-18). In the foreground, a woman is holding a baby; in the background, a man is seated at a table. The lighting is bluish, nocturnal. As also seen in paintings by Marc Chagall (1887-1985), another artist from a Jewish background, the geometricized decomposition of the form is used to describe the human condition. The faces are large, as though to emphasize the expression of anguish present throughout the scene. One of the sides of the woman resembles an old lady: there are wrinkles above that eye and her hair on that side is white.

— MASP Curatorial Team

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The canvas War was donated to Masp by the artist’s request. Painted in Dresden, its subject matter lies on the hub of the complex emotional realm of German Expressionism in the immediate post-war period, laden with critic connotations that oscillate between nihilism and socialist content. Particularly remarkable in this work, even more than an occasional Cubist trace, is the artist’s interest for African sculpture and the interference of formal simplifications in the reductionist treatment of volumes characteristic of woodcut printing. In the 1920s Segall made intense use of this print technique highly appreciated by Expressionist artists. Later the artist was to resume these simplifications in his woodcut Mangue Woman with Venetian Blinds, conserved at Museu Lasar Segall, that revisited a few elements present in the Masp canvas, by transferring to the Brazilian scene the degraded and desperate indoor themes of postwar Germany. By and large the painting resembles the large-format canvas Interior with Diseased Family (140 x 173 cm), of 1921, conserved in a private collection in São Paulo, that may be viewed as a first sketch of this work. Because of its dimensions, comparable to those of mural paintings, as well as for its social content and epic treatment, the composition is typical of the years that followed World War II, during which so many artists expressed their chagrin before the horrors of Nazi-Fascism and the war conflict in general. The canvas belongs in a series of works with similar themes, most of which were taken from the sketchbook Visions of War, including Pogrom (1936-37), Migrant Ship (1939-1941), and others. In 1941 Segall produced a series of drawings titled War, that to a certain extent were preliminary studies for the work in question.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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