Painter who migrated to Brazil from Germany and was overwhelmed by the colours of Brazil and the misery plaguing Europe.

Lasar Segall left his home of Lithuania as a young man to pursue studies in Berlin, during the course of which he familiarised himself with the work of the Expressionist and New Objectivity movements. He visited his siblings in Brazil in 1913, before returning to Germany several months later. Letters and postcards reveal that he maintained contact with a number of Bauhaus teachers including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Lyonel Feininger. In 1923, Segall made the decision to emigrate to Brazil. Once there, he soon established himself in the avant-garde scene and integrated the concept of Brazilian modernism into his work. He increasingly depicted Indigenous and Afro- Brazilian people and, like other 19th-century European artists, was particularly intrigued by the country’s lush tropical flora. Throughout the course of the 1930s, Segall’s artworks grappled with themes of persecution, the fate of refugees, and the generally devastating situation in Europe. His work was banned from German museum collections by the Nazis and condemned in their Degenerate Art exhibition. The 1930s saw the vibrant colours of the 1920s replaced with shades of brown and grey. The rhetoric of Nazi art criticism, which was primarily targeted at Jewish artists like Segall, was also adopted to an extent in Brazil, with Segall branded a “degenerate” artist there as well.