This article considers the work produced by the Lithuanian-born painter Lasar Segall as it explores the question of how “Africanism” became part of the local identity in Latin America following the emergence of modernism. Jorge Schwartz refers to the literary and artistic aspects of Segall’s painting as he reflects on the phenomenon of blackness in Brazil. The article explains how interest in this was closely related to the primitivism that was in vogue among the historical avant-garde in Europe. Interest in such matters among Latin American artists was prompted by their exposure to foreign movements in the early twentieth century, and was further encouraged by both industrialism and the positivist ideology of progress. It was, however, the search for a national identity (in countries with black populations) that influenced that approach. Discussions on the question of Afro-American roots were not, in Schwartz’s opinion, nuanced references to either exoticism or hedonism. In Segall’s paintings, however, it was a question that allowed him to reflect on problems he had begun to explore while still in Europe, and which in Brazil, he expressed in terms of human tragedy, exclusion, loneliness, and poverty.  

Jorge Schwartz wrote this essay for the catalogue for Lasar Segall: un expresionista brasileño, the exhibition curated by Vera d’Horta that was shown in Brazil at the Museu Lasar Segall and in Argentina at both MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) and the Museo de Arte Moderno, 2002. In his essay Schwartz compares the thematic presence of the concept of blackness in Latin American art and literature, referring to the work of writers such as Raul Bopp, Jorge de Lima, and Manuel Bandeira, and artists including Xul Solar, Joaquín Torres García, and Pedro Figari, among others. He attempts to show that the focus on African subjects was influenced by contact with the European avant-garde. In his opinion it was not a spontaneous type of “discovery” that was somehow separate from the production of art; there were links that included “Afro-Americanism” at a thematic level. As distinct from Emiliano di Cavalcanti’s exotic view, Segall took a different approach; his melancholy sensibility and commitment to social justice led him to address the black issue as he had addressed the Jewish issue in the expressionist paintings he had produced in Europe. He replaced the lushness that was prevalent in Brazil and other Latin American countries with an alternative that considered the peripheral and poverty-stricken nature of the subject.     

Lasar Segall (1891–1957) was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, where his family was part of the Jewish community. He enrolled in the School of Applied Arts in Berlin and, in the early years of the century, spent time at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1912, he settled in Brazil, where his siblings were already living. The Centro de Ciências e Artes de Campinas (SP) bought one of his paintings: Cabeça de menina russa (1908). He returned to Europe during the First World War. Joining forces with a group of German painters (such as Otto Dix) he cofounded the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe in 1919. After an exhibition of Russian art in Hanover in 1921, he was in touch with Kandinsky. In 1923, Segall returned to Brazil. He painted a mural at the Pavilhão de Arte Moderna, a meeting place for artists and intellectuals at the home of the great promoter of the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922, Dona Olivia Guedes Penteado.

[As complementary reading, see the following articles by Lasar Segall in the ICAA digital archive: “Existe uma arte judaica?” (doc. no. 783319); “O expressionismo” (doc. no. 783352);  Mangue (doc. no. 1110480); Poemas negros (doc. no. 1110581); “O que é a SPAM, que se inaugurou quinta-feira à noite” (doc. no. 783486); and “SPAM (Sociedade Pró-Arte Moderna) – Manifesto” (doc. no. 783455)].