Eternal Wanderers

Lasar Segall

1919

Painting of five figures with geometric heads and bodies.

At first Eternal Wanderers seems like an abstract assemblage of colorful shapes. A closer look, however, reveals a group of people, young and old, with mask-like faces, teetering on tilting ground. This cubist and expressionist painting is one of a series of works that Segall made about victims of war in the aftermath of World War I. The painting itself has a peripatetic history. It was confiscated by the Nazis from a museum in Dresden, exhibited in the 1937 traveling “Degenerate Art” show, and later hidden with other looted art in France. It was eventually recovered after World War II and sold to the artist’s widow in Brazil in 1958.

Credits

Lasar Segall Museum. IBRAM/MinC. Photo by Jorge Bastos.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 8.

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Creator Bio

Lasar Segall

1891–1957

The son of a Torah scribe in Vilna, Lasar Segall traveled alone at age fifteen to Berlin to study art. He became involved with the expressionist school, and his work, like that of many German expressionists, dealt with the themes of poverty, powerlessness, and social deprivation. In 1923, he settled in Brazil, where three of his siblings were already living. Though geographically distant from the horrors that engulfed Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s, in his work he powerfully addressed the upheaval, dislocation, and brutality unfolding there.

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