Jewish Museum presents panorama of Lasar Segall

Exhibition gathers 60 works by Lasar Segall and highlights themes such as displacement, spirituality and the human condition.

The Jewish Museum of São Paulo opens on November 29 the exhibition Lasar Segall: always the same moon, developed in partnership with the Lasar Segall Museum. The exhibition brings together 60 works and offers a broad panorama of the artist’s production.

Curated by Patricia Wagner, the show adopts a poetic perspective to explore his multiple languages and the construction of an artistic identity that addresses displacement, spirituality and the human condition.

The starting point is the association between the moon and the deep human feeling Segall attributed to Jewish identity. The moon guides the exhibition path and connects memory, spirituality and collective experience.

This symbol reveals how the artist balanced personal tensions, cultural heritage and reflections on the world in each phase of his career.

Born in 1889 in Vilnius, Lithuania, and naturalized Brazilian, Segall grew up in a religious environment. As the son of a Torah scribe, he had early contact with artisanal practices that shaped his artistic vision.

In dialogue with European modernity, Segall developed a unique language that combines his Lithuanian Jewish heritage and Eastern European culture. This phase prepares the central nucleus of the exhibition.

In this nucleus, works from his expressionist period in Germany appear alongside those created after his immigration to Brazil in 1923. The Brazilian palette overlaps the dense colors of his German phase, expanding relations between form, color and space.

The exhibition also highlights how Segall absorbed the tensions of his time. In the 1930s, as the Second World War advanced, the tragic dimension of the human condition returned in works marked by opaque atmospheres and earthy tones.

In Brazil, his immigrant status exposed him to prejudice, a theme present throughout his production. During a major retrospective at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Vinicius de Moraes published an article defending him from conservative criticism.

In the text, the poet recalled an episode narrated by Rubem Braga. While looking at the moon, Segall said: “This old moon, my friend, always the same…”, a phrase that synthesizes the symbol that shapes the entire exhibition.

The show includes Eternal Wanderers (1919), confiscated by the Nazi regime in 1937 and presented in the Degenerate Art exhibition. The painting also appeared in Peter Cohen’s documentary Architecture of Doom (1989).

Visitors will also see Death (1919), from the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Red Hill (1926), from a private collection; and Poor Interior II (1921), restored especially for the show.

With an accessible approach, the curatorship highlights how Segall used different languages to build an artistic identity rooted in a specific tradition yet open to universal themes.

“By incorporating the dramas and transformations of his time, Segall turns his work into the visual equivalent of an ethical and aesthetic movement. The exhibition proposes a renewed perspective on his career.”

Lasar Segall: always the same moon reaffirms the artist’s relevance and his capacity to transform personal and collective experiences into images that inspire reflections on art, memory and humanity.

Eternal Wanderers, 1919. Credit: Acervo Museu Lasar Segall