Still More Distant Journeys: The Artistic Emigrations of Lasar Segall, the first major United States retrospective of the work of preeminent Brazilian artist Lasar Segall (1891-1957), opens at The Jewish Museum on February 15 and remains on view through May 10, 1998. A major contributor to the development of German Expressionism and Brazilian modernist painting, Segall left a rich legacy of passionate and dramatic artistic responses to the many places he lived in and visited, including Vilnius, Berlin, Dresden, and São Paulo. The extensive travels of Lasar Segall had a profound effect on his aesthetic vision.

The exhibition presents over 200 works - most never exhibited in New York before - including paintings, watercolors, prints and drawings. The artist's sketchbooks and photographs, as well as postcards, popular literature and guidebooks, will also be on view. These works, as well as articles of ephemera, illustrate Segall's changing cultural and artistic identities and provide a visual expression of his search for a place within an adopted culture.

Documenting the Diaspora of the Jews and embodying notions of "exoticism" and "primitivism" in modern art, Segall's work examines a range of issues significant to today's global culture and politics.

The exhibition was co-organized by the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Lasar Segall Museum, São Paulo, National Institute of the Historic and Artistic Patrimony, Brazilian Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with the São Paulo/Illinois Partners of the Americas. It is an initiative of the Partners of the Americas, and comes to The Jewish Museum from a showing at the Smart Museum of Art.

Born in the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius, Lithuania, Segall - one of eight children of a Torah scribe -spent his childhood immersed in the traditions of Orthodox Judaism. His first exposure to international aesthetic and political concerns came as a student at the Berlin Art Academy. Travels to Germany and Holland followed from 1909 to 1912. Segall went to Brazil, a country that had a great impact on his work, late in 1912 for his first exhibition, held in March 1913. Later that year he returned to Germany and, due to his Russian citizenship, was interned as an "enemy alien" for the duration of World War I. In the following years he was introduced to such artists as George Grosz, Otto Dix and Kurt Schwitters, and founded with Conrad Felixmuller the radical artists' Dresden Secession Group 1919 to promote an Expressionist avant-garde aesthetic philosophy and organize exhibitions. Lasar Segall was a featured artist in the 1991 exhibition, "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde In Nazi Germany at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, a recreation of the exhibition of avant-garde modern art staged by Hitler to vilify such work.

Though Segall's initial trip to Brazil had no visible impact on his work in Germany, it was the catalyst for his emigration ten years later. After moving to Brazil in 1924, Segall became an influential figure, infusing Brazilian modernism with the color, psychological intensity, and spatial distortion characteristic of the German tradition. Brazil came to represent the artist's new identity and culture, although he continued to travel, including numerous trips to Europe as well as the United States, throughout the rest of his life.

Still More Distant Journeys focuses on the changing national identities of Segall and the diverse ways he was able to immerse himself in new cultures. Throughout his travels, the artist maintained particular interest in human psychology, wandering and loneliness, which is reflected in his oeuvre.

In his early works, Segall frequently portrayed scenes from the lives of the Jewish poor, influenced by such older Jewish artists as Isidor Kaufmann, Lazar Krestin and Hermann Struck. Jozef Israels, the most celebrated and influential Dutch artist at the end of the 19th century, known for portraying Dutch peasants and fisherman, as well as motifs from Jewish life, also provided inspiration. During a four week stay in Holland, Segall spent much of the time in an old age home, producing such works as the pastel study, Old People's Asylum (c. 1909), showing women sitting in their dining hall with the light shining brightly through large windows and the figures in shadow. Two Jewish men, surrounded by emblems of sun and moon, the Star of David, and arches of Vilnius's Great Synagogue, gaze out from Segall's 1920 woodcut, Holy Day, its black and white planes conjuring a realm of Jewish Russian mystical melancholy. Segall's woodcut technique, a trademark of Expressionism, closely followed contemporary practice in Dresden, with broad, flat, black and white surfaces and simplified forms.

Segall's profound preoccupation with identity, culture and travel is apparent in such oil paintings as Self-Portrait II (1919) and Torah Scroll (1933). In other paintings and prints, the artist celebrates the exotic atmosphere, people and vegetation of his adopted country, evident in Brazilian Landscape (1925), which also reveals the influence of Paul Klee, whom he first met in 1920. In a watercolor from 1924, Geometric Landscape, Segall adopts a childlike approach to form, color and perspective, representing the Brazilian countryside in shifting views, treating trees, animals, and houses like hieroglyphs, in an economical and abstracted vocabulary. After World War II, Segall became increasingly interested in a spiritualism focusing on a universal humanism and communion with nature. The artist was particularly drawn to the peaceful life of animals, as in the watercolor and gouache drawing Cattle in Moonlight II (c. 1954).

A 284-page fully illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition provides the first detailed discussion of Lasar Segall in English and is organized according to the principal stages of his cultural emigrations: from Lithuania to Germany to Brazil. It is available for $39.95 in The Jewish Museum's Cooper Shop.

Still More Distant Journeys: The Artistic Emigrations of Lasar Segall has been possible by grants from The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Smart Family Foundation, Inc., The Brazilian Ministry of Culture, and The Safra Bank, Brazil. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.

The presentation at The Jewish Museum is supported in part by The Smart Family Foundation, Inc.