Street in Helgoland II

Artist: Arthur Segal (Romanian, 1875–1944)

Original Dimensions: 38 3/4" x 31 1/2"

Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

About Artwork: (1924) "In 1922, Arthur Segal began experimenting with what he termed prismatisch (prismatic) painting, as he attempted to capture the optical effects of light and shadow while also achieving a uniformly balanced composition. The rhythmic, faceted surface of Street in Helgoland II, which extends over the painting’s frame, reflects this approach. Each area has been given equal pictorial value. Roughly equivalent geometric sections are painted with a distinct color gradient to mimic the effect of reflected light, a technique that lends the appearance of three-dimensionality. Adjacent shapes are pressed together to create a sense of tension. As a result, the painting seems tightly coiled, with each part working together to form a compositional whole.

Segal’s integration of bold color and light effects emerged from his exposure to disparate avant-garde practices from Paris to Italy to Munich and Berlin, where he studied after leaving his native Romania. As a young art student in France at the turn of the twentieth century, Segal had come into contact with Impressionism and its preoccupation with the depiction of light. In Italy he was introduced to divisionismo, a style that employed distinct areas of color using small brushstrokes. In Berlin, where he ultimately settled in 1904, he exhibited with the nascent avant-garde art groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, which privileged bright, non-naturalistic colors and influenced a change in his palette.

The artist’s experiences during and immediately after World War I directly influenced his interwar style. At the outbreak of World War I, Segal moved with his family to Ascona, Switzerland, a refuge for artists and utopian social community near the Italian border. There, in 1916, he devised his egalitarian principle of "equi-balance," a painterly approach that emphasized visual equivalences and pictorial balance; one might read a wartime desire for peace in the artist’s attempt at compositional unity and harmony. After the war Segal returned to Berlin and, in 1923, formed Die Novembergruppe, a loose association of radical artists that embraced a wide range of artistic styles and modes of expression, Cubism and Futurism among them. Street in Helgoland II reinterprets these diverse artistic traditions, adopting the cubist grid and fractured space of futurism to depict a road in Helgoland, a small German archipelago in the North Sea that Segal had visited with his family." - (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)