Girl with a red Hat

Arthur Segal painted this around 1910 in Berlin, where he had settled after leaving his native Romania to study art. These were the years the young avant-garde was pulling away from the official Berlin exhibitions. In 1910 a group of rejected artists formed the Neue Secession, and Segal showed with them alongside the Expressionists of Die Brucke. A bright, simply built picture of a girl in a red hat sits right in that moment, when strong flat colour was becoming a value in its own right. Segal went on to help start the Dada movement in Zurich during the First World War, and later worked out his own theory of spreading a painting's interest evenly across the whole surface. Born in Iasi in 1875, he would die a refugee in London in 1944.