Railway

1910 was a turning point for Arthur Segal. Born in Iasi in Romania and trained in Berlin, that year he had his first one-man show back in Bucharest, helped found the breakaway Neue Secession in Berlin, and set out to paint modern life instead of the old subjects. A railway was exactly the kind of thing he meant. Trains, tracks, and stations stood for the new century, and choosing one over a landscape or a saint was itself a claim to be up to date. He was already beginning the optical experiments that would later break his canvases into balanced patches of colour. Within a few years Segal moved to Switzerland and fell in with the Dada circle around Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara, but this picture still belongs to his Berlin years and their appetite for the machinery of modern life.