Woman reading

Arthur Segal made this just after the First World War, when he was living near Ascona in Switzerland among the pacifists and Dada poets who had sat out the fighting there. Out of those years he built a theory he called equivalence, the idea that no part of a picture should matter more than any other, that a reading woman and the wall behind her and the very edge of the frame all deserve the same weight. So in a Segal the border is often painted too, broken into little facets of colour, and the eye is gently refused a single focus. He had been born in Iași in Romania in 1875 and trained in Berlin, and a year or so after this he went home to Bucharest and became a driving force in the Romanian avant-garde. This canvas is held in the National Museum of Art of Romania.