Evanston artist Leo Segedin infused his vivid and colorful, figurative paintings with gritty looks at cityscapes featuring at-times exaggerated personages.
Segedin taught art for 32 years at Northeastern Illinois University while seeing his primary calling as an artist. In a career that spanned 75 years, Segedin brought to life his memories of growing up on Chicago’s West Side through an evolving style that some have characterized as magic realism.
“The way he built his paintings was amazing, with layers and layers of paint,” said retired art gallery owner Byron Roche, who frequently displayed Segedin’s work. “And there was so much emotion to his work. His paintings just blow people away.”
Segedin, 97, died of natural causes on Jan. 7, said his son Paul.
Leopold Segedin grew up in the West Side Garfield Park neighborhood, in a house at 3857 W. Polk St. His father was a collector for a jewelry store, and Segedin later recalled his boyhood as pleasant and typical, one of flying model airplanes and playing cops and robbers while also dodging threats from larger, tougher kids.
Segedin displayed a talent for drawing, and his mother took him to see exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago. At Crane High School, Segedin took a drafting course and had a homeroom teacher who encouraged his talent, noting that illustrators can make a living. However, Segedin’s father remained unpersuaded of his son’s preference for vocation.
“Art is a nice hobby, my father thought,” Segedin told the Tribune for a 2023 story. “But it’s no way to make a living.”
Segedin attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he majored in art and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1948 and picked up a master of fine arts degree in 1950. He then taught art for a time at Crane.
Segedin spent a short but meaningful time in an artists colony in Booth Bay Harbor, Maine, where he painted abstracts of rocks lining the shores. He served in the Army with an eye toward becoming an engineer, taught drafting and created a mural at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.
After his 1954 discharge, Segedin decided to pursue art as a career but knew that he couldn’t simply produce art to pay the bills, particularly as Chicago had just three contemporary art galleries at the time. So Segedin took a job in 1955 at what is now Northeastern Illinois University, where he taught until retiring with his wife’s encouragement in 1987.
“When many artists become professors they never go back to painting,” Segedin told the Tribune in the 2023 story. “I never gave it up.”
In 1957, Segedin teamed up with close to 30 other artists to create a cooperative gallery called Exhibit A. Segedin was president of the group, which came together to finance the $180-a-month rental and upkeep of the ground-floor gallery in the building at 47 E. Pearson St. on the Near North Side, formerly known as the Fauve.
Exhibit A didn’t last long — the building on Pearson was demolished two and a half years later — but Segedin continued exhibiting at locations including the Evanston Art Center, the Chicago Artists’ Exhibition at Navy Pier in 1958, in the Sherman Hotel art gallery and the Suburban Fine Arts Center in Highland Park.
Influenced by the social realist painter Ben Shahn as well as Dutch and Flemish masters, Segedin eschewed the nonfigurative movement in American expressionist art in the 1950s, instead retaining his humanist subject matter.
In the 1960s, Segedin started working to convey social commitment and commentary in his art. As a way to communicate his opposition to the Vietnam War and an increasingly depersonalized nation, Segedin produced paintings with titles like “Parts of Man” and “Body Parts.” A 1972 Tribune article said his use of color “demands attention and will not let the viewer remain neutral.”
“I had always been interested in social issues, but I also felt a strong sense of futility, especially after — as a child — I became aware of the Holocaust and the indifference of people to do anything about it when they could,” Segedin said in a 2012 lecture he gave at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. “I had a desire to represent such issues in my painting, but felt it was impossible to do so without trivializing them. (Later) I began to develop some ideas about how this visualization might be achieved.”
In 1982, Segedin returned to producing Chicago cityscapes. Employing finely drawn and painted acrylic and acrylic with mixed media, Segedin produced scenes of Chicago from the 1940s, including elevated trains and platforms, old schoolyards, worn and decaying brick facades and buildings, ubiquitous urban back porches, cobblestone streets and images of boys playing games. Some work included renderings of a himself as a kid.
“He saw games as serious business that definitely continued in other forms into adulthood,” said his Ben. “And of course, self-portraits.”
“I still take the ‘L’ and paint the way I recall things from the ‘40s,” Segedin told the Tribune in 1996.
In his 2012 lecture, Segedin reflected on how in his work attempting to capture old Chicago spaces, he attempted to create an experience of his memory.
“I try to paint with the sense that so much of the world in which I lived — a world that I once took for granted — has disappeared,” he said. “I remember that the neighborhood of my childhood was full of people, but all those people are gone — moved out — died. So the streets in many of my paintings are empty, but those spaces are still there. The empty rooms — the streets and sidewalks I paint — remind me of the people who once lived and walked there.”
Former Tribune art critic Alan Artner in 2002 noted that the force of Segedin’s paintings “comes from a strangeness based on past time and its modes of life.”
Artner was among the critics who placed Segedin’s work squarely in the camp of magic realism, which is a naturalistic style of painting typically carrying an intensity of mood.
In 1998, folk singer Michael Peter Smith wrote “Hey Kid!,” a song based on Segedin’s paintings. The song was featured that same year in a musical, “Hello, Dali: From the Sublime to the Surreal,” which Smith and playwright Jamie O’Reilly wrote.
Segedin completed his final painting in mid-December and then stared on a new one, despite a near-loss of vision.
Ben Segedin reflected on his father’s commitment to his craft.
“When Paul and I would visit, he would always say that ‘I’m still here’ and ‘I’m still working,’” Ben Segedin said. “He feared the fate of lots of seniors, even senior artists, and didn’t want to disappear. It was important for him to keep working and I think when he was no longer able to produce art, he was ready to go.”
In the 2012 Illinois State Museum lecture, Segedin used a distinctly Chicago metaphor to describe his work.
“The experiences of striking colors, of delicate lines and bold shapes — especially, as they create dramatic, metaphoric images — are like, well, the tang of garlic in a good, Vienna hot dog, if we can imagine such experiences as being more serious, more profound, than pleasurable,” he said.
A show titled “Leopold Segedin: Conflict & Confrontation,” opened Jan. 7 — the same day that Segedin died — at the National Veterans Art Museum, 4041 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago. The museum will hold an opening reception from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 23.
Segedin’s wife of 46 years, Jan, died in 2005. In addition to his two sons, Segedin is survived by a sister, Ruth Freedman; and a granddaughter.
A public celebration of life service is being planned.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
