Vintage Tribune: Whatever issue came up for discussion during a recent visit with artist Leo Segedin, he rested his position on an axiom: “I’m a West Side Jew boy. What can I say?”
Leo Segedin, 95, talks while sitting in front of his painting titled BLANK behind him displaying his experience as a child on Chicago’s West Side Dec. 19, 2022, in Evanston.
Segedin’s parents lived at 3857 W. Polk St., not far from the border of the Jewish and Italian sections of Lawndale. On one of his canvases, two groups of menacing-looking young men are advancing on each other.He’d be confronted with virulent antisemitism if he crossed into the non-Jewish section of Lawndale. A big kid would grab him and ask: “Are you a Jew?”
“Torn wallpaper, broken walls, cracked streets and sidewalks — that’s not sentimentalism. That’s history.”Segedin thinks of himself as a scholar who happens to work with a brush instead of a typewriter or a computer. When he went into the Army during the Korean War, his ambition was to be some kind of engineer. The Army had him teach drafting, then assigned him to create a mural at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. The finished product depicted a hunting scene in Missouri.
Returning to Chicago, he found himself face-to-face with the history of art, as he saw it. “Before the French Revolution, artists were members of the aristocracy’s courts,” he said. “With their patrons gone, they had to sell their work through galleries.”
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