The Evil Mothers

The Evil Mothers (1894) is one of Segantini's most ambitious and disturbing symbolic paintings, depicting condemned maternal spirits — women who have rejected or harmed their children — suspended in the frozen branches of Alpine trees in a wintry limbo. The subject draws directly from Indian karmic theology as Segantini understood it: the rejection of motherhood, which he regarded as the most fundamental natural obligation, condemned the soul to indefinite suspension between lives, frozen in the very landscape that sustains the life they refused. By 1894 Segantini was living in Maloja at over 1,800 metres altitude, and the extreme, hostile quality of the Alpine winter — which could kill the unprepared — provided the perfect setting for a vision of karmic punishment. The Belvedere in Vienna holds this as one of its major Segantini works, reflecting the Vienna Secession's particular enthusiasm for his combination of divisionist technique and mystical subject matter. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and other Viennese intellectuals wrote about Segantini's work with admiration. The Evil Mothers has been interpreted by feminist art historians as reflecting problematic attitudes toward female sexuality and maternal obligation, but Segantini himself understood it as a universal moral painting about karmic responsibility rather than gender-specific condemnation.

The divisionist technique must serve both the extreme winter landscape — bare trees, snow, frozen sky — and the pale, spectral bodies of the condemned women. Segantini uses desaturated, cold tones for the figures — blues, pale greys, and anemic whites — to distinguish them from the relatively warmer (though still cold) Alpine winter landscape. The bare branches are rendered as complex linear structures against the sky.