When Giovanni Segantini died unexpectedly on September 28, 1899, at the age of just forty-one, he was already an internationally celebrated artist. It is not surprising that the artists of the Vienna Secession in particular revered the great symbolist Segantini as a pioneer and role model. Less obvious, however, is the fact that a contemporary physician spent years studying the painter's biography and work. Convinced that Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic research could "also provide important information about the laws of artistic creation," the neurologist, psychiatrist and Freud student Karl Abraham (1877-1925) wrote a treatise in 1911 entitled Giovanni Segantini: A Psychoanalytical Essay. In a critical assessment of this study, the lecture focuses on the themes of motherhood and death, which dominate Segantini's artistic work and writings and are treated quite ambivalently, and explores this ambivalence in exemplary works. The Sils Art and Literature Tour Days will open at 5 p.m. with an aperitif and an introduction to the program. You are welcome.