He was the scion of a pharmacist clan in Piatra Neamț, but abandoned the family trade to take up drawing, and became a student at Munich's Academy of Fine Arts.
Praised as an intellectual as well as a painter, he moved away from Art Nouveau, studying Cubism and Expressionism, and exchanging ideas with a young Marcel Duchamp.
Vorel also worked as a cartoonist for Der Komet magazine, befriending Albert Bloch, Hanns Bolz and Erich Mühsam, and frequenting Café Stefanie.
Maintaining some interest in Romania's modern art scene, he was featured at Tinerimea Artistică shows and published sketch stories in Bucharest's literary magazines.
He maintained a lively interest in politics and military developments, expressing his continued support for the Central Powers; he was also increasingly pessimistic about the future of art, and about his own ability to thrive.
This period brought him into contact with Romanian writer Nae Ionescu, who was his admirer and promoter, but Vorel's notebooks suggest that their friendship was superficial.
Born to Czech-Romanian parents at Iași, on Copou Hill,[2] Lascăr was the great-grandson of Anton Vorel, a well-known herbalist who had arrived in Moldavia from the Kingdom of Bohemia.
[3][4] Anton had set up the main pharmacy of Piatra Neamț, which doubled as his medical practice; in tandem, he served as consular official for the Austrian Empire.
[10] As he recalled in adulthood, his passion for drawing was first cultivated during his time at the Boys' School in Piatra, and was picked up from a talented schoolmate, Mărgărint, "my first and final master".
[8] Around 1896, he was shortlisted for a national competition held at Tinerimea Artistică society in Bucharest—the event was also attended by Ignat Bednarik, a boy of Moravian Wallachian origin, who took first prize; despite their momentary rivalry, they became good friends.
"[19] As noted by critic Valentin Ciucă, Vorel was both a shy man with a "complex interior life" and a modernizer, "interested in artistic synchronism, with all newness that existed in art at the start of the century.
[8] His artistic vision fully incorporated Cézanne's geometrical guidelines,[22] resulting in what writer Dumitru Iov viewed as "moderate cubism".
[29] Although Vorel ultimately refused to join any particular group of artists, his work shares common traits with that of several German Expressionists—including George Grosz,[30] Otto Dix,[31] and Oskar Kokoschka.
[35] His main stylistic choice was contrasted by works depicting his home region: concentrating on wider compositions and landscapes which included more emotional portraits of peasants and artisans, he made use of lighter tones of color.
[33][36][37] Journalist Constantin Dănciuloiu found these works to be reminiscent of two classical painters, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Nicolae Grigorescu;[36] another reviewer, I. Cristian, suggests that they were characterized mostly by a "tarnished" palette of "worn-down vegetation".
[32] Vorel's private papers document his bouts of anger and depression; in 1915, he described his trade as a form of "clowning around", noting that, at any moment, "hell can reign upon my dwarfish life".
[41] Ionescu reports that Vorel consulted the Tinerimea catalogue during a regular meeting at Café Stefanie—passing it around to his German colleagues, including Bloch, Bolz, Franz Marc, and Frank Wedekind.
[45] While Romania still kept neutral, Vorel derided its pro-Allied agitators, including Octavian Goga and Ioan Toplicescu, endorsing instead the pro-German Petre P. Carp.
[2][8] This was curated by Petru Comarnescu who, in 1968, also put out the first Vorel monograph at Editura Meridiane, introducing him as both a Romanian artist who "never fit in with German art" and a "modern humanist".
"[59] By 1975, the Neamț County Museum Complex had received funding to purchase Vorel's Romanian paintings, exhibiting them alongside other acquisitions (from Aurel Băeșu, Aurelia Ghiață, and Constantin Daniel Stahi).