George Segal

American, 1924 - 2000

(not assigned)New York, New York

SchoolPop Art; Modern Sculpture

Biographyb New York, 26 Nov 1924; d Trenton, NJ, 11 June 2000).
American sculptor. He studied at Cooper Union, New York (1941-2); Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (1942-6 and 1961-3); Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY (1947-8); New York University (1948-9); and SUNY at Purchase (1949-50). Although he began as a figurative painter in the late 1950s in the company of artists such as Allan Kaprow, George Brecht and Al Hansen (b. 1927), who were involved with environments, assemblages and happenings, he turned to sculpture in order to render human figures in actual space and to relate them to their surroundings. He was also strongly influenced by Edward Hopper's paintings and specifically by their close attention to the attitudes, gestures and comportment of the figures and by the use of urban and rural settings to psychological ends. Segal's early work was treated within the framework of Pop art because of its references to the individual's position within mass culture and its examination of the relationship between fine art and popular art forms, but he began casting plaster of Paris moulds from living models in order to capture human gesture and stance in social contexts. Once cast, the figures were placed in environmental tableaux constructed by him to lock them in time. The process of casting followed several stages, beginning with the selection of a situation such as figures waiting outside a cinema, an isolated individual at an all-night laundromat, or his own father standing in the window of his butcher shop. Segal then selected a person and a pose and cast the figure, often in clothing appropriate to the setting, protecting the hair and the exposed parts of the body with cream and creating the cast from bandages soaked in plaster and applied and shaped to the body.
In the first such works, for example Man at a Table (1961; Mönchengladbach, Städt. Mus. Abteiburg), Segal used only the outside surface of the cast, which he left unpainted, to give the figures an abstract, impressionistic and disembodied anonymous quality akin to the depersonalized social settings into which they were placed. Later in the 1960s, in works such as the Parking Garage (1968; Newark, NJ, Mus.), he poured an industrial plaster inside the cast to achieve a three-dimensional negative, which in capturing intimate details of his model's skin, expression and physical form produced more life-like figures. From the late 1960s, in works such as The Corridor (1976; Mexico City, Mus. Tamayo), he began to paint the casts in vivid colours, favouring pink, vivid blue and black as metaphors for a 'rosy disposition', a 'blue funk' and a 'black mood'. In addition to solitary figures, fragments and groups of figures in social settings, he also cast still-life tableaux after works by major modern artists, for example Picasso's Chair (1973; New York, Guggenheim).
In the late 1970s Segal instituted a series of public monuments as pointed political and ideological statements, for example Gay Liberation (1980; New York, Sidney Janis Gal.), Steelmakers (1980; Youngstown, OH), Appalachian Farm Couple-1936 (1978; Purchase, SUNY, Neuberger Mus.) and In Memory of May 4, 1970, Kent State: Abraham and Isaac (1978; Princeton U., NJ). The Holocaust (1982), for the San Francisco Memorial to the Six Million Victims of the Holocaust at Lincoln Park, consists of a group of dead or dying figures lying prone on the ground, cast in bronze from the plaster version; its subject-matter made it Segal's most controversial work. (Source: KRISTINE STILES, "George Segal," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, http://www.groveart.com, Accessed May 10, 2004)

Person TypeIndividual

Terms