George Segal and the Nobility of Everyday Life
A Memorial Exhibition
"The mission of art is not to copy nature but to express it." These words written in 1832 by Honoré de Balzac, the protagonist of the emerging avant garde of the last century apply well to the art of George Segal, whose unexpected death last June ended the career of one of the foremost masters of late twentieth century American art. Over the course of four decades Segal embraced the spiritual ambition and ever-raw emotion of the post-war Abstract Expressionists and infused it with an abiding love of what he could sense, touch, and see—be it art or be it life. With his camera he plumbed the depths of the back streets of lower Manhattan to capture the vitality and richness of daily urban life. With artist friends and art historians, supported by frequent visits to museums and galleries, he acquired a keen sense of the art of the past, from Rembrandt to Cézanne to Picasso. With all of this he sought to achieve in his work a balance between artifice and reality, abstraction and illusion, normative representation and portraiture.
Whether George Segal is recreating a seemingly banal moment from the mundane functions of everyday life in plaster, bronze, or paint or whether he is fabricating a three-dimensional equivalent of a still-life painted by Cézanne or a Cubist collage by Picasso or Braque, there is a duality between what is real (intuitive) and what is artificial, (imaginary or cerebral). The differences are further highlighted by the introduction of real life props and the reliance upon friends as models. Nowhere does Segal permit himself to be sentimental or obsequious. Nowhere does he indulge in art for art's sake.
Every drawing, every painting, every work of sculpture, be it in relief or in the round, full or fragmented, expresses his own feelings and experience. Rarely is there irony or wit, which distinguishes him from many of the so-called Pop artists, especially Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Oldenburg. While his art celebrates life, it always reminds us of the inevitability of death. In that sense, he is, a humanist moreover one with a compassionate soul and abiding curiosity. In an interview in 1988, the artist stated" "I'd rather be sincere, naïve, dealing directly with my own passionate feelings, than to be regarded as witty or ironic." Both the praise and criticism of Segal's art can be traced to this statement. As a young artist struggling to support a family in the 1950's, Segal made abstract paintings under the influence of Hans Hoffman's teaching emulating the figure paintings of DeKooning and of saturated colors of Rothko. And some day these works rank among the finest works by a group of younger artists who included Alfred Leslie and Richard Diebenkorn. By the late fifties he was experimenting with sculpture, modeling figures in chicken wire and plaster and placing them in front of his paintings, thereby breaking down the barrier between the work of art and the viewer. A breakthrough occurred in the early sixties with the discovery of a plaster compound that he could use to take molds from real people. With this discovery Segal started making life-size figures in white plaster that gave the appearance of mummies brought to life. His earliest works explored vernacular subjects like a bus driver, restaurant booth, dressing table, dinner table, farm worker, and so on.
Yet the artist's concern for more universal subjects, evidenced already in his paintings from the 1950's, led him to explore the realm of legend and myth. In 1966 he recreated a scene of the biblical Lot seduced by his daughters—a work that prefigures his use of the story of Abraham and Isaac to symbolize the Kent State tragedy. In a parallel development Segal responded to the tenor of the time by leaping into the area of social protest with a four-figure piece called The Execution on 1967, a precursor of his monument to the Holocaust as well as a monument to the gay liberation movement.
By the early 70s, having exhausted a wide range of vernacular subject matter, Segal pushed himself into more naturalistic direction. Beginning in 1971, he abandoned the technique of "outside" casting in favor of a so-called "inside" type of sculpture, using the first plaster cast as the mold for the final cast, thereby permitting a higher degree of surface description. As his sculpture became more naturalistic, though, he introduced color to impart emotion and feeling. In this respect, Segal followed in the footsteps of Duane Hanson and John DeAndres without his figures becoming surrogates for real people. Likewise, from the mid-sixties his sculptural environments not only included actual things in real space but they also incorporated movement and real time through the use of tape recordings, films, functioning clocks, and even a television set reminiscent of Allan Kaprow's Happenings of the 1950s. "Once you decide that anything is subject matter, you are not limited to noble things," he stated in a 1971 interview. By the same token, you are not limited to whole figures or complete environments. Throughout the seventies Segal explored the meaning of works that were more compressed or fragmentary, producing a body of relief's that seem to be exercises in pure form, divorced altogether from feeling or time. These led to his exploration in the early 1980s of Cézanne's still-life painting—paraphrases in three-dimensional space of the French artist's manipulations of perspective, volume, and color. A logical extension from this initiative was the series of relief sculptures that he did based upon the precedence of Cubist collages by Picasso and Braque, serious attempts to understand the way in which such artists faceted forms to make their images project forward into the viewer's space. Segal's aesthetic experiments may also have led him into an exploration of the use of chiaroscuro in old master paintings. Long as admirer of Rembrandt, Segal produced a series of pastel and charcoal close-up portraits of his wife and friends that have a haunting quality reminiscent of Rembrandt's more introspective and expressionistic self-portraits. In a similar vein Segal produced a series of brightly-colored pastel works on paper that spring from Rembrandt's interest in depicting the texture and shapes of slaughtered meat, carrying forward a tradition of such paintings by the early-twentieth century master Chaim Soutine.
George Segal's art contains many contradictions, and there in may lay its greatness and resilience. In all of his work the man-made vies with the real, two-dimensional rendering with three-dimensional concreteness, fragmentary with complete, metaphor with transcription, light with dark, color with non-color (black or white), figurative with abstract, positive with negative. If we try to interpret his art according to one set of criteria, we miss the subtlety and complexity inherent in the ambiguity that he deliberately exploits to add further layers of meaning. George Segal is the one Post-modern artist who makes full use of the Modernist concerns for purity while embracing the aesthetical and literary traditions of earlier periods of art to make of his art a language of timeless symbols and universal messages.
