“People have attitudes locked up in their bodies… A person may reveal nothing of himself and then, suddenly, make a movement that contains a whole autobiography.”
M an Leaving a Bus from 1967 is an early and important example of George Segal’s practice which marries Abstraction with Pop Art, capturing the emotion of everyday human experience through handmade figures and the re-purposing of ready-made objects. In the present work, Segal presents a seemingly ordinary moment as a figure steps off a bus. The lifelike, yet characteristically anonymous figure evokes a generalized human experience, further reinforced by the commonplace setting of the yellow school bus. At the same time, the compressed space of the bus entrance, coupled with the inference of motion as the figure descends towards the viewer, imbues the figurative tableaux with an aura of expectancy.
Segal’s work can be seen as a bridge between the Abstract Expressionists with whom he studied and also the Pop Artists of his generation. An admirer of Hans Hofmann, Segal sensed that for Hofmann there wasn’t a battle between figuration and abstraction. The work of Hofmann and his teachings became appealing to Segal because he wanted to combine styles that may have previously been thought of as contradictory, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the styles of Abstraction and Pop would have certainly been seen as such (Jan van der Marck, George Segal, New York 1979, p. 19). Segal painted abstractly for a decade before his breakthrough. Having felt that there were too many restrictions with working in the two-dimensional picture plane and that he couldn’t convey what he wanted to say, in 1958 Segal began placing plaster figures in front of his paintings as if they had just stepped out of the picture plane. “With his crude sculptural forms … placed in an environment of everyday objects, Segal had found an effective means of closing the distance between the abstract space of a formalist generation and a new art of psychological responses and environmental definition.” With nearly a decade of painting under his belt, his sculptures were able to take on “a more literal apprehension of space” and a “sense of actual life and the dynamics of human interaction” (Sam Hunter, George Segal, New York 1984, p. 7). Segal is often also associated with Pop Art, due to his allusions to mass culture and his commonplace materials, however his commitment to reflecting the human condition set him apart from his Pop contemporaries.
In Man Leaving a Bus, Segal’s use of space and creating intimate views onto everyday life evokes work of Edward Hopper. In fact, Mark Rothko once called Segal’s sculptures “walk-in Hoppers” (Martin Friedman and Graham Beal, George Segal: Sculptures, Minneapolis 1978, p. 68). Both Hopper and Segal’s use of figuration and space are at the core of their practice. Like one of Edward Hopper’s most famous paintings, Nighthawks, the present work, much like many early Segal sculptures, evokes a feeling of loneliness, singularity and existential longing by focusing on a fleeting moment in time within the world around us. Furthering this notion, Segal used both himself as well as other subjects as human molds for his figures, which injected a sense of reality mixed with anonymity. His chosen media of plaster and gauze recalls the fragility of both the medium and vulnerability of life. Reminding us that art can reflect rather than perfect those fleeting elements of life which might otherwise go unnoticed, Segal's white sculptures are infused with the artist’s respect for the fragile beauty of human life.
Comparable Works by George Segal in Institutional Collections
“With his crude sculptural forms … placed in an environment of everyday objects, Segal had found an effective means of closing the distance between the abstract space of a formalist generation and a new art of psychological responses and environmental definition.”
Originally acquired by Harry Abrams at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1967, the present work has remained in the Abrams Family Collection for nearly 60 years. Man Leaving a Bus has been featured in many of the artist's most celebrated exhibitions and publications, including his first museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1968 as well as his first retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1978, which then traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The present work was also included in the provocatively resonant exhibition, fittingly titled Qu'est-ce que la sculpture moderne? ( "What is modern sculpture?") at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1986, further underscoring the present work as not only an important example within Segal’s body of work but as a prominent example of 1960s sculpture.
