George Segal

Abandoning the style of painterly abstraction of the 1950s, George Segal found his artistic expression in figurative sculpture, and his most important contribution to 20^th Century art was the inclusion of a three-dimensional environment for his figures to create a new sort of poetic realism. From the moment Segal placed one of his enigmatic plaster figures in a chair in 1958, his commitment to spatial figuration expanded to include the psychological aura of human surroundings. As the artist stated, ``I want to intensify ...the sense of my own inner life. I equally want to intensify my sense of encounter with the tangible world outside of me. I can’t think of divorcing the one response from the other.’’ (George Segal, Knokke Heist 1989, p. 19)  Such statements reveal Segal’s interactions with fellow artists who orchestrated the revolutionary Happenings, and in fact, his friend Allan Kaprow staged the first Happening on Segal’s New Jersey farm and studio in 1958. Stressing a generic, universal Everyman over a particularized individual, questioning the relationship between man and objects, and investigating the preoccupation with `total environments’ were all tenets Segal shared with the Happening artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, Segal’s interest in the human condition went beyond this early influence, as he explored more psychological considerations in the interplay between persons, whether in his multi-figure tableau or in the relationship of the viewer to his early solitary sculptures. 

Unlike the hyper-realism of Duane Hanson or John de Andrea, Segal’s figures captured a more metaphysical and displaced actuality. Despite the sense of recognition engendered by the pose and stance of Segal’s figures, his life-casting process in fact subverted the intent of capturing a likeness. When Segal cast figures in plaster, he used the mold itself as a figure – we see the rough exterior while the more accurate, life-like impression of the individual resides in the interior negative space within the mold. By maintaining the white, uncharacterized exterior of plaster, Segal further stresses the gap between the literalness of his objects or props with the existential remove of his figures. The isolation of Hanson’s figures is often expressed in their abstracted gaze, waiting posture, or desolate accessories, Segal’s figures are as much distanced from the viewer by aesthetic absence as by their averted gaze.

Segal’s evocation of absence within presence is most palpable in the contemplative single figure environments of which Walking Man is a poignant example. While Segal also developed more narrative themes in the multi-figure environments such as The Gas Station (1964) or The Diner (1964-66), works with single plaster figures invite the viewer to supply their own interpretation and their own narrative to the scene.  In the case of Walking Man, the figure, slowly striding with head bent and hands in pocket, embodies Segal’s genius for capturing the frozen gesture in time, a moment which is specific to this environment and a mood that is sustained for our quiet observation. The weighty repose of the figure, lost in thought, conveys a sense of privacy which places the viewer in the position of voyeur, free to associate with the figure based on our own emotions, history or imagination. While the pose, hardly indicative of jubilation or light-heartedness, sets certain parameters on the mood of the composition, the aversion of the figure’s face and the lassitude of his posture leave any specific interpretation to us.

In Segal’s environments, the surroundings are on equal terms with the figure in their physicality and Segal took great pains in selecting and arranging these formal considerations.  The bright red elevator door in Walking Man contrasts sharply with the quietude of the figure, lost in thought, while the grill of the elevator door is a cage-like backdrop. These graphically emphatic choices are an excellent empty canvas for our contemplation, yet in the case of Walking Man, the artist also had more private motivations for their selection. There are subtle, personal references to a particular individual – a fellow artist – in the choice of background in Walking Man, bringing this work close to a portrait of sorts.  Segal had executed a few works that directly alluded to art, including the sculpture John Chamberlain Working (1965-67) which depicted the sculptor grappling with the bent metal of his crushed creations. As Phyllis Tuchman has observed, ``Walking Man (1966) does not at first seem to belong to the artists-at-work series. Painter Larry Poons, who posed for the piece as if he were standing by a loft building gate, is not identified in the title because this is not a conventional portrait. `Pretend you’re cold, hunch your shoulders’, Segal said to his Green Gallery colleague. Segal has made many sculptures with people walking, and several have figures in front of doorways. In this instance, he wryly used a metal grate whose patterning has a passing similarity to Poons’s dot paintings, and the red field against which the white plaster figure and the black metal are seen also recalls his canvases. By thus suggesting connections with his friend’s art, Segal reminds us that in our everyday surroundings we too may often pass commonplace images that resemble art.’’ (Phyllis Tuchman, George Segal, New York 1983, p. 48).