The American sculptor George Segal (born 1924) made his professional
debut with an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and pastels at the
Hansa Gallery, an artists’ cooperative, in New York in 1956. This
was, of course, the heyday of the New York School, and like a good
many other members of its so-called “second generation,” Segal
responded to the movement’s Abstract Expressionist aesthetic with a
mixture of admiration and ambivalence. He was drawn to its scale,
energy, and ambition, yet he found its concentration on abstraction
an uncongenial limitation. Preferring representation to abstraction
meant, for a number of painters of Segal’s generation, taking Willem
de Kooning’s “Women” paintings as a point of departure in the search
for a style of their own, and so it was to some extent for Segal,
too. Yet, it was not as a painter that he was ever able to create a
body of work that satisfied his own artistic ambitions.
Abandoning painting as his primary medium in the early
Sixties—reportedly under the influence of Allan Kaprow, another Hansa
Gallery artist whose “happenings” marked a similar rejection of
painting in favor of three-dimensional display—Segal turned to a
mode of representational sculpture based on the casting of white
plaster figures directly from live models. The resulting figures
are, in effect, generic Expressionist sculptures defined by their
“frozen” gestures and postures–featureless, immobilized
archetypes that are made to represent easily recognized emotions,
which range from the most banal and benign to the uttermost extremes
of melancholy and