The Brooklyn Rail

Some of the most significant sculptures of the twentieth century were made by painters. Works by Picasso, Matisse, David Smith, and Ellsworth Kelly are well recognized examples. After seeing the big show of George Segal’s work at Rutgers, I feel that he belongs in this category of painter-sculptors. The exhibition opens with a couple of rooms featuring his big, brushy, figurative paintings from the late fifties, which look like energetic examples of the Ab Ex influenced figurative work of the period. By 1962, Segal had switched to making his life cast figures in plaster and participated in the legendary New Realists show at Sidney Janis, which introduced many of the artists who came to be known as members of the Pop generation. What are the characteristics of a pictorial approach to making sculpture? A preference for big shapes with strong outlines and a correspondingly negligible interest in internal modeling. Frontality and often relief, a sculpture that hangs on the wall. Applied color, used to augment or contradict the actual forms. An interest in the perspectival effects of some shapes or arrangements of shapes. All of these preferences play a part in Segal’s work.

The first pieces that brought him notoriety in the sixties were made by covering a live model with a thin layer of plaster bandages, and then cutting them off and reassembling the sections. There are only two of these early pieces in the show. But by the third room of the show, one comes upon Italian Restaurant from 1988, a typical example of Segal’s later work in which he switched from exhibiting the shells made of plaster bandages to often using the shells as molds in which to cast new plaster positives. Italian Restaurant is a mixed case. A thin, male figure seated on a real chair with a small round table next to him is placed against a wall painted with an imitation of a fragment of Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden (1425). The clothed parts of the figure were formed by covering the model’s garments with wet plaster bandages, and then cutting them off and assembling them as the figure. As in all of Segal’s later clothed figures, this figure looks like he stepped into the shower with his clothes on. The looser parts of the fabric form strange fins and clumps, the tighter sections sticking to the body. Nothing billows or furls. All the shapes are bunched and collapsed by the weight of the wet plaster. The face, however, is a cast from a mold section, so it has more realistic shapes and contours emphasized with applied color. But as with all of Segal’s later casts, the eyes are shut, leaving the figure in a weird, suspended sleep with intimations of mortality. Life casts, after all, were traditionally used as death masks. The table is painted a saturated red, and it has a real espresso cup and saucer sitting on it, which have a startling presence compared to the rest of the piece, which is veiled and otherworldly. In fact, the whole issue of absence and presence is at the heart of Segal’s oeuvre.

Since all the figures are indexical images—that is, a physical trace of an object that is no longer there, like a footprint—they seem to be “really there.” But in fact, what is there is an absence, the residual sign of what was there before. At the end of the day this precludes the possibility of a convincing, illusionary living presence. When you come upon Segal’s version of Matisse’s 1910 painting, The Dancers (1971), this becomes startlingly apparent. This piece, made in the earlier technique of reassembling the actual shells of the plaster bandages that were applied to the models, creates strange, awkward figures that lean and twirl in a frozen parody of the spinning energy of Matisse’s painting. You can feel the now absent presence of the models as they strained to maintain the poses like the stiff figures in early photographs. This piece is in the round and immediately calls up comparison with Degas’s sculptures of dancers. Degas was clearly a touchstone for Segal, and in some of his drawings and a lovely set of serigraphs, Segal really caught some of the abrupt viewpoints, startling color, and cropping characteristic of Degas’s pastels. But the life casts of the dancers seem utterly incoherent, imprisoned in their one to one scale relationship with the viewer, momentarily gaining and then losing a satisfying anatomical wholeness as you move around them. Unlike Degas’s sculptures, Segal provides no surprising alignments of forms or delightful transitions from one view to the next.

Nevertheless, for all the limitations of Segal’s method, his use of color and lights, his compositional power, and a warm humanistic sensibility make his work appealing. There is a fossilized, almost volcanic feeling to some of his strange textures and a lusty, Rembrandt-like eroticism to some of his fragmentary nudes. He was in many ways an outlier in the sixties. He certainly never fit in with his Pop contemporaries and their biting ironic humor. He had a sincerely political and sensual approach that rings true in a more disaffected age like our own. I wonder if he didn’t have a secret soft spot for an artist like Ben Shahn, whose reputation was at a low ebb in Segal’s heyday, but who is now getting another look. I think Segal deserves another look as well.