345 Chambers St, New York, NY 10282, United States
Stuyvesant High School
70 Washington Square, South, New York, NY, 10012, United States
New York University
New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States
Rutgers University
200 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, United States
Pratt Institute
345 Chambers St, New York, NY 10282, United States
Stuyvesant High School
New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States
Rutgers University
70 Washington Square, South, New York, NY, 10012, United States
New York University
200 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, United States
Pratt Institute
George Segal was born on November 26, 1924 in New York City, New York, United States. He was a son of Jacob Segal and Sophie (Gerstenfeld) Segal, who were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In 1940, the family moved to South Brunswick, New Jersey, where George's father, who had previously worked as a butcher, operated a chicken farm.
Initially, George studied at Stuyvesant High School in New York. Since 1942 to 1946, Segal attended Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he studied literature, psychology, history and philosophy. Before receiving his Bachelor of Science in Art Education degree from New York University in 1949, Segal took classes at the Pratt Institute. While attending New York University, George studied collage with the sculptor Tony Smith and also studied under the painter William Baziotes. Later, he resumed his studies at Rugers University and received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1963.
In 1970, Segal received Honorary Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts degree from Rutgers University.
In the 1950's, Segal experienced financial difficulties, but he continued painting and developed important friendships with other artists, who were in the New York area. He operated a chicken farm from 1949 to 1958, but when George faced bankruptcy, he began teaching in various public schools in New Jersey from 1957 to 1964.
Segal's earliest exhibited works were paintings. Unlike the work of most artists in New York in the late 1940's and 1950's, Segal's paintings were representational and frequently included human figures in an interior environment. By the time of his third one-man exhibition at the Hansa Gallery in New York in 1958, George's works were life-size in scale, intensely colored and mainly represented figures, painted with heavy, expressive brush strokes. The problem of resolving the conflict between the two-dimensional, formal space of abstract painting and his interest in depicting three-dimensional figures led Segal, in 1959, to exhibit plaster figures, placed in front of his paintings. These three-dimensional sculptures could exist in real space, while the flat canvases served to form an environmental setting, created by flat areas of color. These tentative sculptures were made of wood and plaster, the materials, which were familiar to Segal from his construction activities on his farm.
In the summer of 1961, Segal's student brought him some bandages, used to set broken bones. When these plaster-impregnated strips are wet and molded in place, they harden into a cast. George began experimenting by making plaster casts of his body and assembled the parts into a sculpture of a seated figure. The full sculpture, entitled "Man Sitting at a Table", included a real chair and a table, to which a window had been nailed. The mullions of the window form a grid, through which the viewer looks, as if into an illusionary painted canvas. The incorporation of an environmental setting for the figure grew partly from his combining of painted settings with his first sculptures two years earlier, but the idea is also related to parallel artistic concepts, that were then developed by a number of Segal's contemporaries.
Segal generally made his sculptures by molding cloth strips, dipped in hydrostone, an industrial plaster, over the person, serving as his model. The surfaces of the sculpture were manipulated freely by the artist as he worked with the strips of plaster-soaked cloth. Sometimes, he used these casts of the figure as a negative mold, into which he poured plaster in order to produce a positive cast, but he generally preferred the greater artistic activity, involved in working with the exterior surface of the initial cast. On rare occasions, these sculptures were cast in bronze and painted with a white finish.
Segal's sculptures of the 1960's were often mundane in subject, such as "Woman Painting Her Fingernails" (1962), and were cast from personal friends and neighbors. A large number of sculptures, beginning with his first cast work, incorporate windows. In many of Segal's works, the presence of an actual window (with a real three-dimensional space) clarifies the nature of the space as concrete, not an illusion.
A considerable number of George's sculptures of the 1960's and 1970's have the theme of transit — for example, "Man on a Bicycle", "The Bus Driver", "The Bus Riders", 'The Gas Station", "The Truck" and a number of other works of figures in a doorway, such as "Woman in a Doorway I", or other sculptures, where the theme is even more obvious. All the works relate to the theme of passage or the transitory nature of temporal existence.
In 1994, the sculptor returned to painting, often exploring depth and space. Works of this period are drawn with charcoal on house paint, in shades of gray, black and white. George also applied stucco layers for texture.
Also, later in his life, Segal showed a renewed interest in photography. He used the photographs of people and city scenes in both New Jersey and New York as basis for some of his later sculptures and as the starting point for drawings.
During his lifetime, George took part in documenta IV and VI in Kassel, Germany, and widely exhibited in the United States and Europe.
George Segal pioneered the use of plaster bandages for casting life-size figures. "The Costume Party", "The Laundromat", "The Commuters", "Street Crossing" are among his most famous works.
Also, the sculptor attained numerous awards, including Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (1992), Praemium Imperiale (1997), National Medal of Arts (1999), Federal Design Achievement Award (2000) and others.
Segal’s works are kept in the collections of more than one hundred museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and others.
Street Crossing
Classical Still Life
Lovers in the bed II
Three Figures and Four Benches
Chance Meeting
Picasso's Chair
The Holocaust
Depression Bread Line
Resting Dancer
Woman on a Bench
Portrait of Sidney Janis with Mondrian Painting
The Holocaust
Blue Girl on Park Bench
The Holocaust
The Commuters
The Costume Party
The Bus Driver
The Laundromat
Quotations: "I discovered that ordinary human beings with no great pretensions of being handsome were somehow singing and beautiful in their rhythms. The people that I prefer to use again and again as models are friends and relatives with a very lively mental life...I discovered that I had to totally respect the entity of a specific human being, and it’s a whole other set of insights, a whole other set of attitudes. It’s a different idea of beauty and it has to do with the gift of life, the gift of consciousness, the gift of a mental life."
George married Helen Steinberg on April 7, 1946. Their marriage produced two children — Jeffrey and Rena.
