At New York's Whitney Museum, a Segal introspective
Silent, muffled in form, tinged with the pathos of the discarded chrysalis, George Segal's plaster figures have kept their place on the edge of modernism for the better part of 20 years. They have also shown how art changes one's reading of other art. In the early 1960s, when Segal —the son of a New Jersey chicken farmer —first emerged as a sculptor, he was identified with Pop art. This happened because some of his tableaux had an aggressive, urban character and used real props: stacks of oil cans, winking beer neons, even the inside of a scrapped subway car, with seats, hanging straps, lights and all. Some 15 years later, after a revival of realism in American art that Segal, among others, helped to set off (his plaster molds, for instance, are the direct ancestors of Duane Hanson's ultrarealist wax people), his connections to Pop look tenuous indeed. In this changed context, it is the figures and their mood, rather than their surrounding artifacts, that one notices first; and they connect to an older realist tradition, far from the self-consciousness and media-play of Pop. They resemble, as the late Mark Rothko once said, "walk-in Hoppers," sculptural equivalents to the world of that American master, with its nocturnal bars and waiting figures. Segal's tableaux have a flavor of the '30s—overlaid, now and then, with a sharp erotic curiosity. Instead of the irony of a '60s Warhol or Lichtenstein, one is treated to an unremitting earnestness, a moral concern with the voids between people and the circumspectness of their gestures. It is a somber sight, this "populist art," as one of Segal's admirers dubbed it; and it gives a special density to the retrospective of 100 works by Segal that is on display at Manhattan's Whitney Museum.
One reason for the popularity of Segal's work is its material: plaster casts from live bodies. Because there was once a person inside each of the shells, they have the slightly eerie factuality of a petrified tree, a fossil or (as has often been said) that great tourist attraction of Southern Italy, the plaster molds of dead Pompeians. Now and again, Segal made an identifiable portrait; the show includes the effigies of those New York Pompeians of the '60s, the collectors Robert and Ethel Scull, she complete with sunglasses and Courrèges boots. But as a rule, Segal's figures are not identifiable. They are generalized, spectral presences, muffled in the folds of calcified gauze, their skin roughened with residual abstract-expressionist drips and clots. It hardly matters that the stooped Gerontion in Segal's Hot Dog Stand, 1978, is a cast of the sprightly museum director Martin Friedman; what does count is the peculiar tension between his dark shape and the bright white figure of the waitress, under the glare of the lit mock-Mondrian ceiling.