On Art

...If one had to classify Segal, one would list him as a sculptor...

...On the other hand, artistry comes in many sizes...

...Easily understood and enjoyed, his plaster figures and tableaux are also resistant to the intellectual jargon so prevalent in recent years...

...you feel you are about to see high drama...

...It is impossible to do a body casting while a model is in motion, and so Segal's aerialist has none of the true gesture or muscle tension that would make him believable...

...A crude plaster man, formed on an armature of wood and chicken wire (of which Segal had plenty) stands against a background painting that is strongly Abstract Expressionist—tumultous swabs of brilliant color interrelated with the suggested figures of Lot and his wife...

...Figurative art, object-related abstraction and Cubism were being challenged by Non-objective art, pure geometric abstraction and no-holds-barred Abstract Expressionism...

...it includes some 25 pastel drawings from the late '50s and early '60s, plus 50 sculptures dating from 1962-78...

...In some cases, his medium gets in the way of his message...

...Another work that misses the mark is the trapeze artist, on display in the lower gallery of the museum...

...he mo\ cd into his most recent refinement: pouring plaster into the shell of the body casting...

...Since the wall reliefs date back to 1974 and have not been repeated, it seems a safe assumption that Segal has passed such experiments and has settled down to the meatier stuff we see in his most recent work on display...

...c ^^egal of course has his detractors, like the elderly visitor I heard complaining to the museum guard: "This isn't art...

...His art-schooling came during the late '40s, a time of turmoil in the world generally and the art world particularly...

...Kaprow created oddball environments with discarded objects ranging from furniture to battered auto bodies, and then invited his friends—artists, actors and poets—to take part in his im-provisational dramas...

...Since that time, Segal's technique has improved immeasurably...

...Segal moved nearer to his current style under the influence of his close friend Allan Kaprow, the pioneer of the famous "Happenings...

...his wife wrapped him in plaster-soaked strips of cloth), this sculpture set him on his successful course...

...Sometimes the relationship between Segal's works and their inspiration is even more direct: One sculpture recreates a Picasso drawing in three dimensions, another emulates Cezanne's painting, "The Card Players...

...Those early '60s experiments, related to the Pop movement, were intended to transform art from something hallowed that hangs on museum walls into an event people participate in...

...Yet his arrangements of figures against backgrounds, and his concern for the size, shape and color of his props betray a painter's sensibility...

...Segal's quiescent nude fragments, while graceful enough, pale by comparison...

...The color separation suggests the disparate emotional states of the two lovers...

...Body castings made from "live" models, no matter how realistically posed, do not have the limp, drawn quality of dead bodies, and this is especially noticeable of a figure hanging by its heels...

...From his awkward chicken wire constructions and live body-w rappings...

...Usually brightly lit, the exhibition floor has been darkened for the occasion...

...It is evident from such pieces that he has absorbed every Modernist painter from Matisse to Ellsworth Kelly...

...True, Segal's figures do not require the same arduous work and demanding skill of, say, Michelangelo's "David...

...In trying to realize his own vision, he produced "Man Sitting at a Table, 1961" his first experience with live body-casting and with actual props...

...Segal, who loved Matisse, was also immensely stirred by Abstract Expressionism...

...Included in the exhibition, for example, is a late '50s piece based on the Biblical legend of Lot...

...Eventually, his involvement with the commonplace put him in tune with the whole Pop art scene that was being heavily promoted in the '60s...

...Indeed, Segal himself has described "The Corridor, 1976"—consisting of a blue nude, a yellow door, a red chair, and a long black corridor—as being directly inspired by a Barnett Newman painting...

...He preferred, however, more mundane events involving more ordinary people...

...Sometimes he employs it psychologically...

...Perhaps they disappoint because they are reminiscent of Michelangelo's "The Prisoners," a formidable group of "unfinished" sculptures of incomplete bodies twisting spasmodically in their marble block...

...Her male companion, physically spent, is painted black and is absorbed into the black bedclothes...

...But by far the least satisfying efforts on exhibit are a series of wall reliefs—where parts of the female body are represented as emerging from the plaster backgrounds...

...inconsequential moments are recorded as if they were historic events...

...In addition, this was a period dominated by some formidable personalities, including Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Wilhelm deKooning, Jackson Pollack, and the influential critic, Clement Greenberg, who declared that figurative art was dead...

...Segal is simply trying to create a theatrical experience for us...

...There is, moreover, a self-consciousness and artiness in these plaques that is not consistent with the integrity the sculptor displays elsewhere...

...The ultimate effect is of a contemporary Pompeii—its inhabitants preserved in plaster—from which future historians will deduce the intimate details of 20th-century life...

...The current exhibit at the Whitney Museum (through September 9), organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, is the first retrospective of Segal's art...

...Particularly unconvincing is "The Execution, 1967," based on a newspaper photograph of the execution of Mussolini and his henchmen...

...Yet this is not to imply that Segal's work is commonplace or simplistic...

...How Segal arrived at this form is a fascinating story...

...Many of the Happenings happened on Segal's chicken farm, and the idea of recording them enticed him...

...The Prisoners" constitute a double metaphor, representing the sculptor's struggle to "pull" a figure out of stone, and at the same time man's surging drive to escape his bondage...

...But Segal also makes purely esthetic decisions about color...

...Sculpture, in the purest sense, is something to walk around and view from many angles...

...Nevertheless, he could not abandon his commitment to the human figure and to three-dimensional space...

...He is never so brilliant or awe-inspiring that we are directed to his dexterity, rather than his work, and as a result we become intensely involved with his eerie combination of fact and fiction...

...Which is not to suggest that he is always successful...

...Although crude and physically precarious (Segal served as his own model...

...there is a great deal more to it than a casual glance will reveal...

...Thus he will juxtapose an intense blue nude against an equally vibrant green door, and these two strong elements are balanced by a very small albeit powerful dash of red at a carefully determined distance...

...A tableaux by Segal comes off best when we stand directly in front of it and see it all at once, as we do a painting...

...Forced to withdraw to rural New Jersey to make a meager living on his family's chicken farm (even though he also managed to teach art, to paint and to keep in touch with new movements), Segal arrived at a compromise solution—a combination of painting and sculpture...

...In "Blue Girl on Black Bed, 1976," the female figure, painted electric blue, is poised pensively at the edge of an all-black bed...

...His figures thereby pick up the detail of the inside of the mold, are less cumbersome and more accurately resemble the model...

...Where's the skill in making body castings...

...All these scenes are full of paradoxes: The props are real, the human beings are fake...

...Segal uses color like a painter, too...

...What you encounter instead, though, is a series of life-size plaster casts of the most ordinary people doing the most ordinary things: two men in a service station, a bus driver at the wheel of his vehicle, a man in a bar sipping beer while the TV set drones on, a tired woman on the subway, an elderly couple out for a stroll, pedestrians waiting at a traffic light, a woman fastening her bra before a mirror, a pair of exhausted lovers sprawled on a bed, etc...