Word: segal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This is the peculiar magic of the strange plaster figures of Sculptor George Segal. In a new show at Manhattan's Sidney Janis Gallery, he demonstrates that at 44, he has survived his early classification as a pop artist to become a major, if idiosyncratic sculptor subject to no label whatever...
Converted Farmer. Son of a Bronx butcher turned New Jersey chicken farmer, Segal began as a figurative painter and bought his own chicken farm to support himself. The farm was on the verge of bankruptcy and his works were not selling when, one day in 1960, a student walked into an art class he was teaching at a New Brunswick community center with a plaster-impregnated bandage marketed by the local pharmaceutical company, Johnson & Johnson. She asked Segal whether he thought it could be used as an art form. Segal took the stuff home, had his wife wrap...
Today, nobody loses any hair under Segal's hands. In his perfected technique, hairdos are swathed in Saran Wrap before the plaster cloths are applied. In the case of nudes, Vaseline is used wherever the plaster might pull on body hair. But Segal can never cast the whole figure in one piece-a complete cast would cut off the body's pores from the outer air and might prove as lethal to the model as gold paint was to the hapless girl in Goldfinger...
...aesthetic all objects and materials can be art--not just oil on canvas or clay on armature. Within the art world itself wide-spread use of "found objects," like irons and mattresses, verifies this. And the post-Warhol men who make happenings, assemblages, and environments, like Segal and Kaprow, would embroider "everything can be art" on their coats of arms...
...Answered another: "Only Senator Javits." With all the glamour around, there was no reason for a mere political pooh-bah to titillate the thousands who assembled outside Broadway's Criterion Theater for the benefit premiere of Funny Girl, the movie musical of the life of Fanny Brice. George Segal showed up in a double-breasted Nehru jacket, Rod Steiger in a black shirt with gold medallion, and Leading Man Omar Sharif in an old-fashioned tuxedo with wide peaked lapels. But all oohs and ahs were for the star of the spectacle, Brooklyn's own Barbra Streisand...