George Segal, Sculptor, 75

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

Saturday June 10 11:37 PM ET

Pop Art Sculptor George Segal Dead at 75
By Jeanne King

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sculptor George Segal, a Pop art icon of the 1960s
known for life-size plaster casts that showed common people in everyday
situations, has died after a long illness, his New York dealer said on
Saturday. He was 75.

David Janis, whose family represented Segal for nearly half a century, said
the artist died on Friday at his home in South Brunswick, New Jersey.

Segal, who was born in the Bronx and raised during the Depression, began his
career as a painter but started making sculpture out of chicken wire and
plaster in the 1950s.

``Segal was the most influential figurative sculptor of the 20th century,
and certainly one of the most important of the 20th century, period,'' Janis
said on Saturday.

``He had a very sophisticated and deep understanding of people and expressed
that through his sculpture.''

In 1960, Segal got the idea to make life-size plaster sculptures when a
student brought him a supply of medical scrim used by doctors to make casts
for broken bones and he asked his wife to wrap him in the plaster-soaked
gauze.

``He was his first subject,'' Janis said.

Segal titled the sculpture, ``Man at a Table,'' and later wrote of the work:
``People call what I created sculpture. But my own reaction to it is as to
the presence of man in his daily life.''

Unlike fellow Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein who got their
inspiration from comics, magazines and advertisements, Segal focused on
average people.

Segal assembled tableaux of his life-sized white plaster figures in everyday
situations such as pedestrians paused at a crosswalk or a woman lying on a
bed. One of his best known works depicted a Depression-era bread line with
care-worn figures in bronze installed at the memorial to President Franklin
Roosevelt in Washington.

The sculptor portrayed daily life ``while profoundly capturing the depth of
human emotions in his figures,'' the National Endowment for the Arts said
last year when President Clinton awarded Segal a national medal.

An important turning point in Segal's career was his ``New Realists''
exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 which ''helped anoint pop
art,'' Janis said.

Segal's interest in art was wide ranging and he haunted museums around the
world. Whether he was in Paris or Tokyo, he always found time to visit
museums in that city, Janis said.

``At home, no matter how busy he was, he managed to find time to drive into
New York City a couple of times a week to see exhibitions by other artists
at galleries and museums. He was constantly studying the great masters of
the world,'' Janis said.

Segal grew up in New York and studied art at the Cooper Union Art School,
Pratt Institute, New York University, and at Rutgers University in New
Jersey where he earned an art education degree in 1950 and a master's in
fine arts in

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