System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Artist leaves legacy of life
Famed sculptor, George Segal, dies at age 75
By David Weinstein
Thursday, June 15, 2000
Renowned artist, sculptor and Princeton township, New Jersey, resident, George Segal, perhaps South Brunswick's best kept secret for six decades, died Friday in his Deans home. He was 75.
Bronx-born and 4 years old when America's economy crashed to the ground in 1929, Mr. Segal's entrancing sculptures often exhibited a country's quiet despair recalled from his childhood: his life-size casts looking always forward, their eyes unblinking, forever seeing the world as a canvas.
And while Mr. Segal, through his sculpture, brought to life a human condition palpably touched with feeling and emotion, he was, as well, adept in a myriad of art media. His range would go so far from sculpture as to letter a friend's work truck, or design another's business card. He began as a painter and often returned to the canvas, to figure paintings and to pastels, all in simplicity, representing a world he saw.
"I find impossible-to-read work unnecessarily difficult," Mr. Segal told the Post last November. "I'm unimpressed by it."
Family friend Dave Schultz, a township resident, said Monday Mr. Segal always spoke plainly about art intentions, both his and others.
"He'd say, 'Dave, if you like it, it's good art. If you enjoy it, it's good art,' " Mr. Schultz remembered. "He was intelligent and he was worldly, and that was his philosophy."
Though Mr. Segal has been tagged as a pop artist by most critics and professors — for his use of everyday objects in his art, like the one-way street signs in "Chance Meeting" (1989) — his work speaks larger than soup cans and hamburgers ever could, his men and women often more real, more moving than passers-by on the street.
"People are forever asking me, 'Are you really a pop artist?' " Mr. Segal told The Washington Post in 1998, "and I'm forever answering, 'Yes, but…' "
In a way only a true family man whose profession is that of artist, the faces of Mr. Segal's family and friends' also are the faces of his work. They were his models, his templates, though the entire human condition was his canvas. Neither pop icons nor cultural artifacts are those faces, though his works became just that, and will remain so.
"Everything made sense about George, the things he said, what he did. I really liked George. He was an outstanding person," Mr. Schultz said.
Mr. Segal is survived by his wife of 54 years, Helen; two children, Rena of Somerset, Jeffrey of Vineland; and by his brother, Morris of North Brunswick.
Mr. Segal's works were commissioned and displayed around the world; his worldly artist companions with famous names and his well-earned notoriety a part of his everyday life. But none of it, his friends say, could steal an ounce of honesty or modesty from the frame of this artist.
"The part I'll remember most about George was that he was incredibly down to earth," said Lester Seidenstein, a close family friend and township resident. "He was so down to earth, I believe he owned one suit and wore only one suit to his last days."
Mr. Segal was "the kind of person you wouldn't know had the fame he had on his shoulders," said his next-door neighbor Neysa Bibel.
"He was just a real person, he never put on airs. He'd meet you and treat you like he was anybody else, and so were you," said Ms. Bibel, the wife of the late Leon Bibel, an important artist in his own right.
"My husband and he had a lot in common," she said of the longtime friendship.
Born on Nov. 26, 1924, Mr. Segal moved to New Jersey from the Bronx with his family when he was 15. The Segals settled on the chicken farm on Davidson Mill Road, which was, in part, constructed by the young hands of Mr. Seidenstein.
During this time, Mr. Segal worked on his father's farm and studied different art formats in New York at the Pratt Institute and New York University, and in New Brunswick at Rutgers University, ranging from architecture to art education, which he taught later in life in Highland Park and Piscataway. His diversity in study foreshadowed his diversity in creation.
A colleague of Mr. Segal's in Piscataway remembers, almost in awe, the trance the artist could hold over students.
"He was magnetic," said Frank Brennan Jr. of Cranbury, now retired from the South Brunswick school district. "I would go to his classes just to see and hear what he had to say. He could interject his own feelings about what art was, what it needs to be. It was hypnotic for these kids, it was hypnotic for me."
And even more than Mr. Segal's talent for expressing ideas to students, was his way of keeping his accomplishments unknown.
"Because he was so unassuming, I was shocked to see these newspaper articles," Mr. Brennan said. "He never pushed, but was a caring, social-type person. I kept track for years of what he was doing because he wouldn't tell you about it. He'd never say, 'Oh, by the way, I'm going to France.' Nope. He was magnetic."
But for 11 years, Mr. Segal stepped away from his art dreams, operating instead the chicken farm where he also raised corn on the plot of land in Deans, living there, until he died from cancer June 9.
"But," Mr. Schultz said, "he always had the art in him."
"He was always determined to be an artist, even in 1939 when he first came out here and became a chicken farmer and raised corn, he was always determined to go back to art. He was always an artist, whether in carpentry or in polishing an egg," Mr. Schultz said.
But his parents, Mr. Segal told The South Brunswick Post in November, weren't thrilled about his intentions.
"My father and mother told me I was wasting my time, and I should become a chicken farmer like he was," he said with a smile and a laugh then.
Mr. Segal converted the farm's chicken coops into his studio, an expansive space, where friends and family, rarely professional models, stayed still and were bandaged with plaster. The molds, later, were cut and worked into famous figures by Mr. Segal's famous fingers.
"They have to suffer for my art," Mr. Segal said, laughing, in November.
"I like using my friends because I know them completely and I know and I like their mental life," he said then.
Ms. Bibel was one of those models.
"At first, you're a bit fearful, only because you don't really know what's going on, but he worked piecemeal, piece by piece, from your foot on up. By the time he'd reach your head, you're fine, you're relaxed.
"He had this way of soothing you," she said of those chicken-coop sessions. "We were friends."
Mr. Segal made many friends: His modest appeal made this possible. The Anne Frank exhibit displayed in South Brunswick in 1996 presented that opportunity for Ted Van Hessen, a Township Council member. He met and became acquainted with the late sculptor.
"A 10-minute chat would turn into three hours," Mr. Van Hessen said, remembering fondly his encounters with Mr. Segal, who often lent a hand and his name to community affairs.
" 'What did you think?' he'd ask me. 'What did you see?' He was always searching, looking for what people saw in things and places. He was quite a man. He was South Brunswick's best-kept secret. That's the way, I think, he wanted it," Mr. Van Hessen said.
"His humanity, his simplicity stand out. If you met George on the street, you'd have simply no clue from his demeanor or from his actions what a notable artist he was. That's the way he liked it," said Mr. Van Hessen.
While New York City and its art circles and celebrity would have welcomed Mr. Segal permanently instead of his trips to and from, he remained here, on Davidson Mill Road, where he forged lasting friendships.
"He never left the friends he had before he was famous, that's for sure," said Mr. Schultz.
"George and Helen always included everybody, they were never too big. I'm a carpenter, he's a famous artist. Still, we talked about lawn mowers. Any type of thing you could talk about. He was friends with all walks of life. The farm was the original common denominator, he was friends with my father. People's age made no difference. People were people," Mr. Schultz said.
"He used to letter my work truck, that's the kind of person he was. He would design somebody else's business cards, all for free. He was a home-type guy. He was funny when it's time to be funny, he could talk politics, tell a dirty joke, listen to a dirty joke.
"There's a Yiddish word, 'mensch.' It means a person that is anything good, a person who's down to earth, who will help the next guy, who's good to have. It's all in the word, but can't really be described. It's more than being nice. It's George," Mr. Schultz said.
A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE WORK OF GEORGE SEGAL
The following is a list, by no means comprehensive, of works by the artist George Segal exhibited at museums around the world. It should be known that his work is included in hundreds of private and public collections throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Montclair Museum of Art, Montclair, N.J.; Gasiumasen Gallery Palm Beach, Fla.: Girl on a Chair, 1970
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Wash.: Woman on a Bed, 1963
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Forth Worth, Texas: Chance Meeting, 1989
The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.: The Curtain, 1974; The Restaurant, 1975
Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, Ga: Force Power Tools, sculpture
Animation and Fine Art Galleries, Carrboro, N.C.: Woman Brushing Her Hair, print
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pa.: The Tightrope Walker, 1969
Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna, Sintra, Portugal: Flesh Nude Behind Brown Door, sculpture
Ho-Am Art Museum, Seoul, Korea: Rush Hour, 1983, bronze sculpture
Musee Des Beaux Arts, Montreal: The Diner, 1964-1966; Depression Bread Line, 1991; The Bar, 1971
Princeton University: In Memory of May 4, 1970, Kent State: Abraham and Isaac, 1980
Mr. Segal's work is also on display and/or for sale at the following museums and galleries:
The Jewish Museum, New York; the Jan Krugier Gallery, New York; the Locks Gallery, Philadelphia; the Whitney Museum of Modern American Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
