Magazine: Fall 2009

While Segal first emerged in the late 1950s as a painter, he began to achieve recognition in the 1960s for his plaster sculptures and installations depicting scenes from everyday life. Like the Pop artists with whom he is often associated, Segal gravitated toward the quotidian on the one hand and the figurative on the other, triggering something of a revolution in an art-world weaned on abstraction. Unlike the Pop artists, though, Segal focused less on celebrities and consumerism and more on domestic life, social issues, and the working class. His works generally convey a sense of melancholy and quiet contemplation, reinforced by Segal's pioneering use of plaster bandages as a rough-textured sculptural medium. As early as the late 1950s, Segal's farm in New Brunswick, New Jersey, became the nexus around which an exhilarating array of events, performances, and collaborations with New York-based artists occurred. It was for the art performances that took place on Segal's farm in spring 1957 that visual pioneer Allan Kaprow coined the term Happening. Segal's place as one of the nation's leading artists was confirmed by the award of a National Medal of Arts in 1999, the year before the artist's death at age seventy-five.