GEORGE SEGAL AND THE POP ART QUESTION

In the early 1950s Segal (1924-2000) began his career as an abstract painter. He was included in both the aesthetic and social circles of New York's Abstract Expressionist artists of the post-World War II period and was especially influenced by Hans Hofmann's ideas about painting. Yet in his 1959 exhibition at New York's Hansa Gallery, Segal managed to move, almost alone, into a figurative and assertively representational mode, using his paintings almost as a backdrop to crude plaster figures. That high-risk act might have spun him off to the periphery of the art world in which so many of his friends played central roles. By the late 1950s, tensions over abstraction's hegemony had given way to the elusively layered meanings in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, or the playing-with-our-sensibilities Pop Art of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and others. But Segal found his voice elsewhere, even though he was inaccurately pigeonholed as part of a Pop "movement."

-Wall Street Journal
Oct 16 2008