American sculptor George Segal is known for his real-life tableaus of plaster sculptures, cast from living models. He began his artistic career as a painter, but did not turn to sculpture until the 1950s, after he had established himself as a painter and an associate of other New York artists involved with environments and “Happenings”; indeed, the first Happening took place on his New Jersey chicken farm in 1957. While his early plaster sculptures were unpainted, from the late 1960s on, he used vivid colors in some of them. Segal’s first major retrospective was presented at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1978). He also produced a number of public monuments cast in bronze, including several powerful Holocaust memorials.
Segal’s sculptural representation of the Akedah, the biblical story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, raised eyebrows when it was first exhibited. His irreverent depiction of Abraham as a…
Houses hold virgins
The doors on the chain
‘Plumb streets with hearts’
‘Bore curtains with eyes’
Virgins without dots
Stare beyond probability
See the men pass
Their hats are not ours
We …
Uzziah’s reinterment inscription, Jerusalem. King Uzziah (reigned 785–733 BCE) was a leper and therefore, according to the book of Chronicles, could not be buried in the royal tombs and so had to be…