Sacrifice of Isaac

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.