FROM GEORGE SEGAL TO KIKI SMITH: THE BODY IN SCULPTURE

Growing up in West Germany, I had several opportunities to experience the sculpture of George Segal in European art museums. With limited insight into Segal’s importance in the history of art, his work evoked oddly mixed emotions in me. His white plaster sculptures struck me as strangely mundane and philosophically deep at the same time. Today, with many years of art history training behind me, I realize that my younger self’s impressions were not far from the truth.

As our new exhibition, George Segal: Body Language, richly illustrates, Segal has made an indelible mark in art history with a body of work that presents humanity as mysteriously present and absent.

To understand the trajectory of Segal’s art, one must go back to the early 1960s when the artist first emerged as an important modern sculptor. In 1962, two of his plaster sculptures were included in the groundbreaking exhibition, New Realists, at the Sidney Janis gallery in New York City. That exhibition introduced American audiences to the European artists known under the French term Nouveaux Réalistes such as Arman, Christo, and Yves Klein, alongside American artists who later became known as Pop Artists. Akin to all these artists, Segal shared an interest in making art inspired by the world of real, everyday objects. In his lead essay to the New Realists catalog, the famous American poet John Ashbery wrote that these objects “are a common ground, a neutral language understood by everybody, and therefore, the ideal material with which to create experiences which transcend the objects.”

Segal’s use of medical plaster bandages as a primary material for casting human bodies makes him a realist, in the same way other artists were concerned with common material. Yet Segal’s work is distinctive from other artists associated with Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Segal’s realism was primarily directed toward people, not objects. More accurately, Segal was drawn to the “common ground” of everyday life. Consider Bus Driver, one of his sculptures included in the New Realists exhibition, or Bus Passengers, appropriately included in our exhibition. Both works are perfect representations of Segal’s realism based in common experience. One could also call it urban realism, with its six figures, tightly sitting and standing together in a New York City bus, sharing the same space for a short time, perhaps only for a single stop. Segal’s sculptural group distills a moment in time that echoes the poet Ashbery— the sculpture indeed transcends its object.

At Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, specifically in the outdoor Harvey Lemmen Gallery, stands another Segal sculpture that in many ways transcends its time. Girl Standing in Nature depicts a nude figure who is completely at ease in nature. She stands in contrast to Auguste Rodin’s Eve, found in the same area of our Sculpture Park, who covers her face and is visibly uncomfortable being exposed in a natural space. Segal’s artistic practice, as a sculptor and a painter, was steeped in the history of Western art, including not only Rodin, but also Courbet, Cézanne, Matisse and Giacometti. What Segal gleaned from these artists was a commitment to both modern, unidealized renditions of the human figure and to a freedom of drawing and color. Yet, from Girl Standing in Nature, one can easily draw a wider circle of comparison with contemporary artists whose work draws inspiration from the human body, all on display across our Sculpture Park. As you wander the path, note the sculptures of Kiki Smith, Hanneke Beaumont, Antony Gormley, Juan Munoz and Jaume Plensa, to name a few.

Of these sculptors, it seems most appropriate to focus on two women, Hanneke Beaumont and Kiki Smith. Their work is kindred to Segal’s, even though their respective birth years are two and three decades apart from his. At first glance, though they are in a different location in the park, there is a connection between Beaumont’s two brooding figures, Number 26 and Number 25, and Segal’s Girl Standing in Nature. The sculptures share an introspective mood, a certain silence as if they are reluctant to engage with the viewer. Beaumont’s figures seem to be more manifestations of a conceptual idea than living, breathing people. Like the aforementioned artists Gormley, Munoz, or Plensa, Beaumont turns the human body into a sculptural apparition that exists only as a phantom of the artist’s imagination—and her hands which worked the original clay model.

Kiki Smith’s Sleepwalker represents another figurative sculpture that is physically and psychologically in and from a different world. With Smith, one can palpably sense the distance that exists between Segal and a younger generation that thinks differently about sculpture, gender and identity. Like Girl Standing in Nature, Smith’s Sleepwalker is a female nude. Yet this is where the similarity between the two seems to end. Unlike Segal, Smith explores hybrid states of being in her art. Human and animal, girl and woman, archetype and fairytale— Smith’s sculptures emerge from realms that coexist to challenge common sense, as if they force their way into being. With Sleepwalker, Smith created a sculpture that is the embodiment of dream and illusion, existing far apart from the earthy, Segal’s solidly grounded Girl Standing in Nature.

As you experience George Segal: Body Language, I hope it inspires you to expand your perspective on life as art, as well as take a closer look at the relationships between the many figurative works in our Sculpture Park. Each in their own way express the beautiful complexity of what it means to be human.

Essay by Jochen Wierich, Curator of Sculpture & Sculpture Exhibitions

George Segal. Girl Standing in Nature, 1976.

Photo by William J. Hebert.