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George Segal Lover of Life

George Segal was born on November 26, 1924 and died on June 9, 2000, leaving behind a contribution so large that he is known as the world's greatest Pop Artist. He trained in education, painting, and psychology yet never took a sculpting class. His unique patterns of thought contributed to his success as a sculpture. George's mission in art was not to copy nature but to express it so that his viewers would experience life in the real world. He had an abiding love of what he could sense, touch, and see. Whether it is it art or in life, for he did not indulge in art for art's sake, but expresses his own feelings and experience of the real world. Rarely is there irony or wit, his figures are inhuman people barren of life and we question our own existences as we step onto his stage for we are not ready to deal with the living world as he describes it.

In an interview with producer/director Amber Edwards, Segal reveals his two passions, his love for life in the real world and art history. Art is a magical place, and that is exactly what art history was to Segal, he could make references to the art that he loved and ideas that stirred him, by referring to other artist works, such as Cezanne Still Life. Segal worked hard to find the "extraordinary in the ordinary" (Haber's Art Reviews). He grew up on "Abstract Expressionism, on pure form, pure shape, and pure color" and rejected it because he was missing the reality of the real world (Haber's Art Reviews). His idea of expression in art was the "reality of encounter" (In His Own Words 1). It is interesting to see how he represents these encounters, for by doing so, he is in essence, America's conscience. Segal is known as the humanist of Pop Art. According to Haber's Art Reviews, "Pop Art relishes the ordinary, but ordinary people are notoriously absent from much of it", but not from Segal's work, his "trademark body cast makes them white as ghosts" (Habers Art Review 2). His artistic ventures in body cast has challenged and expanded traditional definitions of art. Segal brought popular culture into art in a humanist sort of way. It makes us look at the world around us with sharpened eyes. For Segal, art was more than a profession; it was a way of looking at the world. The real world, real people and real body cast to create his cold, white stony silences that make us listen. Segal revels in plaster, as a man alone at a diner, "nurses his toast and coffee, while a lone waitress turns away

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