From June 14 through October 4, 1998, The Jewish Museum will present a major retrospective honoring the American artist George Segal (b. 1924), whose evocative sculptures of everyday people in urban environments have become signature works of modern art. The exhibition features works made between 1958 and 1996, reflecting the evolution of the artist, one of the founders of Pop Art in the early 1960s. In addition to the freestanding sculptures for which Mr. Segal is best known, sumptuously colored pastels from the 1950s and 1960s, reliefs of the human body, Cubist paraphrases and related still life sculptures, public commissions, and recent larger-than-life portrait drawings will be on view. George Segal, a Retrospective: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings is the first major exhibition devoted to this artist since the traveling exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1978 to 1979. The New York-born Segal, raised and still based in New Jersey, has had a longstanding concern for the human condition and a fascination with "the magic of everyday life" which permeate the exhibition. The exhibited works come from North American public and private collections. This exhibition was organized and circulated by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Following its New York showing, the exhibition will travel to the Miami Art Museum in Florida (December 17, 1998 - March 7, 1999).

Segal's sculptural tableaux form the core of the 42-piece exhibition, which comes to The Jewish Museum from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. More than 16 examples range from landmark works of the Pop Art era, such as Cinema (1963) -- a solitary white figure placing letters on a marquee -- to the original, mixed media version of Depression Bread Line (1991), a somber composition of five destitute men that was recently cast in bronze for Washington D.C.'s new Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial.

Segal creates figures by wrapping models, usually friends and acquaintances, in thin layers of plaster-soaked cotton gauze. The mold becomes a hollow sculpture with features, clothing and pose suggested, rather than depicted, in crusty white surfaces. Furniture and other diverse objects from old buildings and scrap yards complete the environment, which the artist sometimes heightens with color.

The exhibition includes bright, sensual pastels of nudes from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Segal worked primarily as a painter. Affected by his friend Allan Kaprow's multimedia "Happenings," Segal created a stage-like presence in The Legend of Lot (1958), a transitional work in which rolling figures on a large canvas provide a backdrop to a life-size sculpted plaster man. Segal soon introduced found objects and, in 1961, discovered that a new type of medical bandage could be used to cast the figure from life. His signature style, focusing on city life, was born.

A kosher butcher shop, a man in a bar, an encounter in a diner and lovers lying on a bed are among the subjects of Segal's first mature mixed media sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s. These "Frozen Happenings," as one critic dubbed the earliest examples, were originally exhibited and discussed as Pop Art but have increasingly been seen as seminal to the resurgence of figurative sculpture, and precursors of the cast figures of Kiki Smith, Anthony Gormley and others. Parallels to Edward Hopper's earlier paintings of urban alienation have also been drawn.

Because Segal's sculptures have such lifelike features, clothing, and postures, and they inhabit settings taken from daily reality, the viewer experiences an instantaneous sense of recognition, contact, and familiarity. His tableaux present ordinary people in daily routines. Their normalcy reveals that even uneventful moments offer important perceptions about life and may possess an elusive magic. Insight may be found in a person's posture, as it unconsciously conveys the essence of work or personality, as in Portrait of Sidney Janis with a Mondrian Painting (1967), which depicts the renowned art dealer presenting a masterpiece.

In the wall pieces on view, created mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, Segal explores mood and psychology. A woman's nude body appears vivid blue at a doorjamb. The sensitive features of art historian Meyer Schapiro and painter Leon Bibel are finely etched and heightened with color. The legacies of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and George Braque are reinterpreted in Segal's still life sculptures.

A 1981 monument to Holocaust victims behind barbed wire (from the collection of The Jewish Museum, the bronze version of which is a public sculpture in San Francisco) and an execution scene from 1969 bring further resonance to Segal's vision as the exhibition unfolds. In a gray-toned work of 1987, the Bible's Abraham embraces Ishmael (his son by Hagar) at a crossroad, an all-plaster tableau. Segal's psychologically penetrating, expressively crosshatched charcoal portraits of his wife and his aging friends - larger than life - end the exhibition.

George Segal, a Retrospective, which covers four decades of Segal's career, illustrates the wide variety of mediums he has employed in his work, and, for many visitors, will be a revelation. The Jewish Museum's long and cordial relationship with the artist goes back over four decades to its 1957 exhibition, Artists of the New York School: Second Generation, which presented George Segal as a painter.

George Segal was born in 1924 in New York City to impoverished East European Jewish immigrants. At the age of 16, he moved with his parents to a chicken farm in South Brunswick, New Jersey. In the early 1940s, Segal studied art at Cooper Union in New York, but returned to work for his father when his brother was drafted into the army. At the end of the decade, Segal continued his studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then graduated from New York University with a B.S. in art education.

Segal began his artistic career as a painter inspired by artists ranging from Paul Cézanne to Willem de Kooning. Segal made his first sculptures out of plaster and chicken wire in 1958, after pulling apart some department-store mannequins in order to analyze their method of construction. It was his chance discovery of medical bandages as a material with which to wrap his models in July 1961 that led Segal to the method of direct casting on which all of his subsequent sculpture has been based. He then combined the resulting figurative forms with objects and furniture evocative of the most banal urban decor, such as the counter of a diner or a gas station, and ordinary human activities like bathing, dressing, or simply sitting or lying down. George Segal has been making evocative sculptures of figures, usually set in realistic everyday settings, for nearly forty years.

Pop Art, a movement of the early 1960s, made use of the imagery of consumerism and mass culture with a finely mixed balance of irony and celebration. Pop artists included Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. The use of objects that were, in Segal's own words, "considered low-class, anti-art, un-art, kitsch, disreputable" linked his sculpture to Pop Art. His individualistic approach, however, quickly distinguished him from the other artists with whom he exhibited. Far removed from the wit and sophisticated detachment of their art, Segal confronts the human condition with a strongly felt empathy.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated, 159-page catalogue with an essay by London-based guest curator Marco Livingstone and extensive documentation. The hardcover book, published by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, will be available for $40 from The Jewish Museum's Cooper Shop.

The presentation of George Segal, a Retrospective: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings at The Jewish Museum has been made possible through the generosity of The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation. Major grants have been provided by The Morris S. and Florence H. Bender Foundation, Israel Discount Bank, ABC, Inc., and Automatic Data Processing.