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Lot Essay
Representing a woman sitting alone at a restaurant table in front of a window that looks out onto the illuminated cityscape of Manhanttan at night, George Segal's The Restaurant Window II is a poignant expression of human solitude and modern living. Executed in 1971 it is the final version on a theme that preoccupied the artist for many years.
Much of Segal's work explores the way in which the depths of human emotion are expressed through the nuances of a person's body language. Like Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud, Segal repeatedly turns to the same friends and relatives for his models, as he has found that his work is wholly "dependant on the sensitivity and response of the person posing". The casting of a human figure in plaster has revealed to him "a mystery" concerning the encapsulation of a moment of life which Segal has found perpetually mesmerising. "I discovered," he once commented, "that ordinary human beings with no great pretensions of being handsome were somehow singing and beautiful in their rhythms. The people that I prefer to use again and again are friends (and relatives) with a very lively mental life. I discovered that I had to totally respect the entity of a specific human being, and its whole other set of insights, a whole other set of attitudes. It's a different idea of beauty and it has to do with the gift of life, the gift of consciousness, the gift of a mental life." (quoted in George Segal, P. Tuchman, New York 1983, p. 109).
Restaurant Window II explores the contrast between open and enclosed space, between the vastness of the urban landscape and the private enclosed world of a woman lost in her own thoughts. It is the final working of an idea that Segal first began in 1967 with his sculpture Seated Girl in which he placed the sculpture of a woman deep in thought, in front of a window that opened out onto a panoramic view of the outside world. He developed this idea further the same year with the work, Restaurant Window I. The original version of this sculpture, entitled simply Restaurant Window was first shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery along with Segal's celebrated Truck of 1966. Both works incorporated moving film into their structure. In Truck a film of the moving road was projected onto the windshield of the truck, conveying the illusion of motion and subtly incorporating two levels of reality into the sculpture. In Restaurant Window, a three-minute short film of what the seated girl might have seen in the restaurant was projected onto an opaque window behind her as if it was a visual rejoinder of her thoughts; a projection of the interior world of her mind onto the exterior world of the restaurant window.
Unfortunately for Segal, due to technical problems the film kept burning up during the installation and the artist finally abandoned this device and changed the arrangement of the work entirely. In the installation-like sculpture that he now retitled Restaurant Window I Segal created an alternate division between exterior and interior space by adding a the figure of a man passing in the street and by using the simple glass frame of a window to emphasise the psychological divide between inside and outside. Here the body language of the two figures clearly emphasises the psychological importance of the window as each are clearly isolated, lost in their own thoughts, and set against an alienating empty space in a way that clearly recalls the paintings of Edward Hopper.
Segal's original concept of exploring the inner world of the woman's thoughts evidently preyed on the artist's mind, and it was a return to this aspect of Restaurant Window that he began to re-explore in 1971 in Restaurant Window II. Segal's original intention in this re-working of the subject was to project the same three-minute film onto the screen behind the seated woman, but defective equipment again dissuaded him from doing so and he ultimately resolved to explore the contrast between intimate and extreme space that had characterised recent sculptures like Aerial View which depicted a panormaic night-time view of New Jersey from an aerial vantage point.
Using a light box and a series of plastic coloured pegs, Segal created, in place of the projected movie, such a convincing view of Manhattan skyscrapers by night that its powerful presence seems to invade the interior space of the imagined restaurant. Seeming full of the frenetic energy and life of the city, this wholly artificial view in the window contrasts directly with the sterile calm of the interior scene of the pensive woman lost in thought at her table for one. In this way the work explores a direct encounter between the city and the individual, between a vast open impersonal vista and the lonely interior space of a woman alone with her thoughts. It is a persuasive and simultaneous presentation of the vast ant-like macrocoism of modern metropolis and the private microcosmic world of the self.
In exploring this extraordinary contrast between public space and private life, Segal is clearly paying homage to the tradition first established in the 1930s by Edward Hopper.
As Segal has recalled, "The reason I admire [Hopper] so much is that he never stopepd looking at the real world … for im /to use the real stuff of the world and somehow - not suddenly put painstakingly, painfully, slowly - figure out how to stack the elements into a heap that began talking very tellingly of his own deepest inner feelings, he had to make some kind of marriage between what he could see outside with his eyes, touch with his hands, and the feelings that were going on inside. Now I think that's as simply as I can say what I think art is about." (As quoted in George Segal, P.Tuchman, New York 1983, p. 64).
Much of Segal's work explores the way in which the depths of human emotion are expressed through the nuances of a person's body language. Like Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud, Segal repeatedly turns to the same friends and relatives for his models, as he has found that his work is wholly "dependant on the sensitivity and response of the person posing". The casting of a human figure in plaster has revealed to him "a mystery" concerning the encapsulation of a moment of life which Segal has found perpetually mesmerising. "I discovered," he once commented, "that ordinary human beings with no great pretensions of being handsome were somehow singing and beautiful in their rhythms. The people that I prefer to use again and again are friends (and relatives) with a very lively mental life. I discovered that I had to totally respect the entity of a specific human being, and its whole other set of insights, a whole other set of attitudes. It's a different idea of beauty and it has to do with the gift of life, the gift of consciousness, the gift of a mental life." (quoted in George Segal, P. Tuchman, New York 1983, p. 109).
Restaurant Window II explores the contrast between open and enclosed space, between the vastness of the urban landscape and the private enclosed world of a woman lost in her own thoughts. It is the final working of an idea that Segal first began in 1967 with his sculpture Seated Girl in which he placed the sculpture of a woman deep in thought, in front of a window that opened out onto a panoramic view of the outside world. He developed this idea further the same year with the work, Restaurant Window I. The original version of this sculpture, entitled simply Restaurant Window was first shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery along with Segal's celebrated Truck of 1966. Both works incorporated moving film into their structure. In Truck a film of the moving road was projected onto the windshield of the truck, conveying the illusion of motion and subtly incorporating two levels of reality into the sculpture. In Restaurant Window, a three-minute short film of what the seated girl might have seen in the restaurant was projected onto an opaque window behind her as if it was a visual rejoinder of her thoughts; a projection of the interior world of her mind onto the exterior world of the restaurant window.
Unfortunately for Segal, due to technical problems the film kept burning up during the installation and the artist finally abandoned this device and changed the arrangement of the work entirely. In the installation-like sculpture that he now retitled Restaurant Window I Segal created an alternate division between exterior and interior space by adding a the figure of a man passing in the street and by using the simple glass frame of a window to emphasise the psychological divide between inside and outside. Here the body language of the two figures clearly emphasises the psychological importance of the window as each are clearly isolated, lost in their own thoughts, and set against an alienating empty space in a way that clearly recalls the paintings of Edward Hopper.
Segal's original concept of exploring the inner world of the woman's thoughts evidently preyed on the artist's mind, and it was a return to this aspect of Restaurant Window that he began to re-explore in 1971 in Restaurant Window II. Segal's original intention in this re-working of the subject was to project the same three-minute film onto the screen behind the seated woman, but defective equipment again dissuaded him from doing so and he ultimately resolved to explore the contrast between intimate and extreme space that had characterised recent sculptures like Aerial View which depicted a panormaic night-time view of New Jersey from an aerial vantage point.
Using a light box and a series of plastic coloured pegs, Segal created, in place of the projected movie, such a convincing view of Manhattan skyscrapers by night that its powerful presence seems to invade the interior space of the imagined restaurant. Seeming full of the frenetic energy and life of the city, this wholly artificial view in the window contrasts directly with the sterile calm of the interior scene of the pensive woman lost in thought at her table for one. In this way the work explores a direct encounter between the city and the individual, between a vast open impersonal vista and the lonely interior space of a woman alone with her thoughts. It is a persuasive and simultaneous presentation of the vast ant-like macrocoism of modern metropolis and the private microcosmic world of the self.
In exploring this extraordinary contrast between public space and private life, Segal is clearly paying homage to the tradition first established in the 1930s by Edward Hopper.
As Segal has recalled, "The reason I admire [Hopper] so much is that he never stopepd looking at the real world … for im /to use the real stuff of the world and somehow - not suddenly put painstakingly, painfully, slowly - figure out how to stack the elements into a heap that began talking very tellingly of his own deepest inner feelings, he had to make some kind of marriage between what he could see outside with his eyes, touch with his hands, and the feelings that were going on inside. Now I think that's as simply as I can say what I think art is about." (As quoted in George Segal, P.Tuchman, New York 1983, p. 64).