拍品专文
Beginning with his very first sculptures utilizing the revolutionary plaster casting technique in 1961, George Segal broke with the constrictions of Modernist theory and located his figures in "real" environments. His white figures, with their myriad details of flesh and clothing rendered nearly perfect by the casting process, are both like us, and in their ghostliness, not of our world. This otherworldliness contrasts powerfully with the fragments of reality that compose the environments Segal creates, and makes for an intense visual experience. As he grew more confident in his method, Segal in the later 1960s began to compose more sophisticated environments, such as The Subway.
Public transportation conveyances have always fascinated Segal as neutral yet distinct environments in which people become blank and introspective as they are routinely shuttled between points. The subway as a subject had never been within his reach because of the near-impossibility of obtaining the necessary hardware. Few subway cars are scrapped in New York, but through a special introduction he was directed to the only yard in the metropolitan area where a car might become available. For days on end he waited for union employees to cut out the section he wanted...He loaded a one-eighth section-wall, ceiling and seats on his pickup truck and drove it home to South Brunswick.
Next he had to decide how to populate his subway car. He immediately rejected the idea of a crowd...So he settled for a lonely girl riding home at night--huddled vulnerably on her seat carrying a handbag...Traveling alone on a subway is a more frightening image than traveling in company, and Segal successfully evoked that (J. van der Marck, op. cit., p. 67).
Segal often tried to incorporate light and sometimes even movies into his works of this period in order to convey a more compelling sense of the environment in which he placed his figures. In Subway, Segal uses flashing incandescent lights to create a convincing representation of the movement of a subway car speeding through a tunnel.
Public transportation conveyances have always fascinated Segal as neutral yet distinct environments in which people become blank and introspective as they are routinely shuttled between points. The subway as a subject had never been within his reach because of the near-impossibility of obtaining the necessary hardware. Few subway cars are scrapped in New York, but through a special introduction he was directed to the only yard in the metropolitan area where a car might become available. For days on end he waited for union employees to cut out the section he wanted...He loaded a one-eighth section-wall, ceiling and seats on his pickup truck and drove it home to South Brunswick.
Next he had to decide how to populate his subway car. He immediately rejected the idea of a crowd...So he settled for a lonely girl riding home at night--huddled vulnerably on her seat carrying a handbag...Traveling alone on a subway is a more frightening image than traveling in company, and Segal successfully evoked that (J. van der Marck, op. cit., p. 67).
Segal often tried to incorporate light and sometimes even movies into his works of this period in order to convey a more compelling sense of the environment in which he placed his figures. In Subway, Segal uses flashing incandescent lights to create a convincing representation of the movement of a subway car speeding through a tunnel.