George Segal - The Expulsion

LOS ANGELES—On the occasion of a major gift from the George and Helen Segal Foundation, the Skirball Cultural Center presents the exhibition, George Segal’s The Expulsion: With Photographs of the Artist at Work by Donald Lokuta. On view from May 12–September 5, 2010, the exhibition showcases George Segal’s The Expulsion (1986-87), a life-sized tableau of Adam and Eve as they are driven from the Garden of Eden. Presented alongside the compelling sculpture are more than thirty black-and-white photographs of the artist at work, made throughout his seventeen-year friendship with photographer Donald Lokuta.

The Expulsion represents one of only five biblical scenes made by George Segal (1924–2000) in a career that spanned more than forty years. Segal portrays the agonized figures of Adam and Eve using his signature cast-plaster method. The striding figures are set before a fiery, Abstract Expressionist-style painted wall representing the angel’s flaming sword of the biblical text. The exhibition includes photographs of Segal’s other biblical works, all scenes from Genesis. These include: The Legend of Lot (1958), In Memory of May 4, 1970: Kent State: Abraham and Isaac (1978), Jacob and the Angels (1984-85), and Abraham’s Farewell to Ishmael (1987).

“George Segal is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century,” says Skirball Museum Director Robert Kirschner. “His humanism, expressed so powerfully in his work, embodies the Jewish ideals of engagement and empathy that we cherish at the Skirball Cultural Center.”

George Segal began his career as a painter, but by the late 1950s, as he expressed it, seeking to give “the physical sensation of an actual human being occupying real space,” he began to experiment with making plaster sculptures. He soon pioneered the works for which he is best known—evocative environments of ordinary people and everyday life. Most of Segal’s models were family and friends, whom he cast in plaster-infused bandages to make his sculptures.

Combined in scenes with real-life props, Segal’s tableaux are noted for their intense psychological realism. Acclaimed for his novel approach to sculpture, Segal was recognized as part of the “Pop Art” movement, along with artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, and Andy Warhol.

Segal was drawn to the Genesis stories as settings that allowed him to explore the humanistic ideas that propelled his work. As he explained in a 1996 interview, “I found myself incapable of painting in pure abstraction divorced from my idea of reality, which included narrative, history, psychology, etc. I was tempted to use Greek myth, but the biblical stories from Genesis were far more known to me as themes from which to take off.” Segal appreciated the brevity of these powerful stories that were “without adjectives…with utterly no hint as to what each character was thinking,” and felt they provided “a theater for my probing.”

Donald Lokuta, currently Distinguished Professor of photography at Kean University in Union, N.J., has worked as a photographer, painter, teacher, and historian. Over the course of his friendship with George Segal, dating from 1984, he made more than 10,000 photographs of Segal at work. Nearly 400 of these have been included with the Segal archives, housed at Princeton University.

The photographs in this exhibition, loaned by the photographer, document Segal casting himself and close associates as figures for several important works, including Street Crossing (1992), Graffiti Wall (1990), and Depression Bread Line (1991), one of three Segal sculptures at the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C. Other images detail Segal’s installation process in preparation for a 1998 retrospective at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Taken in a seemingly casual way, Lokuta’s photographs admit the viewer to unselfconscious, intimate moments with the artist, capturing, as Lokuta describes, “the intensity of the creative process at work, and how George Segal used his environment as part of his visual language.”

George Segal
The Expulsion: With Photographs of the Artist at Work by Donald Lokuta