The American sculptor George Segal (born 1924) made his professional debut with an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and pastels at the Hansa Gallery, an artists’ cooperative, in New York in 1956. This was, of course, the heyday of the New York School, and like a good many other members of its so-called “second generation,” Segal responded to the movement’s Abstract Expressionist aesthetic with a mixture of admiration and ambivalence. He was drawn to its scale, energy, and ambition, yet he found its concentration on abstraction an uncongenial limitation. Preferring representation to abstraction meant, for a number of painters of Segal’s generation, taking Willem de Kooning’s “Women” paintings as a point of departure in the search for a style of their own, and so it was to some extent for Segal, too. Yet, it was not as a painter that he was ever able to create a body of work that satisfied his own artistic ambitions.

Abandoning painting as his primary medium in the early Sixties—reportedly under the influence of Allan Kaprow, another Hansa Gallery artist whose “happenings” marked a similar rejection of painting in favor of three-dimensional display—Segal turned to a mode of representational sculpture based on the casting of white plaster figures directly from live models. The resulting figures are, in effect, generic Expressionist sculptures defined by their “frozen” gestures and postures--featureless, immobilized archetypes that are made to represent easily recognized emotions, which range from the most banal and benign to the uttermost extremes of melancholy and suffering, but which remain devoid of complexity or depth.

By placing these anonymous plaster effigies in “real” environments, which are constructed from hardware salvaged from the remains of a butcher shop, for example, or a movie marquee or bedroom furniture, Segal thus created a series of tableaux that are more like a form of theatrical still life than anything we normally associate with the art of sculpture. Yet, this is the mode of sculpture that has won the artist a large international reputation as one of the leading sculptors of his generation.

It is inevitably the selection of still-life tableaux of generic plaster figures in “real” environments that dominates the current retrospective exhibition, which was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal and has already been seen at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. For its New York venue, the Jewish Museum, the selection of paintings has been somewhat abridged, but that is not, in my view, an intolerable loss. Even the most ambitious of the paintings here—a female nude called Red Courbet (1959)—leaves one with few regrets that Segal abandoned the medium.

It is, in any case, for its survey of sculptural tableaux that the public now takes an interest in Segal’s work. These have undergone certain changes over the years, with political and Biblical themes having supplanted the earlier emphasis on commonplace subjects from everyday urban life. It was the latter, of course, that made Segal seem to be part of the Pop Art movement in the Sixties—an association that did much to advance his reputation when Pop Art was the rage—but with the passage of time his connections with the Pop aesthetic have been shown to be peripheral. His interests remained those of a social expressionist, and in the more explicitly political tableaux of recent years—particularly The Holocaust (1982) and Depression Bread Line (1991)—he seems now to have more affinities with the socially engaged art of the 1930s than with anything having to do with contemporary sensibility. They are governed by a similar kind of political sentimentality and melodrama. Certain subjects remain entirely beyond the range of Segal’s own sensibility, however. Of these, the most egregious are the painted sculptures about painting. The most awful is the Cézanne Still Life No. 4 (1981), but almost as demeaning to their subjects are the parodies of Braque and Picasso.

The great suprise in this retrospective comes in the very last room, where the visitor encounters a series of oversized portrait drawings, executed in charcoal and pastels and all dating from the 1990s. The subjects are drawn from family and friends--the artist’s wife and mother, the photographer Arnold Newman and the sculptor Marisol—and the emotional note they strike is at once somber, respectful, and unflinching. In my judgment, these are the finest works of art George Segal has ever created. They are also the most “traditional” in their command of a dense chiaroscuro that is in many ways more “sculptural” than anything to be found in the artists’s sculpture. They are the most personal, too, and they leave one wondering if drawing, rather than sculpture or painting or the attempt to combine them, may not after all be his true métier.