Hand Over (To) Breast

Segal was a pivotal figure in the post-war New York art scene, which informed his practice, and which he eventually helped to shape in turn. At the same time, his work stood apart from that of his contemporaries, complicating some of the truisms coalescing around emerging practices of performance art, Pop Art, and assemblage of the 1960s and straddling established categories of artistic production.


This piece is an unpainted, partial, molded-paper cast of a woman’s face and upper body in profile. The figure places her right hand just above her left breast and over her left armpit: an ambiguous gesture that is echoed in the doubled prepositions of the work’s title, Hand Over (To) Breast, which focuses attention on the artist’s representation of an action rather than the subject from which the cast was made. Like Segal’s earlier series of "fragments," or partial plaster casts from 1970, this work breaks with the full sculptural ensembles for which the artist is best known. The artist’s sitters were often close friends and acquaintances, and the appearance of a portion of the body rather than the whole, as well as the focus on the female nude, lend the fragments an intimacy absent from many of his other works. Reminiscent of Rodin’s studies of partial figures, as well as fragments of Classical statuary, the work appears both ancient and startlingly contemporary.