Girl Resting

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.


This is an unpainted, white plaster cast of a young woman resting her cheek in her hand. Segal’s "fragments"— of which this work is an example—broke with the full sculptural ensembles for which the artist was 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. The gerund tense in the work’s title suggests a state of doing rather than being. This sustained, if suspended, action recalls the tradition of the tableau vivant: a hybrid visual and performative arts genre popular in the nineteenth century. Reminiscent of Rodin’s studies of partial figures, as well as fragments of Classical statuary, the work appears both historical and startlingly contemporary. Cast directly from a model rather than sculpted, the work complicates established categories of artistic production.