A Slower Sense of Time: George Segal’s The Dancers

On the Museum’s West Terrace, a group of four life-size figures balance mid-movement, arms outstretched as they dance. The Dancers was the first bronze sculpture made by George Segal, an artist widely renowned for his installations in which monochrome figures seem to be arrested mid-activity. Segal has long had a significant presence at Princeton: The Museum’s collections include more than two dozen of his artworks, and his papers were donated to the University’s library in 2009. As these papers reveal, by the time Segal created the plaster version of The Dancers in 1971, he had been in rather vexed conversation with performance and liveness for more than a decade.

After completing his studies in art education at New York University in 1949, Segal built a studio and chicken farm in South Brunswick, New Jersey. His local community included fellow artists like Allan Kaprow, who taught at nearby Rutgers University. In 1958 a picnic on Segal’s property was the setting for Kaprow’s first “Happening.” Happenings—carnivalesque mixtures of performance art, dance, cabaret, and participatory spectacle—became regular events on Segal’s property, featuring performances by numerous choreographers, poets, and artists, although Segal himself did not participate. In a 1966 interview with Dorothy Seckler for the Archives of American Art, the artist recalled: 

Mostly, it was because of a reservation I had aesthetically. The earliest Happenings had to do with fragility and perishability. . . . Allan [Kaprow] was convinced that they didn’t have to last, you know, that they could be a burst of a brief moment of time and be an image that would be remembered and then could disappear, you know, and have history only as a score to be reconstructed at some other time. And strangely enough it was just this whole attitude of throw-away materials and the perishability that put me off. And, again, it was only temperamental, I think, because my sense of time is a little slower. . . . I need a larger chunk of time for me to dig into an artwork which is complex and rich. I like the  contemplation time. 

Segal’s need for an extended period for contemplation and fabrication lent itself to painting and, eventually, to the creation of his distinctive sculptures, for which he wrapped friends and acquaintances in plaster bandages to create life-size human figures. Segal’s “slower” sense of time invites us to consider his sculptures as not opposed to performance but rather existing on the slower end of a continuum of liveness.

Segal created The Dancers in 1971, after seeing Henri Matisse’s Dance paintings of 1909 and 1910 at a retrospective in Paris the previous year. Segal’s sculptural version might appear at first glance a straightforward extrapolation of Matisse’s central image; indeed, the Princeton art historian William C. Seitz called it “a veristic recognition of Matisse’s masterworks.” In translating the ring of dancers into three dimensions, however, Segal also rendered them less abstract and more individuated. Where any differentiating details are largely omitted from the figures in Matisse’s Dance paintings, Segal’s sculpture was cast from life, reflecting the narrow or wide flare of models’ hips, defined or youthfully rounded cheeks, and the flexing muscles in backs or strong legs. Segal’s work transmits his models’ efforts to balance and coordinate, a more sedate contrast to Matisse’s nearly weightless, whirling figures. The Dancers occupies what Segal referred to as “literal space,” underscored by the figures’ one-to-one human scale, as well as the low platform that places the entire group nearly at the viewer’s eye level. The bronze sculpture’s flat white tone references the original cast-from-life plaster figures while both the patina and the figures’ stillness demarcate their separation: They are not alive but exist in real relation to us, helping create a space charged with potential. 

Segal’s drive to work and think slowly—to embrace “contemplation time”—often led him to revisit his artworks. A decade after creating the plaster version of The Dancers, Segal began a conversation with the Seward Johnson Atelier in Hamilton, New Jersey, about the possibility of casting the piece in bronze. Founded in 1974, the atelier has long been an experimental platform for sculpture fabrication on behalf of both the atelier’s namesake, Seward Johnson, and fellow artists, including Segal, Marisol, Beverly Pepper, and Georgia O’Keeffe. In 1982, the atelier’s fabricators had recently invented a new matte-white patina, presenting Segal with the tantalizing possibility of replicating the alienating whiteness of the plaster in bronze sculptures. Bronze is suitable to long-term outdoor display, providing Segal the opportunity for his work to occupy “literal space” at public sites and to further prolong the timescale—the durability—of his installations.

The Dancers was Segal’s first plaster sculpture to be cast in bronze, marking a turning point in the artist’s practice. He soon began creating monuments and memorials addressing the longevity of memory and of human experience from an activist, humanist perspective: from Abraham and Isaac: In Memory of May 4, 1970 (1978), installed on Princeton’s campus near Firestone Library, to Gay Liberation (1990) in New York and Depression Bread Line (1991) in Washington, DC. While these sculptures address watershed moments and events, The Dancers is at once timeless and personal. From its new home at Princeton, Segal’s installation greets visitors to the Museum in the spirit of liveness and slowness—welcoming us to spend time in contemplation.