Therefore, the work had to be carefully ordered and composed which could easily neutralize the disorder, or make it too consciously esthetic. It is much more important to make room for the private tendrils of response everywhere.'' I don't think it is the function of the artist to repeat that kind of bankrupt frame of mind. ''If I were to recreate the chaos,'' he said, ''I'd have to use the Nazi brutality and contempt to arrive at a solution. The disorder could not be captured, however, by mirroring it. The indignity of the heaping, the total disregard for death, spoke of the insanity.'' Here was a decision by a modern state to perform official murder of an entire race. The corpses are carefully composed, and there is a ritual of grieving. In most countries, there is a ritual order at funerals. Segal said, ''and I was struck by the obscenity of the disorder, the heaping of the bodies. ''I must have looked at 1,000 photographs,'' Mr. Segal most from the photographs of the camps was their disorder.
Making it convincing, however, making it seem as if the heap of figures was breathing, presented the sculptor with the kind of problem that makes an art work on this subject so intimidating. This work, about the dead, is filled with movement.įor the subject to have meaning, for the work to be effective, it had to be convincing. Segal's sculptures have been known for their Edward Hopperlike stillness. The figures seem like a creature that is constantly shifting, changing shape. They seem hollow, disembodied, as much souls as physical beings. Seven men, two woman and a boy, either naked or in undergarments, have been taken out of the gas chambers and tossed in a heap. In form and theme, the work is as complex as any Mr. The bronze version, which will be patinated white, will probably be ready for installation near the California Palace of the Legion of Honor at the end of the year. ''They wanted to make a strong statement,'' said Henry Hopkins, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a member of the committee. On the selection committee were a number of concentration-camp survivors. ''The Holocaust'' won the San Francisco competition. ''All those years in the New York art world were in a sense my gourmet, civilian pleasure,'' he said. As he talks about ''The Holocaust,'' it is clear that he regards the work as a return to his roots. Segal is a stocky man of medium height, with thick, curly hair, a ready smile, unassuming dress and a physical ease that suggests an immediate and un-self-conscious participation in the world around him. I did the entire sculpture in three months, without stopping.'' Except this is connected to politics and world war. ''Most of my work is about my own intensely felt private feelings,'' Mr. Once he started to immerse himself in the material, the sculpture took hold of him. ''Of those relatives who stayed behind in Europe during the war, almost all were killed.'' ''My father and mother were chicken farmers of Russian-Polish origin,'' Mr. He dug into his memory, which had been marked by an Old World Jewish upbringing and stories of World War II he had heard as a young man.
Segal began work on his new sculpture, ''The Holocaust,'' which goes on display in plaster Sunday at the Jewish Museum, at Fifth Avenue and 92d Street, by searching out photographs that he remembers seeing in 1945, taken just after the Allies liberated the concentration-camp prisoners. In that instant, I decided to do the piece.'' For the first time, I heard anti-Semitic words coming out of American mouths. When we arrived in San Francisco, the first thing we did was to turn on the television to find out what had happened. ''While we were in Tokyo installing a show, my wife and I heard Israel had invaded Lebanon. ''I received a phone call asking me to stop by anyway and see the site,'' he continued. I didn't want to do it because I knew I would be steeped in death for months on end.''
''A little over a year ago,'' the sculptor George Segal said the other day, ''I got a letter from Mayor Diane Feinstein of San Francisco's Committee for a Memorial to the Six Million Victims of the Holocaust, asking me to submit a drawing or a maquette.