Mom's Day Out

I recently took a mom’s group to two prominent 57th street galleries: DC Moore and Maxwell Davidson. They are in the same building, 724 Fifth Avenue, which made for an easy transition from one to the other. Part 1 of this blog is dedicated to Maxwell Davidson. Stay tuned for DC Moore...

At Maxwell Davidson, we saw a sculpture exhibit featuring the works of George Segal (1924- 2000), a 20th century American sculptor. Harkening back to one of my first official tours, I took the group to L&M Arts on the Upper East Side to see Segal’s sculptures which focused on life-size figures engaged in everyday activities. The show that Davidson curated, however, was the first time an exhibition devoted itself solely to Segal’s depictions of the female form – both displaying sculptures and pastel drawings.

The first sculpture we saw, titled Standing Woman Looking into Mirror, 1996, immediately made me think of a reference from art history: the Rokeby Venus (also known as The Toilet of Venus, Venus at her Mirror, Venus and Cupid, or La Venus del espejo), a painting by Diego Velazquez (1599–1660), the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. The work depicts the goddess Venus lying on a bed and looking into a mirror held by her son, Cupid, who was known as the Roman god of physical love. I showed the tour an image of the painting, which is now housed at the National Gallery in London, as we discussed the Segal sculpture.

We then moved onto another Segal figure, Red Woman Acrobat Hanging from a Rope, also executed in 1996, which hung suspended from the ceiling. It possessed an incredible sense of movement, and made me think of Edgar Degas for his treatment of women in the act of dance. What usually comes to mind when Degas is mentioned is the ballerina, but he also portrayed other types of dance. I mentioned a work to the group titled Spanish Dancer that he cast in bronze. I wanted to talk about this work particularly in relation to Segal as it presented a different medium of sculpture which is visually and technically very different from the materials Segal used.

Lastly, we looked at a torso that Segal had made, Hand on Buttocks, 1970. As a result of its foreshortened form and its sense of curvilinear movement, I related it to the famous statue of Venus de Milo, which is cast in marble (again, this presented an interesting discussion of sculpture in terms of its material), and also how an artist such as Segal was perhaps paying homage to the art of the past, which, conscience or not, he managed to do in most of his forms.