George Segal, 75, artist

[Fata Morgana]

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) - George Segal, an American pop art icon of the 1960s known for his
life-size plaster sculptures, died of cancer Friday at his New Jersey home. He was 75.

Segal began his career as a painter but later turned to sculpture.

``I couldn't divorce myself from the sensual things of life - things I could touch,'' he
once said.

Segal said he never felt trapped in the art form, even though it was his plaster
sculptures that put his name among the top pop artists, including Andy Warhol, Claes
Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein.

``When pop art first became noticed, I felt I was sitting on the tail of a rocket.
Amazingly, it still flies,'' Segal said in 1989.

In 1999, he received a National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton.

Segal's three-dimensional sculpture scenes include ``Cezanne's Still Life,'' a breakfast
table with ripe fruit, tea pot and milk pitcher modeled after the famous painting, and
``Woman on Orange Bed,'' a nude woman lounging on a rumpled, sun-streaked bed.

He also created a life-size bread line and other sculptures depicting the Great Depression
at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington. One of the five bronze figures in
the bread line, installed in 1997, is a self-portrait.

``I wanted to take sculpture off its pedestal,'' Segal told The Associated Press in a 1985
interview at an exhibition of his works in Paris. ``I wanted something solid, something I
could walk into and walk around and be a part of. But I also want this marriage between
the physical and the state of mind.''

To get his full-size, life-like figures, Segal wrapped the bodies of real models in wet
plaster limb by limb to make a mold into which he recast plaster.

``I like the freshness of the paint, the strokes, I like making the marks,'' he said in
the Paris interview. ``But I moved into three dimensions because all these very
intelligent abstract conceptions and ideas about art blocked my painting on flat canvas.''

David Janis, a New York art dealer who was Segal's agent, said Segal's works are in 150
museum collections and many more private collections.

``Segal was the most influential American figurative sculptor of the 20th Century, and
certainly one of the most important of the 20th Century, period,'' Janis said Friday.

``He had a very sophisticated and deep understanding of people and expressed that through
his sculpture,'' he said.

Janis said Segal died at his home Friday in South Brunswick, about 15 miles northeast of
Trenton.

Segal grew up in New York and studied art at Cooper Union, the Pratt Institute and New
York University in New York, and at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

His family moved to South Brunswick in the 1940s, where his father ran a chicken farm.
Segal later bought a chicken farm across the road from his parents and operated it for
about 10 years.

He taught art and English for several years in local high schools before he was able to
earn enough to live off his art.

Segal is survived by his wife, Helen Steinberg; daughter, Rena Segal; son, Jeffrey Segal;
and brother, Morris.

Cheers,

Fata Morgana