George Segal’s ‘The Holocaust’: Biblical Subject Matter and God as
Center in Adams, D. Transcendence with
the Human Body in Art: George Segal, Stephen de Staebler, Jasper Johns and
Christo. Crossroads Pub. Co. 1991.
This is a
personal summary of the chapter entitled
‘George Segal’s ‘The Holocaust’: Biblical Subject Matter and God as Center’ in
the book Transcendence with the Human Body in Art: George Segal, Stephen de
Staebler, Jasper Johns and Christo.
‘Explicit
articulation of the human body’ presents transcendence
George Segal was born in 1924. His
sculptures present transcendence and Biblical subject matter. Segal’s most extensive sculpture is ‘The
Holocaust’. In the works of Segal
‘relationships with a centre beyond self’ suggest non-verbal post-modern
theology.
For Segal the human body ‘affirms historic subject matter and
transcendence’.
Segal succeeds the modernist abstraction of American artists of the
1940s and 50s. Contrary to Newman and
Rothko who asserted the necessity of abstraction to express the transcendent,
Segal asserts that ‘explicit articulation of the human body’ presents transcendence.
Segal’s ‘The
Holocaust’
Segal’s ‘The Holocaust’ (1984) is in The Legion of Honor Museum in San
Francisco. There is transcendence in
this sculpture through uniting the Twentieth Century Holocaust with Scriptural
narratives, and through the joining of figures within the sculpture with each
other and ‘relating to a center beyond themselves’.
The sculpture is located in a way that allows it to be approached from
several different directions, thus inviting different interpretations.
Three figures that are represented in the sculpture may be perceived as Adam,
Eve and God (Genesis 2 & 3): God is the central figure. There is another group of figures nearby: an
older man and a young boy, and a ‘central figure’; Scripture suggests that these
should be identified with Abraham and his son Isaac and ‘God’s intervening
angel’ (Genesis 22: 1-19).
Abraham and
Isaac
Segal had previously made two sculptures showing Abraham almost
sacrificing Isaac.
When the sculpture of 1973 (‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’) is considered, Adams
asserts that the demeanour and dynamics of both the 1973 sculpture and ‘The
Holocaust’ ‘affirm the figures’ continuing relation to the earth’, which I take
to mean that both are faithful to the Scriptural narrative in which the
sacrifice does not take place and that redemption is affirmed. But the figure of Abraham in ‘The Holocaust’
is stated by Adams to be ambiguous in his intention. ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’ is in the Tel Aviv
Museum.
In Segal’s 1970 sculpture (‘The Holocaust. In Memory of May 4, 1970, Kent State: Abraham
and Isaac’), Abraham is shown in a threatening and ‘ignoble’ stance towards his
son. The son is in a posture that is
submissive and bound, and the father is aggressive, but if the son should stand
he would be seen to be taller and stronger than his father. Kent State University rejected the sculpture
and it now stands at Princeton University.
Abraham, Sarah,
Ishmael, Hagar, Lot and Lot’s daughters
There are two further Segal sculptures that deal with the Abraham
narrative.
Segal’s ‘Abraham’s Farewell to Ishmael’ of 1987 comprises four figures
representing Sarah, Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael.
The Scriptural narrative is Genesis 21: 1-21. Hagar – servant to Abraham’s wife Sarah – had borne Abraham’s first-born son Ishmael
because it was believed that Sarah was beyond child-bearing age. But when Sarah gave birth to Isaac, Sarah
wanted Hagar and Ishmael to be banished.
In the sculpture Abraham embraces Ishmael, and Hagar embraces herself
separately in the same stance: Sarah looks on.
Segal’s ‘The Legend of Lot’ (1966) shows another separation scene within
the Abraham narrative, although Abraham is not portrayed. Lot is a nephew of Abraham (Genesis 11:
26-32). Genesis 19 includes Lot’s wife
becoming a pillar of salt when she turns to see the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah, and subsequently the two daughters of Lot (not named in the Christian
Bible) becoming pregnant by their father for want of another man to continue
their family line. Lot’s wife is shown
as a pillar of salt and Lot is shown unconscious with his daughters taking
advantage of him.
Adams writes that ‘The Legend of Lot’ is a parody of Genesis 19 and
Genesis 21. The theme is ‘faithfulness
and unfaithfulness’: both stories are moral dilemmas concerning obedience,
procreation and inheritance.
Segal’s ‘The
Holocaust’
When viewing ‘The Holocaust’, Segal wants the viewer to have the whole breadth
of the Biblical narrative in mind.
In Scripture ‘holocaust’ is associated with sacrifice. The holocaust may be seen through the story of
Adam and Eve or through the story of Abraham and Isaac. The sculpture ‘The Holocaust’ shows a bigger
picture: the central figure and those around it form a cruciform shape. Segal has affirmed that he intended a
cruciform shape, however problematic this may be in a Jewish setting. Thus the central figure in ‘The Holocaust’ may
be Christ, or possibly ‘God or God’s angel’.
The shape of the sculpture ‘The Holocaust’ may also be perceived to be a
Star of David.
The central figure may also be perceived to represent ‘nature
itself’.
In the manner of presenting each of the figures in the sculpture Segal
has said that the sensuality of the two women in ‘The Holocaust’ ‘contributes
to the sense of lively survival’ that provides ‘affirmations of life’ in the
sculpture.
The ‘most hellish scene in the sculpture’ is to the lower left of the
sculpture’s central figure: the conventional location for hell in medieval
paintings of Christ’s Last Judgement.
The figures in this ‘most hellish scene’ are ‘a pile of bodies’.
In addition to the figures that lie in a cruciform or Star of David
shape, another figure stands to one side against a barbed wire fence: his
separateness emphasises the ‘interrelation’ of the other figures which ‘defies
the horror of the Holocaust’.
The sculpture is ambiguous between the various Scriptural stories that
it may evoke and in the Christian and Jewish ways in which the sculpture may
speak: thus ‘any one view or interpretation is transcended’.
Segal intends that those who see ‘The Holocaust’ allow their own
experience, imagination and sense of Scripture to interact with the sculpture. He particularly wants the sculpture to honour
the rich personal intellect and spirituality of those who died in the Holocaust.
Comments by
Segal on ‘The Holocaust’
Adams then refers to Segal’s comments on the sculpture, covering these
subjects:
·
differences between post-modern art and pre-modern
art in the use of Biblical subjects, and of the human figure;
·
his desire that ‘The Holocaust’ should have within
it a strong affirmation of the value of life – a celebration of life ‘beyond
the death, injustice and genocide’;
·
his intention that gentleness, love and forgiveness
should pervade ‘The Holocaust’.
Some
positive and negative criticisms
Adams then covers some positive and negative criticisms of ‘The
Holocaust’:
·
Andrea Liss doubts whether any artistic response to
the event of the Holocaust is valid because the response to despair should be
only silence. Elie Wiesel wrote, after
Samuel Beckett: ‘Even to write about despair is a step beyond despair’.
·
Felstiner quotes Selz who considers that only
abstract art may make a valid response to the event of the Holocaust ‘in order
to avoid domestication’.
·
Rodati objects to the presence of relatively
healthy bodies being portrayed in ‘The Holocaust’.
·
Adams describes the work of the artist Alice Lok
Cahana – a survivor of Auschwitz.
·
Adams states that contemporary Jewish sources are
not critical of ‘The Holocaust’ for its Christian allusions, because of the
valued transcendence that the sculpture evokes.
·
A post-modern understanding is shown in the work of
Mark Taylor who believes that post-modernism should begin with an understanding
of ‘irrevocable loss and incurable fault’.
Post-modern art should start with the principle not of the great loss
that has occurred but with the gain of the new personal autonomy that has been
gifted. Adams writes that this stance
presents opportunities to make ‘new connections to wider worlds and histories
as in George Segal’s art’.
Adams concludes that ‘The Holocaust’ offers transcendence, connections
and a centre beyond the individual.
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