Pop artist George Segal dies at 75

TRENTON, N.J. - George Segal, an American pop art icon of the '60s 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.

He received a National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton in 1999.

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 Depression-era bread line at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, which was dedicated in Washington in 1997. One of the five figures in the line 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.