"The Holocaust," George Segal by The Jewish Museum published on 2016-08-04T15:35:20Z NARRATOR: Daniel Palmer, Leon Levy Assistant Curator. DANIEL PALMER: “We are looking at George Segal's sculpture, The Holocaust. The piece is a very literal and harrowing example of a memorial to the Holocaust. It forces the viewer to confront with precision and an extreme sense of realism the horror and tragedy of the concentration camps and the material evidence of bodies carelessly strewn in a pile when the Nazis finally evacuated the camps.” NARRATOR: Rebecca Shaykin, Leon Levy Assistant Curator. REBECCA SHAYKIN: “The figures, although they look anonymous from being all white, do have specific references. For example, there's a woman with an apple lying across a man's rib-cage in a reference to Adam and Eve. And there is a man sheltering a smaller figure. It's a reference to Abraham and Isaac. There's also a figure splayed with his arms outstretched in a Christ-like form. “The lone figure of the survivor standing at the fence was cast from a friend of Segal's who was an actual survivor. He's holding on to the barbed wire fence probably as a way of looking out and ... (Overlap) DANIEL PALMER: “Which is interesting because presumably it would have been electrified fence. So this is definitely a point when the authority of the Nazis was no longer present.” “One of those things that I find jarring about this is the universality of this image of the prone cast figure, certainly anyone who's been to Pompeii, who has seen the cast plaster figures that were created in the hollows of the ash by people who were killed in the explosion there almost 2,000 years ago, see a very direct correlation. I think that Segal is using a very contemporary idiom to find much deeper senses of mourning.” REBECCA SHAYKIN: “The idea of combining a kind of abstraction that the white provides, as well as the realism of the subject matter, is integral to Segal's work. He's often associated with the pop art movement but his work, unlike most of the pop artists, involves the human condition and human spirituality.”
