c. 1997 Religion News Service

LOS ANGELES _ The faces on George Segal’s five sculpture-environments now on display at the Skirball Cultural Center and Museum are anonymous, even generic; the clothes are contemporary yet the subject matter is biblical _ an artist’s meditation on the emotional and thematic links between the ancient and modern.”All the states of mind that I try to provoke, induce, enfold into my sculptures are exactly the same list of states of mind that happen in these Old Testament stories,”the sculptor said of his new exhibit,”George Segal: Works from the Bible,”on display at the center through July 25.

The exhibit is the first time Segal’s biblical works have been exhibited together. Segal, considered one of the country’s top artists, first began exploring the sculpture-environment medium in the late 1950s, creating unpainted, life-size plaster casts and setting them in intimate, realistic settings.

The biblical works follow that motif while yoking biblical stories to the contemporary and personal.

The five works include”The Legend of Lot,””In Memory of May 4, 1970: Kent State _ Abraham and Isaac,””Jacob’s Dream,””The Expulsion,”and”Abraham’s Farewell to Ishmael.””Each of these works creates an environment with figural characters inviting viewers to see biblical stories in contemporary human terms,”said Nancy Berman, museum director.”The themes are timeless: God, families, generations, good and evil.” Tourist Merryl Levinson, a Hebrew school teacher from Boston, said the sculptures touch many of the themes explored in her teaching.”A very interesting contrast _ that it’s ancient and current,”Levinson said.

Museum goers spend nearly as much time reading and contemplating each piece’s accompanying biblical passage and rabbinical commentary as they do looking at the statues, according to museum officials.

Among the most compelling pieces, they said, is the Abraham-sacrificing-Isaac piece, Segal’s meditation on the killing of four students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University during the height of the antiwar protests directed against U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Segal’s version shows two human figures placed on an irregularly shaped, rocklike platform. Abraham holds a knife in his right hand and stands squarely before the bound, kneeling young man. The figures are cast in plaster from actual people. The entire tableau is painted a somber gray.

Originally commissioned by a private foundation for Kent State University, the work was rejected as unpatriotic. The bronze casting of the sculpture was purchased by Princeton University, where it was installed near a chapel.

Levinson said the work spoke strongly to a theme she had been thinking about recently _”the slaughter of the innocent and foreign policy.””Jews don’t like to forget,”she said of Segal’s Kent State piece.”We remember. It’s one of our obligations.” Levinson’s interpretation was typical of many Skirball visitors this spring, according to Berman.”They’re using the biblical narrative and seeing themselves and asking questions about our modern world,”she said.

The works were created between 1958 and 1987. Others in the set include:

_”The Legend of Lot,”created in 1958, a tableau of a roughly outlined figurative painting with a free-standing plaster male figure in front.

_”Jacob’s Dream,”done in 1984-85, portrays the angel of Jacob’s dream as a blue, female figure in a bathing suit standing midway up a ladder.

_”The Expulsion,”created in 1986-87, places Adam and Eve in front of a freely painted backdrop of blazing red and yellow. A dead tree, representing mortality, is placed in the foreground.

_”Abraham’s Farewell to Ishmael,”done in 1987, is made up of four figures and depicts the moment when, to placate his jealous wife Sarah, Abraham sends away his first-born son Ishmael and the concubine Hagar, the boy’s mother. The sculpture emphasizes the dynamics of a father embracing a son he will never see again.

Segal said his challenge in creating the sculptures was to give new life to ancient, yet eternal, themes.”I want to re-embrace my own language, what things look like. I wanted to make a peculiar, personal combination of what’s eternal,”he said.”Our understanding has to happen only after we understand what everybody is going through in their own mind, in these sculptures.” MJP END FINNIGAN