George Segal’s Rush Hour — six life-size bronze pedestrian figures cast in 1995 from a 1983 composition — is installed in the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. A gift of the Hall Family Foundation in 1999, it is among the most direct figurative works in the park’s collection, depicting the anonymity and quiet isolation of American urban commuting life.
The work
Rush Hour was conceived by Segal in 1983 and cast in bronze in 1995; the Nelson-Atkins holds edition 5/5. The work comprises six figures — three female and three male — each rendered at roughly life size (heights ranging from 64½ to 73 inches). The figures walk with heads angled downward and shoulders forward, evoking the interior preoccupation of commuters moving through a shared but uncommunicative space. Segal described each figure as “a distinct psychological portrait,” and the composition as a whole has been characterized as evoking “the deep isolation that can occur even when we are surrounded by others.” Object number: F99-33/75 A-F.
George Segal
George Segal (November 26, 1924 – June 9, 2000) was an American sculptor born in New York City to Polish Jewish immigrant parents. His family relocated to South Brunswick, New Jersey, where Segal worked a chicken farm through much of the 1950s while maintaining his artistic practice. He began as a painter but by the late 1950s was building three-dimensional figures, eventually pioneering a technique that would define his career.
Rather than traditional casting from a mold, Segal applied plaster-impregnated gauze bandages — the kind used in orthopedic medicine — directly onto live models, section by section. Once hardened, the sections were removed and reassembled with additional plaster into hollow shells. Critically, these shells were not molds; the outer surface, with its visible gauze texture and seams, became the finished sculpture. The result was figures with an uncanny stillness: unmistakably human in posture and scale, yet anonymous in feature — faces smooth or obscured, individuality subordinated to type. Later in his career Segal began casting these forms in bronze, sometimes patinated white to echo the original plaster.
Segal’s subjects were drawn consistently from everyday American life: diners, bus riders, gas station attendants, Holocaust survivors, lovers. His work is associated with Pop Art in its attention to the vernacular and the commonplace, though his mood and method are distinct from the flat, commercial imagery of Warhol or Lichtenstein. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1999, the year the Nelson-Atkins acquired Rush Hour. He died in 2000.
At the Nelson-Atkins
Rush Hour was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins in 1999 as a gift of the Hall Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Hall family of Hallmark Cards. It is installed in the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park, the 22-acre landscape surrounding the museum that is home to approximately 35 sculptures. The park is named for Donald J. Hall, son of Hallmark founder Joyce C. Hall, and the Hall Family Foundation has been a primary benefactor of the sculpture collection.
Within the park, Rush Hour occupies a position suited to its subject matter: figures encountered in open space, without a defined audience orientation, so that visitors approaching from different directions meet the group as one meets strangers on a sidewalk. The work neighbors other anchor pieces including the Shuttlecocks by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (1994) and the Henry Moore collection. Together these works give the sculpture park a broad range of mid-to-late twentieth-century American and international sculpture, with Segal’s contribution representing the figurative, everyday-life strand of that tradition.
See also
nelson-atkins, donald-j-hall-sculpture-park, shuttlecocks-nelson-atkins, henry-moore-at-nelson-atkins, hall-family-foundation, Wiki