Oil on canvas
In 1961 [George] Segal began using a recently released Johnson & Johnson product—gauze bandages pre-treated with dry plaster—to make full-body plaster casts of family and friends. He combined these unpainted, life-size figures with found objects from everyday life. This portrait pays homage to the legendary art dealer Sidney Janis, who staged an early exhibition of Pop art. He’s shown with one hand perched atop Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s 1933 painting Composition with Red and Blue, which Janis purchased before its completion. His gesture suggests both a collector’s pride and a salesman’s display of his product.
2025
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The artist, Paris, 1933
Sidney and Harriet Janis, New York. Selected from artist in Paris before completion, in 1932. Received in 1933 - 1967
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, 1967
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Piet Mondrian
Dutch, 1872–1944 30 works onlineFor Piet Mondrian, abstract painting was the means of achieving an equilibrium between the “concrete” (the tangible and specific aspects of reality perceived by the senses) and the “universal” (the underlying, essential truths that he believed were constant and unchanging).
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Neo-Plasticism
An artistic philosophy that called for the renunciation of naturalistic representation in favor of a stripped-down formal vocabulary principally consisting of straight lines, rectangular planes, and primary colors.
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Things: A Story of the Sixties
Gallery 412This gallery takes its name— Things —from French writer Georges Perec’s 1965 novel, which follows the journey of a young couple who “wanted life’s enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership.
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