NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY.- Pregnancy Series: Seven Stages, a seven-panel wall relief by the late artist George Segal, has been donated to the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, by the George & Helen Segal Foundation. The work, which depicts the development of a woman’s body during pregnancy, is the only work created as a series by Segal, a founder of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and one of the foremost sculptors of the 20th century.

The work was welcomed to the Zimmerli earlier this year as part of its exhibition, George Segal: Sculpture, Paintings, and Drawings from the Artist’s Studio, which was shown January through May. The placement of Pregnancy Series: Seven Stages in the museum’s permanent collection is important to the Segal family for a number of reasons.

"The Segal family has had a long association with Rutgers that has only strengthened with the recent exhibition of George’s work that the Zimmerli organized," said Segal’s widow, Helen. "We are happy that this piece will be available to central New Jersey residents close to our home and where George worked."

George Segal earned a master of fine arts degree from Rutgers in 1963 and was awarded an honorary doctor of fine arts degree by the university in 1970. He was inducted into the Rutgers Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 1987. His daughter, Rena, also received her MFA from Rutgers. His niece, Susan Kutliroff, who conducts most of the Segal Foundation business, earned a master’s degree in social work as well as her undergraduate degree from the university.

George Segal: Sculpture, Paintings, and Drawings from the Artist’s Studio, which began its tour in the spring of 2001 and made its final stop at the Zimmerli, was shown at multiple venues in Japan and at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. A full-color catalogue accompanied the exhibition.

The exhibition included 90 works representing all major aspects of the artist’s career from 1957 to 2000, emphasizing his wall-mounted works, a significant part of Segal’s oeuvre that had not previously been the focus of his traveling retrospectives. In his review of the Zimmerli’s exhibition, New York Times art critic William Zimmer described Pregnancy Series: Seven Stages as the most "startling" of the show’s relief sculptures of female nudes, the group of works which he felt formed the "heart of the exhibition." Segal’s figural reliefs show the artist’s fascination with ancient figural fragments, and his variants on the theme of the partial figure evoke mystery, human frailty, or a sense of a fleeting moment of time.

Segal began casting human figures directly from live models in 1961, using plaster-soaked bandages to capture the basic characteristics of his models. In the mid-1970s, he began pouring plaster into his casts, using them as molds to produce more detailed figures such as the Pregnancy Series. In 1976, he created his first bronze sculpture for public spaces.

Pregnancy Series: Seven Stages was not Segal’s first sculptural undertaking exploring the state of pregnancy. In 1966 Playboy Magazine commissioned a piece that was created using the bandage method. The sculpture depicted artist Larry Rivers’ wife in a late stage of pregnancy, clothed and seated on a chair. The Pregnancy Series features seven mold castings, created at monthly intervals. Referring to the artist’s sculptural fragments, noted Segal scholar Phyllis Tuchman stated that among these life affirming and often erotic works, "… nothing celebrated life and the beauty of women more than an astonishing group of seven reliefs Segal created in 1978 recording the metamorphosis of a woman’s body during her pregnancy. Obviously figurative, the different moments animating this series, nevertheless, also speak the language of abstraction vis a vis a swelling belly, Venus of Willendorf breasts, and arms and fingers that are as much lines as body parts. Segal was a humanist. Pregnancy Series: Seven Stages makes this abundantly clear."

Prior to the recent exhibition, Pregnancy Series: Seven Stages was shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Alex Rosenberg, and Katzen Brown Gallery, all in New York, and throughout Japan as part of the 1982-83 exhibition, George Segal. The work will make its first appearance in a permanent collection exhibition at the museum this fall, from Sept. 7 to Nov. 16, entitled Twentieth Century American Sculpture in the Zimmerli Collection.

"The Zimmerli is very pleased to add this important work by this area’s most internationally renowned artist to the museum’s permanent collection," said Zimmerli Director Gregory Perry. "It is a significant addition to the Zimmerli’s strong collection of 20th-century sculpture, as well as an interesting complement to the Segal environmental work, Bus Shelter, which the museum purchased in 1998."

Following the upcoming sculpture show, the piece will be installed in a permanent location at the Zimmerli.