George Segal made a cast of Barbara Novak’s head, following her pose for a full-length piece, Street Crossing, 1992, which is now in the Segal Room in the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, and which also features Brian O’Doherty. Although he had used other forms of casting in the intervening period, here Segal returned to the process which launched his career as a sculptor in 1961: the unprecedented technique of wrapping the sitter in plaster bandages and then wetting them so that they set to form casts. Removed in sections when dry, they were then re-assembled, the form was adjusted and the surface treated. The pure white colour of most of Segal‘s works, as the artist himself claimed, did away with details which could distract the onlooker‘s attention. Segal has always sought in his work to evoke a feeling of revelation and of psychological truth. Here, the plaster head is strikingly disposed against a background comprising a section of an old door and its adjacent frame, a fragment of a real-life architectural setting and small-scale relation of the large architectural environments he created for his life-size tableaux. Segal salvaged household hardware and fittings and discarded bedroom furniture which he cut up and incorporated into his sculptures.