The first thing that hits your eye at the Norton Museum of Art's George Segal exhibit is a very familiar piece, at least if you've been to the FDR Memorial in Washington: Depression Bread Line, Segal's sculpture of five figures in various stages of emotional numbness -- waiting for a handout.

Segal sculpted two other pieces for the Roosevelt Memorial -- The Fireside Chat and The Rural Couple, unfortunately not included in the Norton show. They're good, but Depression Bread Line is a great sculpture, because it sums up an entire period -- you can practically hear the plaintive sound of someone whistling Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

George Segal: Street Scenes encompasses 16 sculptures, or, more properly, environments -- Segal always constructed mini stage sets for his figures, scavenging doorways, walls, diner counters, and, in the case of his famous piece Cinema, a movie marquee.

Segal (1924-2000) grew up in rural New Jersey, where his father ran a chicken farm. He tried following in dad's footsteps but couldn't make a go of it, and gradually turned the chicken farm into an art studio. He began his career as a painter, doing abstract expressionist pieces, which brought him some modest success, but he was unhappy.

In 1978, Segal explained to Martin Friedman, the curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, that his paintings of the 1950s made him feel ``trapped in an emotional and stylistic dilemma.'' Dissatisfied with what he was accomplishing in two dimensions, he decided to add a third, and found, as he put it to Friedman, that he ``produced a literal-looking figure, with practically an abstract expressionist surface.'' By the early 1960s, he was finding success.

Segal got his ideas from observation. He'd go into New York with a sketch pad and a camera. Once he got an idea, he'd look for the background pieces necessary to re-create the image in his mind. Cinema, a sculpture of a figure placing a letter on a lit marquee, derives from an image Segal observed one day driving home from New York. It then became a question of finding the correct marquee to use as the backdrop, which only comes alive because of the brightly lit background.

Segal cast his figures over live models in three pieces, using the old-fashioned method of plaster casts -- wrapping linen around the figure, covering it with plaster, waiting for it to harden, then prying it off. It was a time-consuming and not terribly pleasant process, so he regularly used family members who couldn't say no; the woman in Girl in Doorway is his wife, Helen, and Segal himself is the second man from the left in the Breadline sculpture. Constructing the figures in the necessary poses and finding the right backgrounds meant that completing a single piece could take as long as a year.

Because of the way he worked -- covering someone's head with plaster means they have to keep their eyes closed -- Segal's figures are all sightless. He could have worked on the wet plaster to give them eyes, but he came to feel that the sightlessness was a viable part of his aesthetic. With Diner -- one person at the counter, a waitress behind it, each of them looking away from the other -- Segal said that the scene lent itself to ``an electric danger. The waitress behind the counter is always sizing you up, wondering if you're going to rob her or rape her. So, there would be this careful avoidance of eye contact.''

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