The Little Giant: Barbara Ségal’s Dash and the Legacy of Marble Sculpture

Meg Byron

At first glance, a seemingly unassuming laundry detergent bottle stands alone on a pedestal in the Neuberger Museum of Art. Yet, a closer look at the work, the natural veins of the stone signal the artist’s choice of material, reveals that this “found object” is an artwork of masterful carving.

Dash, made in 1994 by the artist Barbara Ségal, is a life-size marble sculpture of a Dash brand laundry detergent bottle. Ségal used the technique of inlay to recreate the bottle’s label using Verona marble, rouge royal marble, Belgium black marble, and onyx. But why—why would someone carve a laundry detergent bottle out of marble? What is it about a bottle of Dash laundry detergent that makes it worthy of being carved out of a luxurious, revered material, continuing the medium’s legacy in Western art history?

Ségal sculpted Dash with the intention of testing her abilities to mimic a real-world object in the spirit of her ancient inspirations. The artist’s ironic play with marble hints at a largely erased and obscured history of polychrome sculpture. Polychromy is the application of multiple colors in a single work of art. Ancient Greco-Roman statuary depicted what was important to that society: their gods, the ideal human form, and other subjects. Thousands of years later, the statues remain, helping historians draw conclusions about a culture from the past to better understand it. Yet, the ancient sculptures passed through the filters of scrutiny and preferences of various artists, art historians, and viewers over time before arriving in the present moment.

Many artists working in the Renaissance promoted a strong desire to move past what people of this era considered the “degenerate” and “backwards” Middle Ages, fueling the hunt for aesthetic purity in the arts[i]—that is, a higher condition of artistic practice that signaled artistic development away from the perceived impure. One course of action they took was the rejection of color in statues. Inspired by antiquity, where achievements in fields such as the arts, humanities, and philosophy signaled it as the pinnacle of progress, artists of the Renaissance found a way forward by looking back.

Many artists in the 15th century regarded the painting of sculpture in the Middle Ages as defilement of the sculpture’s pure form. They looked to ancient Greco-Roman statues, all but completely white, as examples of the aesthetic purity they desired. Neoplatonism, a philosophical call back to antiquity that conceptualized the physical world as a lesser copy of the perfect, abstract world, further bolstered these views. Thus, creating sculptures out of white marble was akin to channeling a higher level of consciousness. What they did not know, or perhaps knew but ignored, was that ancient statues were polychromous.

 Renaissance scholars often did not experience the ancient sculptures’ polychromy; time and weathering wore away the paint applied on top of the marble. Any remaining paint was cleaned off, regarded as leftover dirt.[ii] There is debate in the world of classical art history whether the knowledge of colorful ancient statues was truly unknown, or if it was known but erased in place of the cultural narrative of the time. What cannot be argued, however, is the strength of the Renaissance’s legacy in terms of cementing the classical, white statue in Western art history, demonstrated in famous works such as Michaelangelo’s David (1501-04) and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1581-83).

While Dash is not polychrome in the sense of having paint applied to its surface, it uses the colorful potential of marble to bring qualities to this work that challenge these paradigmatic Renaissance and Neoplatonic visions of marble sculpture. This is especially significant when thinking of the way that scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 18th century text History of Ancient Art cemented the supremacy of the Renaissance interpretations as fact. Winckelmann cited the white statues of antiquity as examples of racial superiority during a time when colonization and slavery tore across Africa.[iii] This landmark text continued a legacy based on a false narrative of ancient history.

Ségal’s Dash exists within the long history of marble sculpture. Its colorful body is a product of marble inlay inspired by the artist’s formative years studying marble carving in France and Italy, specifically the Florentine chapels featuring mosaic marble inlay and the interior of the chapel at Chartres. Color was a part of Ségal’s artistic practice from the start, not unlike her ancient predecessors. Drawing on the scholarship of archaeologists such as Vinzenz Brinkmann, recent major exhibitions like Gods in Color show that, for the ancients, an uncolored sculpture was lifeless. Therefore, color gave that life to the statues of their gods.[iv] Dash is not a sculpture of a deity, but for Ségal, to set in stone what American culture values—perhaps even what it worships—functions similarly. Additionally, to inlay color is to embrace what color and colorful marble offers to the form of the stone sculpture.

The debate surrounding polychromy is at times contentious. In recent scholarship it has been given a platform, and the literal and metaphorical cleansing of color both in the past and in the present has been asserted as symptoms of a deeper cultural issue with color in the West. In that Dash is a cleaning product, and if what Western culture values is a sort of purity, then Ségal’s work is even more ironic in pointing to how that society values cleanliness as an important piece of its foundation, adding to her play with value. To point out that ancient sculpture was not white, and in fact was considered unfinished if it was left so, disturbs a deeply rooted Western cultural, racial, and social identity.

Dash is part of the legacy of classical sculpture because it disrupts the popular narrative. It is a polychromous, marble sculpture of a valued object in its society, echoing the ancient Greco-Roman praxis behind their statues. If the Renaissance took the form and left color behind, then it is within Ségal’s oeuvre that color and form co-mingle in marble once more.

[i] Kim Hart, “Why Do People Still Think That Classical Sculptures Were Meant to be White?,” Artsy, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-people-classical-sculptures-meant-white

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, 1968 ed. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co, 1766).

[iv] Liebieghaus Museum, “Gods in Color: Polychromy in Antiquity,” Online Exhibition, 2020, Accessed December 18, 2020, https://buntegoetter.liebieghaus.de/en/