Born March 13, 1934 in Coney Island and a Woodstock resident since 1973, Richard Segalman would have been 90 this spring. The Woodstock School of Art (WSA) is celebrating the anniversary with a two-month-long exhibition of more than 70 of his works, drawn from the private collections of local friends and of WSA itself. This luminous selection of oil paintings, watercolors, monotypes, charcoal drawings and pastel paintings, titled “Segalman at 90,” will be on view in the Robert H. Angeloch Gallery at the school through May 4.
Segalman was a familiar figure around Woodstock, where he gathered regularly with a group of friends for breakfast for many years – when he wasn’t at his Greenwich Village apartment or his winter refuge in Naples, Florida. He taught at WSA from 1981 up until his death from pancreatic cancer on July 6, 2021. In fact, it was there that his long and diverse career was reinvigorated via the mastery of an entirely new medium as he entered his 60s, after he took a few classes in monotype printing in 1993.
Along with his elder brother, young Richard Segalman bounced from house to house of various relatives after the death of his father, as his single mother struggled to earn a living as a professional milliner. The hats she made and sold, and the fabrics from which she made them, surrounded Richard in early childhood and took on a nostalgic significance for him. As a grown artist he kept many of his mother’s things around to use as props in his paintings, and a selection of vintage hats are displayed alongside his art in the WSA exhibit. Segalman painted crowded street scenes, city rooftops and desert mesas and the Ashokan Reservoir, not to mention plenty of nudes; but the images for which he’s best-known are of women he knew, solo or in clusters, draped in voluminous petticoats that billow in the wind on some shore, whether in Coney Island or in Florida. Often, they’re also bedecked in a jaunty hat.
When Richard was in his teens, his mother remarried, and the boys moved back in with her and their adoptive stepfather in Manhattan. He roamed the streets and the seashore, people-watching, honing his artist’s eye, knowing from the first that this would be his life’s work. “I wanted to be an artist since I can remember. I loved drawing,” he has been quoted as saying. “It’s the only thing that ever felt right.” Degas, Sargent, Sorolla and Turner were among his early influences. He did his formal studies at the Parsons School of Design.
After a stint in the Army, he discovered Naples, Florida, where his aunt and uncle ran the iconic Anchor Bar. It was there that he had his very first exhibition of charcoal drawings, and soon a local gallery was showing his work. Beginning in the 1960s, Segalman’s watercolors and oils were shown by the Davis Gallery, Graham Gallery and Katarina Rich Perlow Gallery in New York, the Kornbluth Gallery in Fairlawn, New Jersey, the Meyer-Munson Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Harmon-Meek Gallery in Naples, Florida. The Marlborough Gallery in New York began showing his monotypes in 2006.
Collectors soon took an avid interest in the young artist’s work, and some of those private collections ended up being donated to such prestigious institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Over his lengthy career, Segalman’s artwork was placed in over 40 permanent collections in museums.
If you come to see “Segalman at 90” at WSA, you’re sure to come away wishing you had acquired some of the sublime, joyful works of this “contemporary Impressionist” yourself. This correspondent found myself wanting to take at least half of them home with me. “Welcome to the world of the pursuit of light, beauty and good painting,” says curator Kate McGloughlin of this exhibition. She characterizes Segalman as “the one they will be writing about 100 years from now when they write about this art colony.”
The Woodstock School of Art is located at 2470 Route 212 and open to the public from 9am to 3pm, Monday through Saturday. For more information about the “Segalman at 90” exhibition, visit woodstockschoolofart.org.
Join the family! 
