Philip Pearlstein

Philip Pearlstein (born May 24, 1924) is an American painter, and an important and innovative artist of the contemporary Realist school.

Biography

Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his Masters in art history at New York University. He was a friend of Andy Warhol from college and he accompanied Warhol to Manhattan from Pittsburgh in 1949. Warhol and Pearlstein subleased an eighth-floor walkup tenement apartment on St. Mark's Place (and Avenue A) for the summer. According to Pearlstein, "The bathtub was in the kitchen and it was usually full of roaches, incredible roaches." When they moved a few months later to the large front room of dancer Francesca Boas's loft on West 23rd Street, Warhol sent out address change cards in small envelopes filled with glitter announcing: "I've moved from one roach-ridden apartment to another."

Career

During the time that Pearlstein began to work realistically the modernists were absolute in their rejection of the Realist option in favor of Abstract expressionism.

Although Pearlstein remained as much a Modernist as many of his contemporaries, he found himself obliged to reconsider the realist option, and in so doing he helped to "reinvent" the terms by which figurative realism could once again be made into a vital art form. The Milwaukee Art Museum honored him with a retrospective exhibition in 1983 and accompanied the exhibition with a monograph on his complete paintings.

The use of the nude, both male and female, has its precedent in prehistoric cave paintings and sculpture. Since then, the nude has been used in a variety of ways, both symbolic and erotic. All of the traditions of the past in painting and sculpture have presented us with the human body in every conceivable pose and situation sanctioned by history, religion, or mythology. In the twentieth century, however, we have acquired a new method of comprehending what we see. It is the act of seeing only what we see, without reference to symbology or association, to see form for its own sake, abstractly that Pearlstein presents in his paintings.

In Pearlstein's paintings, the human body, placed in a corner of a floodlighted studio, assumes a new range of plastic realities; for instance, the relationship of limbs to torso; the continuity of skin and muscle. The mass and weight of the body are emphasized in the unstudied character of the pose: all are normal in our experience, but the point of view from which we see them is detached and the facts they represent are seen in a new context.

It is interesting to note that at the beginning of his career Pearlstein painted landscapes, usually rock-strewn hillsides in which every angle, shadow, and shape was seen with a clinical clarity. In a sense, his nudes are also landscapes. The human body, as a natural phenomenon devoid of any identity other than the attributes of sex and skin color, is, for Pearlstein, another world of forms. The painting "Models With Mirror" is an example of his concern for the body as form. The curves, shapes, volumes, and surfaces are all cannily put together within the pictorial space. The recognition of the form is at the same time a recognition, probably subliminal, of an aspect of ourselves.

Pearlstein's work is in 63 museums collections in the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art amongst others. He recently showed at the Century Association, New York; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Galerie Haas, Zurich; and Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin, Germany.

Since the mid-1950s Pearlstein has received several awards, most recently, the National Council of Arts Administrators Visual Artist Award; The Benjamin West Clinedinst Memorial Medal, The Artists Fellowship, Inc., New York, NY; and honorary doctorate degrees from Brooklyn College, NY, Center for Creative Studies and the College of Art & Design, Detroit, MI, and New York Academy of Arts, New York, NY. Pearlstein is a former President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

External links

[http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pbio?237670 National Gallery of Art] , biography, retrieved July 17, 2008