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Born Pittsburgh,
PA, 1924.
Philip Pearlstein was one of the most important and innovative artists of the
contemporary Realist school. He studied at Carnegie Institute of Technology
and received his Masters in art history at New York
University. During the time that Pearlstein began to work realistically the
Modernists were absolute in their rejection of the Realist option.
Although Pearlstein remained as much a Modernist as any of his
contemporaries, he found himself obliged to reconsider the Realist option,
and in so doing helped to reinvent the terms by which Realism could once again
be made into a vital art. 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 figure, male and female, in art 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.
Witness the paintings of Philip Pearlstein. The human body,
placed in a corner of a floodlighted studio, has assumed a whole 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 so detached that the facts
they represent seem new.
It is interesting to note that at the beginning of his career
Pearlstein painted many 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. Models
With Mirror is an example of his
concern for the body as form. The curves, shapes, volumes, and surfaces are
all masterfully put together within the picture space. The recognition of
the form is at the same time a recognition, probably subliminal, of ourselves.
If it is not comfortable or flattering, it is, at least, tonic.
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