Background
Philip Pearlstein was born on May 24, 1924, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, into the family of David and Libbie (Kalser) Pearlstein. During the Great Depression, his father sold chickens and eggs to support the family.
Carnegie Institute of Technology
New York University
Philip Pearlstein was born on May 24, 1924, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, into the family of David and Libbie (Kalser) Pearlstein. During the Great Depression, his father sold chickens and eggs to support the family.
As a child, his parents supported his interest in art, sending him to Saturday morning classes at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art. In 1942, he enrolled at Carnegie Institute of Technology's art school, in Pittsburgh, where he painted two portraits of his parents now held by the Carnegie Museum of Art, but after one year he was drafted by the US Army to serve during World War II. In 1946, sponsored by the GI Bill, he returned to Carnegie Institute, and first met Andy Warhol, who was attracted to Pearlstein because of his notoriety in the school, having been featured in Life magazine, as well as fellow student, and future wife, Dorothy Cantor. Philip also enrolled in the Masters in Art History program at New York University Institute of Fine Arts. His thesis was on artist Francis Picabia, evaluating Cubism, Abstract art, Dada, and Surrealism, graduating in 1955.
In 1942, at the age of 18, two of his paintings won a national competition sponsored by Scholastic Magazine, and were reproduced in color in Life magazine. That marked the start of his artistic career. He was initially assigned to the Training Aids Unit at Camp Blanding, Florida, where he produced charts, weapon assembly diagrams, and signs. In this role, he learned printmaking and the screenprinting process, and subsequently was stationed in Italy making road signs. While in Italy, he took in as much renaissance art as was accessible in Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan, and also produced numerous drawings depicting life in the Army.
During the summer of 1947, Philip, Dorothy Cantor, and Andy Warhol rented a barn as a summer studio. Immediately after graduating in June 1949, Pearlstein and Warhol moved to New York City, at first sharing an eighth-floor walkup tenement apartment on St. Mark's Place at Avenue A. He was eventually hired by Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar, mainly doing industrial catalog work, while Warhol immediately found work illustrating department store catalogs. In April 1950, they moved to 323 W. 21st Street, into an apartment rented by Franziska Marie Boas, who ran a dance class on the other side of the room. During that time, Pearlstein painted a portrait of Warhol, now held by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
After graduation, he was hired by Life Magazine to do page layouts, and was then awarded a Fulbright Hays fellowship, enabling him to return to Italy for a year, where he painted a series of landscapes. From 1959 to 1963, he was an instructor at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, and subsequently spent a year as a Visiting Critic at Yale University in New Haven. Finally, from 1963 to 1988, he was Professor, and then Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn College, in Brooklyn.
During the 1950s Pearlstein exhibited abstract expressionist landscape paintings. Around 1958 he began to attend weekly figure drawing sessions at the studio of Mercedes Matter. In 1961 Pearlstein began to make paintings of nude couples based upon his drawings, and in 1962 he began painting directly from the model in a less painterly and more realistic style. In so doing, he demonstrated that figurative realism could once again be made into a vital art form.
Pearlstein's early landscape paintings — usually rock-strewn hillsides in which every angle, shadow, and shape was seen with a clinical clarity — foreshadow his treatment of the nude as a natural phenomenon devoid of any identity other than the attributes of sex and skin color. Before modernism, painting and sculpture presented the human body in every conceivable pose and situation sanctioned by history, religion, or mythology, but the twentieth century brought a new method of comprehending what we see as form for its own sake. In Pearlstein's paintings, the human body, placed in a corner of a floodlighted studio, assumes a new range of plastic realities, as the mass and weight of the body are emphasized in the unstudied character of the pose. The painting "Models With Mirror" is an example of Pearlstein's concern for the body as form.
Pearlstein's work is in over seventy 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. The Milwaukee Art Museum honored him with a retrospective exhibition in 1983 and accompanied the exhibition with a monograph on his complete paintings. He recently showed at the Century Association, New York; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Galerie Haas, Zurich; and Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin, Germany. Pearlstein is a former President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Two Nudes on Old Indian Rug
Girl On Iron Bench
Male and Female Nudes with Red and Purple Drape
Nude with Red Model Airplane
Swan, Accordion, and Mercury
Nude and African drum
Portrait of Robert Storr
Two Models in a Window with Cast Iron Toys
Self-Portrait
Flamingo
Iron Bed and Plastic Chair
Nude on Green Cushion
Nude on Navajo Rug
Figure Lying on Rug
Lying Female Nude on Purple Drape
Although the human figure stands at the center of Pearlstein's art he professes lack of interest in the psychological aspects of his models, preferring instead to focus on color, light, and composition.
In 1988 Philip was elected into the National Academy of Design.
Quotes from others about the person
Pearlstein has not only regained the figure for painting; he has put it behind the plane and in deep space without recourse to nostalgia (history) or fashion (new images of man). He paints the nude not as a symbol of beauty and pure form but as a human fact — implicitly imperfect."
"He is fascinated with the beauty of form, and by beauty I mean power. This is a man studying structure and the math of its glamour as deeply as the ancient philosophers. As if understanding the essence of the endoskeleton might uncover the sublime.
In 1950, Philip Pearlstein married Dorothy Cantor, with Andy Warhol in the wedding party. The Pearlsteins have three adult children, of which two daughters were the subjects of several painting he made in the 1960s, and the couple lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City.