The famous nude painter Philip Pearlstein passes away at the age of 98.
The artist Philip Pearlstein, who with his buddy Andy Warhol revolted against abstraction in the 1950s, passed away on December 17 at a hospital in Manhattan. His legacy is based on realistic, even risky paintings of naked people. He was 98.
Betty Cuningham of the Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York verified the death. The reason wasn’t stated.
Mr. Pearlstein, a Pittsburgh native-like Warhol, studied art and design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he and Warhol met and were taught by instructors who brought the avant-garde of New York painting to western Pennsylvania, during and after World War II.
The aspirational young artists came to Manhattan after graduation in 1949, packing their possessions into shopping bags, and supported themselves as magazine and department store illustrators and designers. However, Mr. Pearlstein was the first to establish success as an artist before Warhol as a fashion illustrator.
The Statue of Liberty, Dick Tracy, and Superman were among the “paintings of icons” that Mr. Pearlstein created after starting with a giant dollar sign in the middle of a canvas as an illustration idea. The paintings, displayed in New York in 1952, predate the Pop Art trend by ten years; Warhol started creating dollar signs in the early 1960s.
At that point, Mr. Pearlstein had switched to directly sketching and painting human figures in his studio while they were being observed. This method, which is still employed mostly in art schools despite being almost as old as painting itself, seemed outmoded during a decade that saw the rise of Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art.
But Mr. Pearlstein opted to identify as a dissident in the art world. In 1962, he stated in the publication ARTnews, “It seems insane on the part of any painter educated in the twentieth-century ways of picture-making to take the naked human body as his subject.” He then continued to focus on the naked human form for the subsequent 50 years.
Rubens and Renoir painted their models in fleshy, pulchritudinous, and dazzling nudes, whereas Mr. Pearlstein depicts his subjects as everyday people. Their emotions and frequently sagging, awkwardly poised flesh convey the boredom of the painfully tedious modelling process. There are a few paintings of guys, but the bulk are of women.
Breasts fall victim to gravity, stomachs display folds and wrinkles, and arms, feet, and knees take up a lot of space on the canvas, creating a dizzying impression. Renoir’s fixation on bright cotton-candy pinks appears to be contradicted by the paint itself, which has drab colours of brown and beige.
