Philip Pearlstein, an American painter best known for his realistic nude portraits, died Saturday at the age of 98.
Pearlstein’s death has been confirmed before His gallery, Betty Cunninghamin a Share on Instagram. He died in a hospital in New York The New York Times mentionedHowever, the cause of death was not mentioned.
Regarded as one of the masters of 20th-century portraiture, Pearlstein began painting nudes in the 1960s, during an era when Abstract Expressionism was still considered one of the finest forms of art-making.
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Pearlstein’s rejection of the sentimentalism and formalism of the Abstract Expressionists was coupled with an embrace of what he called “hard realism,” art that is “sharp, clear, unmistakable,” as he puts it. ARTnews in 1967. This translated into finely drawn figures shown in harsh lighting, muted colors and natural, sometimes unflattering, poses, with bodies often cut off at the edges of the canvas.
Pearlstein was clear in his approach to the human personality from early on. In a piece of 1962 l ARTnewsToo many artists, Pearlstein writes, use the figure as a “story-telling tool”, or they “distort” it so that it can “serve as a symbol of poetic evocation”. Perlstein insisted that the form—and thus the art object—exist only as the same.
“The character of a work of art results from the technical devices used in its formation, and the meaning and ultimate value of the work of art lies in the degree of artistic achievement.” wrote in the same piece. He continued, “As an artist, I cannot accept any other basis for value judgments.”
Pearlstein’s mockery of abstract expressionism, which he practiced early in his career, was also expressed by other reigning artists, including pop art icon Andy Warhol, who, like Pearlstein, is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Born on May 24, 1924, to a first-generation Russian immigrant father and a Lithuanian immigrant mother, Pearlstein attended Saturday classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art as a child.
He studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, until he was drafted into the army in 1943 and sent to Italy, where he served as a graphic artist and spent time viewing Renaissance art. He returned to his studies three years later, where he met Andy Warhol (then Warhola). The two became friends and settled in New York together.
In 1950, Pearlstein married Dorothy Kantor, a classmate at Carnegie Technology who was also an illustrator. She passed away in 2018. She is survived by their three children and two grandchildren.
Pearlstein initially painted what he called “symbolic” paintings, based on major American icons such as Superman. In the mid-1950s he painted Abstract Expressionist-inspired landscapes based on places in Maine. However, in 1963 he exhibited a series of realistic painted models at the Alan Fromkin Gallery.
Mannequins became his subject, along with more elaborate decorative props, for the next fifty years.
Pearlstein’s work is in the collections of several major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirschhorn Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
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