Word: nude
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...Museum last spring and may be seen at the Brooklyn Museum until Sept. 15, is a dense and satisfying show. Pearlstein is one of those painters whose work always contains surprises, because one tends to feel more familiar with it than one is. What is so new about a nude in a room, done over and over again? Quite a lot, in fact. Pearlstein is by now a fixture of the museums and art-history books. He is 59 this year, and probably did more to "break the ice" for realist painting in America than any other artist...
...Historian Irving Sandier remarks in his catalogue essay, Pearlstein "resumed what an avant-garde some three-quarters of a century earlier had proclaimed to be academic"-modeled painting of the naked human body. The studio nude, posed, had been the very protein (or, to its detractors, the basic starch) of salon painting from Ingres to Bouguereau. It was thrust into eclipse by impressionism because it carried an aura of the posed, the stagy, the allegorical, and post-impressionism finished it off. The nude became a casualty of the means painters chose to assert their pictorial honesty: the near religious cult...
Taboos are made to be broken; one sees today why Pearlstein was interested in an artist so totally unlike himself, the Dadaist Francis Picabia, who conceived his work as a constant affront to received taste. Painting the studio nude, Pearlstein declared allegiances very different from those common in the New York art world of the late '50s. In neither hedonism nor irony nor self-expression, he wanted to go back and start from Gustave Courbet, painting the naked body in a spirit of detached, colloquial reportage, as though all the proscriptions against figure painting had lost their magic...
Some of the settings are indeed pretty, like the opening tableau of Das Rheingold, in which three nude Rhinemaidens swim in a pool of water, reflected vertically by means of mirrors so that it appears they are frolicking in a deep river. But there are inexplicable departures from the prevailing neoRomantic ethos, born of the director's fascination with stage gadgetry. For the Ride of the Valkyries in Die Walküre, Hall straps four warrior maidens to a slowly descending platform, while beneath them their sisters prepare the naked bodies of dead heroes for consignment to Valhalla. This...
...Separate Tables, in which he gave a 1958 Oscar-winning portrayal of a pathetic military impostor. His candid, bestselling memoirs (The Moon's a Balloon, Bring on the Empty Horses) abound with lightly told anecdotes of Errol Flynn's drunken revels and Greta Garbo's nude swims. Niven once described Hollywood as a "hotbed of false values. . . but it was fascinating, and if you were lucky...