Word: pearlstein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more orthodox figurative art, there is no lack. Philip Pearlstein, that master of the art school nude−the flesh always rendered cold, the formality of the body emphasized by photographic-style cropping−has produced one of the best paintings of his career in Female Model on Platform Rocker, 1977 -78, with its uneasily tilting floor line and stutter of shadows cast by the slats of the chair across the pale wall. California's Robert Graham is represented by a group of his small, fragmentary bronze torsos, minutely finished, imbued with something of the erotic dandyism...
...Mark Pearlstein Ann Arbor, Mich...
Born in Pittsburgh in 1924, Pearlstein gravitated to New York, where he rapidly became involved with the dominant orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism. But in 1958, after a visit to Italy, he began to realize that he was still at bottom a realist draftsman. "I did not mean to become the kind of naive or modest painter of nice pictures the word realist seems to lead people to expect. I meant to create strong, aggressive paintings that would compete with the best of abstraction...
...that Courbet would have approved. Nothing is fudged or romanticized; all the attention is focused on an absolute truth of contour, the precise sensation of bunched, knotted or slack muscle, the laconic interplay between the cold skin and the darting, vivid pat terns of the fabric. No artist of Pearlstein's generation has so brave ly confronted the basic issues of realism-how to hold the utmost concreteness of three-dimensional volume within the strongest two-dimensional pattern. The vigorously modeled limbs and trunks of his subjects create a pictorial energy that, like the black scaffolding of Kline...
...second-generation Abstract Expressionist like Pearlstein, Leslie turned to figure painting in the early '60s. His technique as a draftsman is formidable, sharing Pearlstein's plain speech and relentless grip. Your Kindness is an idiosyncratic companion piece to David's famous Death of Marat, with Leslie's wife Constance West dressed as Charlotte Corday and holding the letter that got her access to Marat's bathroom. It is an exhilarating picture, with its firm amplitude of shapes and stripes. Leslie thinks of his work in partly ethical terms. "I think," he reflects, "it was Balzac...