Philip Pearlstein
September 15 - October 22, 2005
PEARLSTEIN/HELD: Five Decades
November 19, 2009 – February 13, 2010
Opening reception: Thursday, November 19, 6 – 8pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday: 10am – 6pm
New York, NY – October 16, 2009 – On November 19th, Betty Cuningham Gallery will open the two person show: PEARLSTEIN/HELDFive Decades. The exhibition compares the work of painters Philip Pearlstein and Al Held, both of whom have parallel careers spanning the last fifty years. The show will remain on view until February 13, 2010, at the gallery’s space located at 541 W. 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues.
Both artists were born in the mid – 1920’s: Pearlstein in 1924 and Held in 1928. The artists arrived in the center of the “art scene” in the late 1940’s at the time of the birth of Abstract Expressionism. Both tried their hand in Abstract Expressionism in the 1950’s, but by 1960, both had left Abstract Expressionism behind. Philip Pearlstein chose the route of representation – particularly of the female nude, a classic subject throughout art history. Al Held moved toward clear abstraction. Both shared the position that “Expressionism” would be dropped from their paintings. By the late 1960’s Pearlstein had committed to the “New Realism”, as stated in John Perrault’s manifesto:
No stories; no allegories; no symbols.
No hidden meanings; no obvious meanings.
No philosophy, religion, or psychology.
No jokes.
No political content.
No illustration.
No fantasy or imagination; no dreams; no poetry.
At the same time Held removed any evidence of his hand from the canvas, showing no obvious brushwork, and removed the color, producing his well recognized black and white paintings. Held in fact was to anticipate the Minimal Manifesto of Donald Judd as it appeared in Time magazine in May of 1971:
No movement, no gesture, no direction.
No Mass (only gleaming metal surfaces and transparencies of color Perspex).
No pedestal: the box on the floor in the sculpture.
No metaphor, no image, and especially
No relation or reference to the human figure.
At the same time Held removed any evidence of his hand from the canvas, showing no obvious brushwork, and removed the color, producing his well recognized black and white paintings. Held in fact was to anticipate the Minimal Manifesto of Donald Judd as it appeared in Time magazine in May of 1971:
No movement, no gesture, no direction.
No Mass (only gleaming metal surfaces and transparencies of color Perspex).
No pedestal: the box on the floor in the sculpture.
No metaphor, no image, and especially
No relation or reference to the human figure.
From the late 1970’s on, both painters, following their independent roads, chose to further challenge themselves by increasing the complexity to their compositions and their color.
Up to the time of his death in 2005, Held remained steadfastly committed to abstraction, and actually took abstraction a step further by removing his hand and allowing his paintings to be completed by assistants. His complex paintings based on linear perspective would be created on a working canvas, a canvas never to be shown, but to be executed perfectly on a fresh canvas.
On the other hand, Pearlstein, the committed figurative artist, in his most recent work, jams figures and objects into his canvases to make a complex and tight abstract composition. In effect, Held’s late canvases were oddly representative of a new world and Pearlstein’s oversized nudes were clearly abstractions with elements of recognition.
The exhibition seeks to show the distinctive routes of Pearlstein and of Held. The two paths, which appeared at first to be antithetical one to the other, almost seem today to merge as one in contemporary eyes.
Irving Sandler, who has written extensively on Al Held and on Philip Pearlstein, will be contributing an essay to this exhibition.
Click below for full press release.
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“Hello and Goodbye, Francis Picabia”
By Philip Pearlstein
September 1970
One of the prime movers of modern art is subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim; here an American painter tells how he first studied Picabia, felt liberated by his vanguard ideas, and finally rejected them
BY POSTED
With the Museum of Modern Art in New York preparing to open a much-anticipated Francis Picabia retrospective on Monday, we turn back to the September 1970 issue of ARTnews, in which Philip Pearlstein wrote an essay about the artist. The Guggenheim Museum had staged a Picabia retrospective in that year (MoMA’s show, reviewed in these pages by Andrew Russeth, is the first the United States since then), and Pearlstein took this article as an opportunity to pen a love letter to the artist. Pearlstein’s piece follows in full below. For more articles about Picabia from the ARTnews archives, consult the Retrospective that appears in our Fall 2016 issue.
Please find a press release from the Morgan Library & Museum regarding a recent gift of a collection of World War II drawings by Philip Pearlstein. Click the Morgan Library's link to PDF below.
Featuring drawings from the 1940s by the revered realist painter Philip Pearlstein, “WWII Captured on Paper” manifests as a stunning historic document. Made from observation and personal experience, the works tell of the physical and emotional realities of a G.I. in an infantry replacement unit during the Second World War.
Pearlstein recalls: “During my freshman year at Carnegie, most of the male student body took the introduction to military training [ROTC] instead of gym, and at the end of the school year, in June 1943, we all met at Fort Meade, Maryland. After being interviewed, all of my friends were assigned to the Signal Corps.” Already recognized for his artistic talent, Pearlstein was able to avoid the same fate, perhaps saving his life. In the National Scholastic High School Art Contest, he had been awarded first and second prize for two paintings that were subsequently featured in the July 16, 1941 issue of Life magazine.
“On instinct, I had taken a copy of the issue with me,” he explained, “and I showed it to the officer who interviewed me. He seemed impressed, but I was assigned to the Infantry rather than the Signal Corps, packed into a very crowded train, and sent to Fort McClellan, Alabama, where four months of violent physical activity, training in a very hot, sun-blinding summer, transformed me from a pudgy, non-athletic person into a surprisingly muscular G.I.”
The American artist has pursued an independent path for more than 60 years. Here, he talks about his life and career, from his time in Italy during the second world war and his student days with Andy Warhol to his current practice
Pearlstein, Warhol, Cantor: From Carnegie Tech to New York,—featuring the work of three provocative artists—is as informative as it is pleasurable. As you enter the gallery you are faced with their ensemble photograph, taken on the front lawn of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech in the late 1940s, the beginning of their lifelong friendship.
I'm not for a second accusing Warhol of anything close to plagiarism; his greatest talent, as I've said before, may have been his skill as a sponge, soaking up ideas and imagery that others threw away then turning them into vital parts of our culture. But Pearlstein does deserve some credit as spongee.
“Pearlstein, Warhol, Cantor: From Pittsburgh to New York” at The Andy Warhol Museum feels a bit like a family gathering where you learn things about your relatives you hadn’t heard before. It’s a rare look into the career beginnings of two talented young artists who achieved considerable success in both commercial and fine arts, and an opportunity to discover another who later chose to apply her talents elsewhere.
In 1949, two young, aspiring artists, Philip Pearlstein and Andy Warhol, bought bus tickets out of Pittsburgh. They arrived in New York with a few shopping bags stuffed with clothes, art supplies, and little else. This summer, the Andy Warhol Museum tracks the friendship and flight of the two painters, along with fellow classmate Dorothy Cantor, from their industrial hometown to the lodestar of the 1950s art world. Through paintings and drawings—bolstered by a bewitching cache of ephemera including photos of the friends painting in class or lounging on the beach—“Pearlstein, Warhol, Cantor: From Pittsburgh to New York” balances the legacies of three artists who, in the end, followed distinctly different trajectories.
Philip Pearlstein:
Six Paintings, Six Decades
February 27 – May 11, 2014
National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Avenue
NYC
Opening Reception: February 26, 6 PM
(RSVP to development@nationalacademy.org or call 212.369.4880 x215)
