Phillip Pearlstein
American, 1924-
Female Model in Green Kimono on Savonarola Chair, 1979
watercolor on paper
59 5/8 x 40 in.
SBMA, Museum purchase, funds provided by "Auction Auction!" Courtesy of Margaret Mallory
1980.25
Self-Portrait (2000) Watercolor, 10"x12"
“I get my highs from using my eyes…I only care about the visual aspects of painting. I don’t want the burden of literature thrust on me when I only want to use my eyes…"
“I have learned to look at what is in front of me without idealizing it. That has been a consuming experience in itself, and ultimately that may be the aspect of my work that irritates some people. Most of us really don’t want to see things as they are..."
“There are only certain types of landscapes I want to deal with now – mostly ruins. I suppress all their romantic, expressive and metaphorical overtones. Reconstructing them almost brick by brick gives me the same kind of tension as painting a studio nude…"
“Whatever it is that gives a work of art its meaning, its ability to arouse sensibilities to recall other experiences – its poetics in other works – cannot be processed or suppressed. In that respect, scribble and an intellectual sign are equal in value and equally capable of being an art experience...”
- Phillip Pearlstein
RESEARCH PAPER
Watercolors and Prints Phillip Pearlstein’s earliest paintings in the 1950’s were landscapes based on rocks he held in his left hand while painting with the right – cliffs and mountains writhing in forms extrapolated from the weathered surfaces and shapes of the rocks. The works were abstract expressionist in feeling, a style he was later to reject in favor of realism. He is best known as a pioneer of contemporary realism because of his huge “studio nudes,” stylized, graphic, unerotic human still life canvases with foreshortened diagonal composition and short cropping – techniques he used to some extent in these landscapes before us.
The six works in this corner, all executed between 1969-82, are results of travels to England, Egypt and Peru where he first sketched and painted in oil before making these watercolors and prints. The low-key palette, attention to detail, strong diagonal thrust, skewed viewpoint and cropping are characteristic of his landscapes and in marked contrast to the earlier landscapes in this exhibition, particularly the different treatments of Paestrum by Katherine Kimball and Giovanni Piranesi.
Pearlstein admits he has always been fascinated by ruins, and the common thread in his landscapes is the sense of antiquity, of prior occupancy of a particular spot. He first saw ruins in Italy during World War II, and returned to Italy several times on fellowships, which also took him to England to paint Stonehenge and Tintern Abbey as well as to Egypt for the Abu Simbel and Temple of Hatshepsut works. Notice the acute angle of the Abbey, the result of having to find a spot where he could avoid falling stones while he painted. The choice of view of Abu Simbel is based on his desire to include both the colossal sculptures and the entrance to the smaller temple. The seemingly arbitrary cropping of the Abbey arch and the cliff above the Temple of Hatshepsut occurred, he said, because he wanted to frame the major image and make the scene a detailed close-up when viewed from whatever distance.
This artist admits he is really more interested in the process than in the final result of whatever he does. That interest is apparent, according to his biographers who note his intense concentration and seeming oblivion to anything or anyone else as he works. Pearlstein says he does what might be called “stupid painting” – deliberately without thought, only looking, absorbing. “Painting is made up not of ideas, but of perceptions,” he says.
Pearlstein’s realism, according to one biographer, is based on a vision that finds inspiration and a kind of truth in detail. He never used photographs, however, because he finds them inadequate – compared to the human eye – in perceiving structure, depth or spatial relationships. Philosophically he has agreed with the Pop and Hard Edge artists who find emotion suspect. His realism is dispassionate, concerned only with how things look.
Technically, he develops his watercolors slowly, with the aquatint printing process in mind—layers of tones from light to dark applied in stages. The first step is a line drawing in raw umber, then a thin wash of local color. He may work only two hours before the light changes. His landscapes usually end up with the shadows of late afternoon – except for Stonehenge, which was always misty. Finally, large areas are brushed with thin washes to provide a sense of atmospheric condition.
Making prints from his watercolors is a fussy, complex, demanding process that requires total cooperation and concentration by printer and painter. It begins with pencil tracings on a sheet of white Mylar plastic, which is then reversed and retraced with carbon paper on a copper plate. Pearlstein uses three plates for color separation – perhaps one black, one brown, and one with blue and green. The contour drawing is transferred to the first plate with a sugar lift technique – drawing the image with a mix of India ink and sugar, covering it with a waxy varnish or hardground, them immersion in hot water to dissolve the sugar and lift out the background. Then the etching process resumes and the etched drawing is transferred to the other two plates and Pearlstein begins to put in the tones on each, a section at a time, working from the traversed watercolor image as seen in a mirror. Linear details are added with more sugar lift, and with varying lengths of acid exposure each plate is bitten (etched) to develop the tones. Until the first proof is pulled, neither artist nor printer can anticipate the appearance, but corrections are made wherever needed after as many as eight proofs are pulled. Sometimes prints have a life of their own: the Sacsahuaman work emerged with a livelier complexion than the watercolor, which Pearlstein liked and let stand.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1924, Pearlstein won a national drawing contest at 17, studied art at Carnegie Tech and got a Master’s from New York University (NYU) He and his work have been influenced, he says, by his former roommate, Andy Warhol, by the abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, by Cézanne, and by ideas from Chinese Taoist/Buddhist traditions. His awards and fellowships include a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant, and the American Academy of Rome artist in residence program. He has lived and worked in Manhattan since 1964 and currently resides and has his studio on West 88th near Central Park.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Philip Pearlstein Drawings and Watercolors by John Perreault, foreword by Phillip
Pearlstein, Harry Abrams, Inc. New York, 1988, a Times Mirror Corp.
Philip Pearlstein, A Retrospective Milwaukee Art Museum Catalog, Alpine Fine Arts
Collections, Ltd., New York & London, 1983.
Philip Pearlstein exhibit catalog, Herschl & Adler Modern, New York City, 1985.
Landscape Aquatints of Philip Pearlstein, exhibit catalog with introductions by
Jerome Viola, Brooke Alexander, Inc., New York City 1981
Definitions from McGraw Hill Dictionary of Art, McGraw Hill Book Co., New York,
1969 and the 85/86 Printworld Directory of Contemporary Prints, Printworld,
Inc., Bale Cynwyd, Pa., 1985.
Written for the Docent Council in connection with a Focus Tour of an exhibition called “Significant Others,” June 19, 1990, by Molly Burrell.
Prepared for the Web Site by Terri Pagels, March, 2004