Dinner with Philip Pearlstein
"Philip Pearlstein"
Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his Masters in art history at New York University. He was a friend of Andy Warhol from college and he accompanied Warhol to Manhattan from Pittsburgh in 1949. Warhol and Pearlstein subleased an eighth-floor walkup tenement apartment on St. Mark's Place (and Avenue A) for the summer. Before modernism, painting and sculpture presented the human body in every conceivable pose and situation sanctioned by history, religion, or mythology, but the twentieth century brought a new method of comprehending what we see as form for its own sake. In Pearlstein's paintings, the human body, placed in a corner of a floodlighted studio, assumes a new range of plastic realities, as the mass and weight of the body are emphasized in the unstudied character of the pose. The point of view frequently results in radical cropping of the figure at the edge of the canvas.
On January 21, 2011, I was invited to dinner at Philip Pearlstein's studio.
