The Space Between at the New York Studio School
February 13 to March 22, 2015
8 West 8th Street (between Macdougal and 5th Avenue)
New York, 212 673 6466

Some finished works of art efface evidence of the process of their own making. A painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or Philip Pearlstein doesn’t reveal how it was made — in that way, it is like a photograph. There is, by contrast, a special fascination in art which, by revealing the activity of its own making, makes that process part of its meaning. Such art, it might be said, is the most aesthetic visual art — it is doubly art because we both identify its abstract or figurative subject and enjoy seeing how that subject was rendered. We find this happening with Abstract Expressionism, as represented at FreedmanArt’s “Art in the Making,” by marvelous signature style works by Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, among others, and by artworks from artists of succeeding generations who extended that tradition. And the juxtaposition of a little two-sided painting Woodland Stream, Martha’s Vineyard/Chilmark Landscape (1922) by Thomas Hart Benton with a glorious drawing from his pupil, Jackson Pollock Untitled (folded greeting card) (1946-47) is a marvelous demonstration of how varied art whose making is part of its meaning can be. So too are the 23 drawings by Kit White, as illustrated in his book 101 Things to Learn in Art School (MIT Press, 2011), which present details from works by such varied painters as Michelangelo Caravaggio, Giorgio Morandi and Andy Warhol.

The press announcement for “The Space Between” identifies a key theme in Studio School teaching. Between-ness, this text suggests, may allude to the space between forms in the picture plane, between abstraction and representation, and, also, between pictorial symbols and the three-dimensional space they symbolize. Here, then, we find a variation on FreedmanArt’s theme, for speaking in these varied ways about betweenness is to allude to awareness of the process of art making. No wonder, then, that Bill Jensen and Graham Nickson are in both shows, for Jensen’s abstractions and Nickson’s figurative images provide pleasure thanks to both their subjects and our awareness of the painting process used to present those subjects. The same is true, comparing two other works on display at the Studio School: contrast, I would suggest, Margrit Lewczuk’s magnificent large Untitled (2009) with Stanley Lewis’ View from Studio Window (2003-4). Sometimes the most revealing survey displays are found not in our museums but in the galleries — here in small galleries. You could teach a whole history of Modernism using just the art on display in these two richly suggestive shows. That is a great, generous achievement.

The post Making Art, and Making It Well: Two Recent Group Shows appeared first on artcritical.

January 16 to February 22, 2014
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, 212 673 6466

Pearlstein’s supporters have always touted his contrarian steadfastness, objective detachment, and uncompromising equanimity in a rapidly fluctuating art scene. His detractors have always complained about the lifeless quality of the nudes or the dry, plodding facture of the surface. My own interest, after forty years of viewing, has caromed between fascination and an uneasiness that I find increasingly compelling.

There is a simultaneous hunger for and dread of human contact at the heart of Philip Pearlstein’s deadpan work, so scary and elusive that it frustrates straightforward analysis. The real drama of the work, even from its beginnings always feels hidden.
 Two Soldiers in Hut, Camp Blanding, 1943, (could there be a better place name for a Pearlstein location?) is a watercolor he did during his army service in WWII when he was only 19. It initially seems to depict a pristinely ordered barracks interior with intense specificity. Hanging uniforms align with a series of dark rectangular windows. Tightly made beds are in parallel or perpendicular rows, shoes neatly placed underneath.

But not everything is ordered: there are two men in undershirts. One (young P. himself?) is sitting on his bunk absorbed in the straps of the rifle jutting at an angle from between his legs. The other man, sprawled on his back on an adjacent bed with arms clasped odalisque-like over his head, feet chastely on the ground, is absorbed in the man with the rifle.

Several things are striking about the drawing. The first thing is the precision with which it is executed. Everything seems perfect from the light in the room to the shadow of rifle guy’s arm across his wrinkled wifebeater. As in all of Pearlstein’s drawings there is a confident virtuosity, absent visible doubt or second-guessing, which creates an aura of nonchalant control and authority. And despite the specificity, the figures seem alive and engaged and turn the regimented quotidian environment into a vignette that bristles with dramatic possibility.

The young artist creates a Proustian gaze for us to occupy, a slightly disingenuously innocent p.o.v. that allows us to eavesdrop on an intimacy but from a distant and seemingly objective vantage. But watch how this gaze evolves. It is the last time, at least in this show, that Pearlstein invites a viewer to fantasize about the psychological relationships of the humans he depicts. As the years pass, the gaze moves from a comfortable distance to forcing the viewer right into the midst of the scene.

In search of lost time is a good way to approach Pearlstein’s work. This exhibition can frustrate an attempt to chart an evolution of how the work has evolved since it is not hung strictly chronologically. But from Untitled (Two Models), 1962, we can start to get a sense of what he gradually came to leave out.

Gone is the specific interior of the Ft. Blanding drawing, though it is still dynamic. One of the women seems to provocatively crawl away from the viewer, thigh brushing the exposed buttocks of the woman lying next to her, but implicit is that it is just pencil lines that are doing the caressing.  And though throughout the 1960s we may experience the frisson of interaction that could indicate a relational narrative, by the 1970s all intimations of human interaction in the work seem to disappear.

It has become a familiar story. Pearlstein’s obstinate bravery reinvents figurative painting in the face of a modernist juggernaut of abstraction, bravura paint handling, and flatness. Then there is his oft-described decision to eliminate sentiment, psychological narrative, and sexuality from the depiction of the human form, aiming to achieve a tough, objective formalism. But these accounts don’t touch the disturbing nature of the work.

Alexi Worth came very close to pinpointing the trouble in his catalog essay for Pearlstein’s 2005 exhibition in which he remarks on “Pearlstein’s Fictions.” Terms like realism or objectivity are cul-de-sacs in coming to grips with Pearlstein, and it is only accepting and understanding the fictive nature of his work that we have a chance to experience what is going on here.

Any painted representation is a dramatically edited one. Given that even the simplest setting contains an infinite amount of information, a final composition is always a compilation of several vantage points, focal attentiveness, formal decisions, and the elision of time. And it is the elaborate set-ups that Pearlstein employs as well as the fact that his models are hired to take their clothes off and keep a single pose of their choosing for weeks at a time, that reinforce the fictional nature of his pictures.

What actually occurs then is really a drama of absorption and control. Pearlstein’s ability and desire to stay absorbed, to inhabit the moment, feels crucial to all of his work. Absorption is the big payoff for most painters. It is a respite from the confusing swirl of troubling thought. And Pearlstein’s absorption is consummate, though the very things he manages to tune out are all still present sub rosa.

The implicit anxiety of staying in that moment drives the engine of his work. Thoughts of desire, aging, and mortality can be repressed but are always inherent in the naked young flesh of the bored models that he hires to languish year after year. In order to stay absorbed, he must relate to his subjects only as a problem to be overcome by his control and concentration.

Staying absorbed all of these years has required Pearlstein to constantly challenge his own mastery. When one model became too easy, he started using two, then he started using furniture and complex textile patterns, and finally in recent years the models have been partially obliterated, fractured, or juxtaposed with all manner of ethnic, Americana, or folk art objects.

The movement of patterns, and swirls in furniture, in Two Female Models on Cast Iron Bed, a 1975 wash drawing, stand in stark contrast to the two affectless supine women whom we piece together through a complex maze of baroque curves and negative spaces. This “looking through” quality results in our assuming a necessarily scopophilic gaze.

To consider scopophilia and control uncovers the peculiar sexual aspect of this work. Eroticism was something Pearlstein has said he felt compelled to eliminate to free figuration from being debased by petty prurience or illustrational content; but to free it to do what? Models are shown asleep or expressionless, bodies are cropped arbitrarily, the lighting is harsh and bright, and contours are all in focus. But just because Pearlstein renders no hint of erotic intention doesn’t mean that sexuality has been eliminated. He constructs a gaze, and it isn’t a mechanized construction. His gaze is embodied: made by his body, of other bodies, and embodied gazes inherently contain a sexuality.

Gender is never ambiguous. Yet certain absences in Pearlstein’s work eventually becomes conspicuous. Has there ever been a woman’s genitals depicted in one of his paintings? All the naked models are almost without exception fairly young, attractive, and toned. Obviously his choice of models and poses eliminates anything in the depiction of a body that would allow imagination to create an erotic narrative, as would protruding labia or an erect or large or tiny penis, a wrinkle, a blemish, a fold of fat, or a facial expression or gesture. If models touch each other in a Pearlstein picture, it is only incidentally and never with their hands.

Instead we encounter undead zombies ?- bodies with no consciousness, personality, history or sexuality, whose portrayal denies us the possibility of fantasy. The work becomes passive/aggressive. They entice with a naked human presence, but derail any imaginative involvement. We then have a choice: to either content ourselves with admiring Pearlstein’s formal skill, or inhabit the pitiless, but nonetheless sexualized, gaze devoid of empathy he proffers. Whether the gaze of doctor, serial killer, or dispassionate artist, it is a gaze that coldly but actively examines and deconstructs, and not just passively observes. It is a probing gaze that makes us complicit with the attitude that creates it and underlies what can make us so uneasy.

But, this is evolving once more. In the end, it is his addition of folk, commercial, and ethnographic art objects to his compositions that have slowly started to change the nature of Pearlstein’s work. The models remain passive players but in a new narrative that Pearlstein now allows through the back door. He juxtaposes his representations of them with other representational objects, which, though still painted or drawn with his usual insouciant rendering, still contain the expressive signifiers placed by their previous creators. He may disavow a specific narrative, but he certainly invites one.

In Two Models with Swan Decoy and Carved Garuda Figure, the title of both a large drawing and adjacent painting from last year, the reclining nude women become collateral damage in the angry confrontation between a sneering wooden swan and the inflamed half man, half bird of the wildly colored Garuda figure.

Of course the painting of these objects is no more expressionist than the naked women they hover over. But Pearlstein formally builds feeling as the passive bodies of the models frame and emphasize the beak-to-beak confrontation of the two objects in the upper right, while the Garuda’s wavery shadow animates it by repeating its own sharply accented lines.

The swan’s head casts a phallic shape across the buttocks of one model and all diagonals point to her rear as her pelvis nestles the base of the swan. The other model’s extended legs running vertically up the side of the canvas, mirror the curve of the swan’s neck as her delicately crossed ankles and feet come to rest on the depicted wall, congruent with the top of the canvas. She sports a tattoo that sits on the surface of the painting above her pubic line like a turquoise signature, and her sunburnt chest above her breasts implies a personal history unusual for Pearlstein, and is the last part of her body that is visible before her head and shoulders disappear off the bottom edge of the canvas. Her absent head is right where a spectator might normally stand.

This is truly one of Pearlstein’s most accomplished and revealing paintings. Emotion is finally allowed open expression in the context of exposed flesh. All the formal pictorial games Pearlstein plays here amplify the feeling of the painting. And it is finally a relief to see uncovered what one always sensed was simmering beneath the controlled depiction of a lifetime’s worth of naked bodies.

The post Camp Blanding: The Naked and the Undead in Philip Pearlstein appeared first on artcritical.

If you’re prone to fits of acrophobia, the 25^th floor of the John Hancock Center may not strike you as the ideal location for an art gallery.  But staying abreast of the latest shows in Chicagoland requires precarious treks across neighborhoods, dizzying sprints up skyscrapers, and even trips across time-zones, all while maintaining your balance.  On rare occasions, it means facing your fears. Lately, several exhibitions have been worth the anxiety.

“Objects/Objectivity” at the elevated Valerie Carberry Gallery features the work of eminent octogenarians Philip Pearlstein and Ellen Lanyon. Conceived around their shared love of collecting, the show – selected by the artists themselves – examines their working relationships with the objects they accumulate.  The 12 pieces are a snug fit for Carberry’s intimate space and though both artists proceed from observation, the worlds they construct demonstrate a fundamental difference of approach.

Pearlstein’s large-scale paintings are dry, stoic affairs. The merciless cropping, irregular perspectives, and dense compositions the artist is renowned for are softened in the selections for this exhibition. But the augmented atmosphere creates a high-pressure pictorial stasis. The figures in Mickey Mouse, White House as Bird House, Male and Female Models (2001) are nearly as inanimate as the objects that surround them, and Pearlstein’s tendency to touch the surface in a one-dimensional manner further reduces an already sluggish pace. Observing the similarity between the flesh of the model in Two Nudes, Rabbit Marionette (1997) and the leather of the Eames chair upon which she rests, Pearlstein’s figure barely registers as human. While the artist’s eye may acutely perceive the objects around him, it seldom penetrates their surface.

By contrast, Ellen Lanyon’s work bristles with movement and tension. Spatial dislocations brought on by a modernist’s knack for composition provide the jolt of lightening that rouse her slumbering objects.  In Majolica Tea (2010) Lanyon fuses her props into an undulating alternative reality where subjects advance and recede, jostling for position among the pulsating greens and bitter oranges that permeate the picture plane. Compared with Pearlstein’s more sedate approach to surface, Lanyon’s Hanafuda (2010) shimmers and crackles with a dusting of iridescent paint. The dimensions of the canvases themselves – five of the six on view are squares – contribute to the reverie. When asked about the intentions behind her use of this notoriously challenging formant, the gracious Lanyon – who happened to stop by during my visit – shot me a wry smile and replied, “they were on sale.”

Just across the river in Fulton Market, Linda Warren Gallery is highlighting two distinct – but related – bodies of work by veteran painter Ed Valentine. In the main room, his large-scale paintings propose solutions to the problem of presenting street art in the environs of a gallery.  While some artists are content with importing the look of 1980s Brooklyn-style graffiti indoors – where it inevitably looks naïve – Valentine adopts the painted language of the street, its immediacy and its visceral force, while deploying it in the service of a traditional format:  the portrait. His use of the spray can delivers a wire-frame line that imparts a cartoonish appearance to Untitled Spray Portrait with Blue Painted Eye and Four Blue Drips (2011) but the caricature is undercut by audacious painterly swipes beneath the mouth and right eye. This is not to suggest that these works are easy to love, but the freshness of a painting like Untitled Spray Portrait with Painted Eye and Green Drip (2011) is undeniable.

More immediately likeable, the numerous small oils displayed along Warren’s back gallery witness the artist responding to the sheer joy and materiality of paint. In Untitled Portrait with Red-Orange and Brown Painted Eye (2011) Valentine autopsies the last 150 years of painting, tipping his hat to every major development in the modernist tradition without a hint of cynicism or irony. In addition to the strokes, spatters, and Stella-like stripes that comprise works such as Untitled Portrait with Orange Ear and Purple Drip (2011), Valentine locates his subjects in an ambiguous space that expands and contracts. These spatial alterations cause his figures to simultaneously hover along and beneath the picture plane, either dominating their environment or playing victim to it, depending on scale. Taken as a whole, the paintings’ analogous temperament  threatens to blur them together, but with time and patience the works assert their individuality, becoming a rogues’ gallery of characters that you’d swear you recognize.

2011 has yielded a bounty of quality shows around the city and two additional cases feature artists whose works on paper investigate the built environment. In River North, Amy Casey’s exceptional “Boomtown” at Zg Gallery closed in August, but an echo of the exhibition reverberates in the gallery’s office space through the end of October.  The glorious detail and individuality of the industrial buildings, homes, and urban structures that encompass pieces such as the acrylic, City Blocks (2011) make you feel as though you might actually pass them on a stroll along Euclid Avenue. Farther afield, Matthew Woodward’s monumental graphite on paper abstractions take glimpses of the urban environment as a starting point and evolve into a grayed, ethereal space. His “Tremendous Alone” exhibit, comprising an outstanding collection of drawings, is at the Elmhurst Art Museum, located just 15 miles west of the Loop. Worth the trip, if you can maintain your balance.

Philip Pearlstein and Ellen Lanyon: Objects/Objectivity at Valerie Carberry Gallery, 875. N Michigan Ave #2510. September 16 to November 5, 2011.

Ed Valentine: Untitled at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W Fulton Market #200. September 9 to October 22, 2011

Amy Casey: New Paintings & Etchings at Zg Gallery, 300 W Superior Street.  September 9 to October 29, 2011

Matthew Woodward: The Tremendous Alone at the Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 S. Cottage Hill Ave. Elmhurst, Il.  September 16 to December 31, 2011

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Two famous artists with nothing in common spoke about their work to invited audiences in Jerusalem in recent weeks, and both were happy with their audiences. “You couldn’t get 200 people like that in New York,” Philip Pearlstein told a friend after his talk at the Jerusalem Studio School, where he found himself surrounded by fans. Packed audiences are a regular occurrence for William Kentridge, who spoke at the preview of ‘Five Themes’, his exhibition that opened at MoMA a year ago and is now at the Israel Museum – but he said he really enjoyed the responsiveness of this audience.

As a fellow South African, I am familiar with Kentridge’s Johannesburg, but I have an outsider’s view of Pearlstein’s New York. Listening to Pearlstein, and later talking with his wife Dorothy, also a painter, threw light on a few mysteries – which could all be covered by one question: What makes Pearlstein closer as an artist to his old friend Andy Warhol than to the painter with whom he is usually compared – Lucien Freud? In other words, what is so different about painting in New York and London?

Asked how he relates to Freud, Pearlstein said: “I don’t know anything about him but when we went to London in the 1970s, someone said ‘Why do we need Pearlstein when we’ve got Freud?’ “ Then he said with a smile: ” All I know is, since MoMA bought Freud, my work is in storage.”

Dorothy Pearlstein used the word ‘pragmatic’ about the American approach to art. And she said that for Pearlstein it is very important not to “leave a bit of himself on the canvas” – brush marks, fingerprints, or lumps of paint, in the way of European expressionism.

Pearlstein’s decision to make huge paintings was pragmatic from the start – he had to, he said, or they wouldn’t be noticed. His interest in the gleaming nudes that he paints, with the translucent light and shadow moving over them, is unashamedly skin deep. And yet Pearlstein speaks about the people he paints with pride and admiration for their achievements – off the canvas.

He creates a smooth, impeccable, impenetrable surface that removes all evidence of the artist from the work and keeps the viewer at a distance. Elizabeth Taylor’s projected image comes to mind: seamless glamour devoid of irony, simplistic to the point of hick. But it’s New York hick, that moves easily from hick to cool to very sophisticated, and seems so enviable and unattainable to non-New Yorkers

For Kentridge, art is not about making an object to be treasured. His theatricality and love of trickery give a feeling of circus entertainment to his show. He made his audience rock with laughter at a split screen film interview between himself as two competing personae of the artist: the fumbling creative side and the scornful self-critic – while also expressing some of the most pertinent comments about the making and viewing of art.

Self-portraiture is at the heart of Kentridge’s work – a dramatised, evolving self-portrait that he uses in rather the same manner as an author like Philip Roth, where the main protagonist is not exactly him but reflects him; and where real life intertwines with fiction. In his early videos, based on charcoal drawings, Kentridge depicts himself in a pinstriped suit, or vulnerably naked, taking the part of two characters whose names, he says, came to him in a dream. Felix is a romantic lover and Soho is a heartless tycoon, but both are lonely figures in an unreliable world. The charcoal itself is vulnerable, smudgy and ephemeral, adding its own sense of romance and nostalgia.

At the preview, Kentridge repeated the remarkable speech he gave when he received the Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy in November 2010, in which he expressed his strong feelings for Johannesburg, the city where he was born, and where he still lives and works. He has made his home and main studio in the graceful colonial family house where he grew up, on the crest of a hill overlooking the leafy suburbs. There is a buzz of creativity in Johannesburg, embattled though it has always been by politics or crime – but free, gutsy and self-ironical in terms of its people and its culture. Kentridge plugs into this creativity, working with local artists and musicians, and capturing and expressing the fun as well as the toughness of it in his work.

What does link Pearlstein and Kentridge – apart from being hard working, ambitious and impeccably professional – is that both communicate their enjoyment of making art.

The post The Pleasures of the Pursuit: Talks by William Kentridge and Philip Pearlstein in Jerusalem appeared first on artcritical.

By the weekend, however, her naked simulacrum was not so easy to see as the painting had been pulled from the show and replaced by another.  This writer had to request a private audience with Model with Choohoo Weathervane and African Chair, 2010, now consigned to the gallery racks.  The explanation given was that collectors from out of town needed to see hung the replacement work but that the one featuring Mills would soon be back in its rightful place.

The original hang was not restored the following weekend, however, and soon a new explanation emerged.  Visitor-friends of the model had been asking to see “Candace naked.”  This, according to Pearlstein, was “the wrong phrase to use” with his dealer and her staff, lowering the tone of the exhibition in their eyes.  When asked if he was saddened to see his depiction of Mills removed the artist expressed indifference because the work that replaced it is also of merit.  “I like all my paintings equally,” he told me.

The response of Mills, however, has been a little less laconic.  She has posted the following to her Facebook page: “just learned that the gallery took down the painting I’m in because too many people were coming by and asking about the “naked Candace” painting. Thanks, dudes. Way to be classy. You want to look- BUY IT!”  Mills is a professional artist model whose clients have included Paul Resika, Sallie Benton, Duncan Hannah, Mari Lyons, Ariane Lopez-Huici, Alex Katz, Will Cotton and Inka Essenhigh.

Pearlstein points out, in the meantime, that the painting will be included in a show in Paris and that Mills will feature in his next work, also destined for Paris, a double figure composition, which is coming along somewhat slowly, he laments.

His exhibition at Betty Cuningham, with or without the “naked Candace,” continues through December 18.

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Philip Pearlstein: Then and Now at Betty Cuningham Gallery

June 26 to August 8, 2008
541 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues
New York City, 212-242-2772

Philip Pearlstein is the great genre-bender of contemporary art. Ostensibly, the subject of his relentless scrutiny over the last four decades has been the nude in the interior, as the almost retrospective overview of his career at Betty Cuningham, “Philip Pearlstein: Then and Now,” suggests in 13 canvases ranging from 1964–1969 and 1988–2008.

And yet, for all the pounds of flesh and claustrophobic constructions of actual, lived in and worked in space these pictures present, the paintings are imbued with such a denial of emotion, connection or purposeful activity as to rob them of the defining characteristics of the interior genre, such as social intercourse, productivity, leisure.

The sense is that, despite the human presence and the architectural frame, Mr. Pearlstein is actually a still life painter, his intense gaze zooming in upon specific objects, their formal relationship with one another, their visually challenging proximities. In more recent canvases, the props, which reflect his avid fascination with Americana, toys, and folk objects, take on star roles. The nudes are overtly reduced to object status, splayed around the inanimate things in mercilessly matter-of-fact compositions whose construction — starting with a focus of the artist’s attention and ending wherever the edge of the arbitrary frame of vision falls — leaves no room for sentimental humanistic notions of the integrity of the figure. “Nude on Rusty Chair” (1969), on view in the office, nonchalantly decapitates the seated figure and robs her of her feet.

But even in his paintings from the 1960s — with which Mr. Pearlstein first came to the attention of the art world and in which nudes held unrivalled mastery over their prosaic domain — the passivity of the models, the drastic cropping, and the willfully perverse perspective ensured that objectification was the order of the day.

Mr. Pearlstein’s audaciously clinical anatomy studies earned him Irving Sandler’s epithet, shared with Alex Katz, Alfred Leslie, and others, of “new perceptual realism.” These artists’ return to traditional subject and means was understood as being closer in spirit to the strategies of the contemporary avant garde than the academy with which it seemed to make superficial connection. If you keep in mind the all-American objects that were to follow as their canvas-mates, Mr. Pearlstein’s early nudes relate to that most blatant of commodity objects, his Carnegie Tech classmate Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box.

The “academic” nude held a similarly remote proximity for fine artists as the design on a carton of household dry goods — under their noses, yet out of bounds. Mr. Pearlstein broke a modernist taboo by reinvestigating the most traditional of subjects, the passively posed nude, but he imported from cutting edge contemporary art strategies for abstracting perceived things. Primarily, this had to do with radical shifts of scale and context. Mr. Pearlstein’s nudes equally connected with Color Field painting and Minimal Art as they did with Pop, on several counts. They were larger than life (typical canvases here are 6 by 6 feet, 6 by 5, 7 by 7); the lighting was stark even to the point of blandness; and the insistence of painting exactly what is seen without capitulating to the comforting tricks of perspective or foreshortening meant that a realization of the flatness of the picture surface jolted rudely into viewer consciousness.

The selection at Cuningham stresses continuity but also dispels the put down (one of many endured by the ever controversial Mr. Pearlstein) that he has been painting the same work for 40 years. The front gallery sandwiches a recent canvas, “Two models with Large Whirlygig” (2006), between “Nude on a Blue Drape” (1964) and “Two Nudes with Red Drape” (1965). The continuity points to the perceptual realist’s affinity with one of abstraction’s absolutists, Piet Mondrian, answering Barnett Newman’s question (in the title of one of his works): “Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.” In Mr. Pearlstein, the first and third of these primaries are stridently represented while yellow comes in a contingent form — fleshtone.

These rugs notwithstanding, the early canvases are stark in their tonality and anticlimactic in their light modulation. “Two Nudes with Camp Chair,” (1969) for instance, allows enough shadow play to identify without any ambiguity the synthetic light source, which is offstage left, but the contrasts of light and shade are kept to a minimum within the figures, whose pallid complexion melds with the off-white walls and yellow carpeting.

“Model, Neon Mickey and Bouncy Duck” (2007), by comparison, is by Mr. Pearlstein’s standards a riot of chromatic complexity. There are striking juxtapositions of texture and tone — the metals of the iron garden seat, the sprung toy and its foot rest, and the armature of the neon mickey, lit up red, yellow, blue, and white; the different woods of bench and base; the brittle knots of dreadlocks against the shine of glass and metal and the softness of flesh; the different kinds of shadow from neon and overhead light. As he typically does with his black models, the nude flesh is up against a paragon of whiteness in the toy duck. Her rich skin tones bounce back the synthetic colors that surround her.

The extreme objectification of the human figure is accentuated in the paintings of the last 20 years by the increasing animation, by way of contrast, of his still life motifs. So many of his toys are animal characters, and even his furniture can have animal life. “Model with Horn Chair” (1990) pushes the organic-inert dichotomy to an almost symbolic extreme: The baroque furniture writhes with life while the nude, forced tortuously to negotiate a space for herself amidst these absurd protrusions, seems skewered by the horns. His flesh, with heavily defined ribs and muscle, has a statue-like stillness, while the sinewy, glistening horns seem to perspire.

What is less than lively in Mr. Pearlstein’s art is his paint surface, which is deadpan to the point of necrophilia. It is ironic that an artist whose modus operandi is to paint from life, with models posed in an actual space in real time, should produce distilled images that are effectively out of time and space. By rendering what he sees at the expense of what he experiences he drastically compresses space, eschewing any realist tricks for suggesting depth and recession to insist, instead, on the stark reality of the canvas as a film of vision. Architecture is akin to the cropped nudes as Mr. Pearlstein almost never gives a room its corners, rendering surroundings as flat ground rather than as volume. Similarly, the breathing flesh, quivering plastic blimps, and mechanical toys, which must present themselves to the artist in his studio with actual or implied movement, are frozen in paint. A painterly, impressionistic touch would find a metaphorical equivalent of the pulsating signs of life that Mr. Pearlstein denies. His objects — animate or otherwise — are divorced from lived experience. Despite his fanatical perceptualism, his art is anti-empirical — essentially abstract.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 3, 2008 under the heading “Philip Pearlstein, Objectifying the Nude”

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Suzaan Boettger, Charlie Finch, and Bridget L. Goodbody joined David Cohen to review Kevin Landers at Elizabeth Dee, Kim Dingle at Sperone Westwater, Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cunningham, Mary Lucier at Lennon, Weinberg, and Rebecca Smith at Jeannie Freilich.

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SYLVIA SLEIGH
I-20 until May 10 (557 West 23rd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 645 1100)

PHILIP PEARLSTEIN
Betty Cuningham until April 28 (541 West 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 242 2772)

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 5, 2007 under the title “The Realist World”

The more seemingly straightforward realism is, the more it is prone to complications.

Beyond the artworld — whether in schoolrooms, prisons, amateur art classes, psychiatric wards — depiction of the human form is the primary impulse of people who feel the urge to make art.  But it is a persistent strand, as well, of the artistic vanguard even in a century marked by expressionism, abstraction, and recurring claims that mimesis is obsolete.

While the desire to render people in a way that is immediate, universal and impactful has something primitive about it, revival of historically available styles entails sophistication—technically, if you are going to pull it off without looking anachronistic, and conceptually, if in fact mannerism is part of your intent.  Often, significant contemporary realism is pulled by  these competing forces—a naïve belief that you can capture reality and astute awareness of the relativity of style.

This is a good moment to think about realism because of three significant shows by veterans of a 1960s revivial in New York of perceptual realism, along with many young artists (Philip Akkerman at BravinLee Programs, for instance, or Delia Brown at D’Amelio Terras) exploiting realism as much for the frisson of transgression this involves as for the energy it generates within their work.

The key figures of a 1960s new realism that consciously sought to extend rather than simply challenge or bypass the achievements of Abstract Expressionism were Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and Alfred Leslie. Mr. Katz is the subject of a museum loan exhibition that examines his early work of the 1950s (at the Park Avenue Bank) and Mr. Pearlstein has a show of new work that extends the line of inquiry he established in the 1960s.  Mr. Leslie, meanwhile, is also the subject of a historical show, spanning the years 1964-90.  Sylvia Sleigh’s exhibition is a reassesment of an artist now in her nineties that focuses on her work of the 1970s.  Ms. Sleigh is the widow of the critic Lawrence Alloway who was a persuasive early advocate of Mr. Katz.

Mr. Leslie had enjoyed early success as an abstract painter, first working gesturally in a robust style akin to Willem de Kooning and then moving into rough, drippy collage-based paintings that while close to Robert Motherwell also had a kinship with Robert Rauschenberg with whom he shared a four-man museum exhibition in Sweden in 1962.  Then in 1964-5 he underwent a radical change of heart with a series of full frontal portraits, including a self portrait, on canvases nine foot tall by six foot wide, rendered with precisionist finesse.

In a catalogue essay, David Elliott argues against reading these works as a rebuttal of modernism.  Firstly, he suggests, the New York School was more than abstract painting—it included poets, musicians and experimenters in other domains with whom Mr. Leslie’s realism was consonant.  Secondly, the artist had personal roots, predating his abstract painting, in Brechtian theater, to which these stark, “in your face,” isolated yet socially specific figures related.  In parallel with his painting career, Mr. Leslie was an experimental film director, working with Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank on a significant underground movie, “Pull My Daisy,” (1959).   And lastly, from a formal perspective, the paintings adopted strategies from Abstract Expressionism, namely materiality, directness and scale.

The show includes Mr. Leslie’s earliest surviving realist figure paintings of the 1960s, dynamic, group figure compositions of the mid-1970s, and large-scale nude drawings of 1989 and 1990.  The early works include his 1966-67 self-portrait, on loan from the Whitney, which shows the artist with bared chest and glum expression dazed and mournful following the sudden death of his friend and film collaborator the poet Frank O’Hara, and the destruction of his work and archives in a studio fire that had claimed the lives of 12 fire fighters.  In the early 1970s Mr. Leslie began the series of modern-day history paintings charting the poet’s death, “The Killing Cycle,” his best known, and arguably most bizarre, realist works—which are not included here.

Not that the works on show lack in oddity.  Mr. Leslie’s style is extraordinarily diverse.  At times he veers towards photographic realism, as in the Whitney piece.  The use of grisaille relates more to black and white cinema and photography than it does to old master technique, although it has that pedigree.  “Linda B. Cross” (1967) employs harsh lighting in which the face is spotlit, the mammoth lower body – closer to the artist’s sightline and rendered in grotesquely literal scale – plunged into an almost drastic chiarascuro.  “Judy Tenebaum Early in Pregnancy” (1966-67) has a contrastively symbolist feel: the head is fully work and in color, while the body is more ethereal and generalized, in a chalky miasma.  “Jane Elford” (1967-68) opts for expressivity, with clenched fists, a hint of twist in the torso, a slightly Northern Renaissance grotesqueness in the leer of drooping facial features.  The later group figure compositions, like “Birthday for Ethel Moore,” bring various baroque masters to mind, including Carravaggio and de la Tour.

This diversity gives conceptual edge to Mr. Leslie’s realism, which would exhaust his interest by the early 1990s when archiving and restoring his early films became his main activity.  In the portraits it is as if he is testing, in each work, the limits of different genres—this gives the work a unique intellectual energy, and with it an alienating severity and stiffness.  Unloveable works, they demand to be noticed.

Despite her marriage to a critic, Ms. Sleigh’s realism is less concerned with its own stylistic implications.  At least on first impression they seem blessed by an unaffected naivite.   Her work mixes a sunny disposition, the kind of awkwardness that arises from avoiding single-point perspective and other “academic” tropes embraced by Mr. Leslie, and the slightly nutty ambition of primitivism to capture each petal, blade, body hair. “Annunciation” (1975) has a handome youth sporting an Afro, open denim shirt and denim shorts of a paler hue that evokes the various personal liberation movements of the day and bathes them in a religious light.   An “outsider” sensibility contrasts charmingly with evidently insider subjects, as in “Lawrence and Betty Parsons at Horton’s Point,” (1963) depicting her husband and the well-known art dealer.

Her bucolic scenes of nudes in the open air recall the self-consciously anachronistic later works of André Derain while Henri Rousseau could be quoted in one of the her figures: “Reclining Nude: Paul Rosano” (1977).  In fact, her penchant for seating nudes in the classic modernist pieces that obviously furnished her home, from Paul Rosano again, in a Jacobson chair from 1971 through to “Max Warsh Seated Nude” (2006), the one contemporary work, in an Eames lounge chair, makes a justified historical case for naïve realism as literally and metaphorically embraced by vintage modernism.

The critical fortunes of Messrs. Pearlstein and Katz have inevitably been intertwined since Irving Sandler jointly identified them with what he termed the new perceptual realism.  If you see their works at the same time you quickly realize, where Mr. Katz uses perception to build a painting, Mr. Pearlstein paints in order to use perception.  He is optically obsessed, with no love to spare for paint itself.  At times it seems that the “paint originals” might be jettisoned once they have been photographed—the only value of the paint was to realize the image.

This is not to say for a moment, however, that Mr. Pearlstein is photorealist.  He revels in distortions that only become apparent to an eye trained obsessively on the highly suggestive shapes of limbs in space and the shadows they create, with patterns and objects chosen to test the gaze and tease the picture surface.

The new body of work includes many old favorites among its motife: toys, furniture, models, and kinds of relationship whose reality is exclusively bound to the studio “set up”.  These include translucent plastics calculated to accentuate the distortion of spread limbs and carpet patterns in “Two Models with Balloon Chair and Neon Mickey Mouse” (2007), and ornate objects like a model sailboat or a giant model butterfly, the choreography of whose details mimic the light and shade intricacy of musculature.  In “Model with HMV Dog and Renaissance Bambino” the plays of flesh against wood, of antique porcelain against modern porcelain, are elaborate texural challenges.

In terms of the opposition of a naïve belief in capturing everything and a mannerist delight in the extremities of style, Mr. Pearlstein has it both ways: He is a mannerist when he arranges his set up and positions his canvas, a primitive thereafter.

The post The Realist World: Alfred Leslie, Sylvia Sleigh, Philip Pearlstein appeared first on artcritical.

DANICA PHELPS: WAKE
Zach Feuer to October 1
530 West 24 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 989 7700

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 22, 2005

Philip Pearlstein is a collector of oddities, in life and within his paintings.  A typical studio set up juxtaposes assorted toys and curios—kitsch or decrepit in varying degrees—amidst his trademark emotionally vacant, lithe, naked models.

The poses and arrangements are studiedly weird, but somehow, the more tricksy his jumbled and skewed images become, the more disconcertingly prosaic his paint handling seems in comparison.  The same hand is used, in an even, measured way, to render volumetrically complex flesh and flat fabrics, solid forms and elusive shadows.  It is as if in the execution of his mannerist compositions he has an attitude to match the disconnect of his models from their contorted repose.  The viewer is left in a similar space, poised between tedium and fancy, alienation and intrigue.

The artist would have us believe, apparently, that his sole concerns are perception itself and formal construction.  But such an array of at once functional and fantasy objects as a Chinese kite, decoys, a butcher’s sign, iconic pop trademarks, cartoon characters, a weathervane airplane, Americana, and tribal artefacts, not to mention the nude as “play thing” –at once locus and signifier of desire—cannot but operate at some level of metaphor, if not allegory.  Catalogue essayist Alexi Worth identifies for these recent paintings “a tricky middle zone where symbolism and formalism cohabit.”  At the very least, the images operate as object poems, even if they resist decoding.

But often as not, the symbolism seems as literal as the perception.  “Model on Bamboo Lounge with Artist Mannequin” (2005) is almost a manifesto piece for an artist concerned with teasing the boundaries between nature and artifice, what is alive and what is art.  The dramatis personae have interchangeable designations: the wooden lay figure could accurately be deemed a model, while the reclining female figure, by virtue of being in the employ of Mr. Pearlstein, could be termed, following the French term, an artist’s mannequin.  Her pose, kimono akimbo to reveal brown suntanned flesh, one hand upon her thigh, the other pressed on her brow, is oddly stilted (“wooden”) while the light lends a teasingly animated quality to the polished, heavily grained, actually wooden figurine.

Mr. Pearlstein often singles out this African-American model for images that play on visual-verbal issues of color and tone.  In an earlier series she would sprawl over a dollshouse model of the White House, for instance.  In the current group she poses a couple of times on a funky, 1970s inflatable blue blow-up chair in images whose titles reference her dreadlocks—again, the buzz words that go off, consciously or not, on registering the object and its perceptual properties are “color,” “skin,” “otherness.”

There are two pictures which feature a model with her legs crossed over an African drum, both from 2005.  In terms of visual metaphor there seems to be a play on tautness, a sense of stretched skin and tightened muscle uniting instrument and sitter.  The drum has stylised animals carved in relief—at yet another level, a verbal pun on the mannerism of the model’s pose in which tension and relaxation play off against each other.

Apart from the conflict between the literal and the metaphorical, the psychological responses that a Pearlstein elicits are complex.  Within the formal terms the artist seems to prefer there’s a confusion about status: are they “realist” in the sense of using a received language to achieve an impact and immediacy comparable to photography, or are they perceptualist, in the sense of really being about looking afresh and putting down what is seen and experienced, however odd and surprising and actually different from photography that turns out to be?  The awkwardness and distortion that arise from cheating or doing without singlepoint perspective suggest the latter: it is about fresh seeing.  But with all the years that he has been doing it Mr Pearlstein has generated his own set of tropes—radical foreshortening, shadow play, the play of fabrics that are already flattened against volumetric forms that he himself flattens—that are as much a language as is realism.  His naivite is a form of sophistication, and vice versa.

Time is an implicit element in the paintings of Mr. Pearlstein.  Although the surfaces give off, so to speak, conflicting reports—they are chock full of facts but dutifully delivered—the sense of detail and attention, not to mention the cheesed off expression of the models, suggest the long haul.  Danica Phelps, however, leaves no ambiguity about time in her work: It is the work.  Taking the diaristic to a literalist extreme, her show at Zach Feuer presents erotic doodles, flow diagrams, and expenditure charts that list her daily activities on an hourly, not to mention cent by cent basis.

Her hand—whether offering graphic designerish rendering or vaguely expressive, langourous figuration, and whether drawing or writing—is at once neat and dashed off, fastidious and fiddly.  She constructs Filofax-like (but handmade) charts filled in, retrospectively, with the activities that have accounted for her day.  “STUDIO” in block letters will account for long stretches (but not as long, one suspects, as Mr. Pearlstein or his sitters) while other repeating activities are walking the dog, paying bills, chatting with Debi, eating with Debi, making love with the lucky Debi.

The lovemaking brings out the draughtsman in Ms. Phelps, in overlapping, outlined wire figures in minimally defined interior spaces.  Expenditure alone however brings out the colorist.  Ms. Phelps continues from earlier shows an elaborate notational system of income and expenditure in barcodes of reds, yellows and greens.

Despite coming from a very different culture (feminism, conceptualism and fluxus) Ms. Phelps is definitely a coda of sorts to Mr. Pearlstein: Think nutty observation, repeating patterns, overlapping languages, and oddly compelling tedium.

The post Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cuningham and Danica Phelps: Wake at Zach Feuer appeared first on artcritical.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 29, 2004

Philip Pearlstein tests limits – his own, his models’, his admirers’. He is not always an artist who is easy to like, but for anyone serious about painting he is impossible to ignore.

The exhibition of 18 of his new canvases at Robert Miller offers a timely contrast in terms of strangeness and skill to the young celebrity mannerist, John Currin, whose Whitney retrospective has inspired such frenzy.

Mr. Currin, a phenomenal crowd-pleaser, is a true successor of Salvador Dali, combining as he does showy displays of “mastery” and a determination to shock, whether through wilful inanity or sheer nastiness, or both,. Mr. Pearlstein cuts deeperinto the ranks of the old masters than Dali, however, forging a direct line to Ingres.

Because perversity is Mr. Currin’s sine qua non, we quickly tire of it. In Mr. Pearlstein it is pervasive, the byproduct of a truly warped yet intense pictorial intelligence. Where the younger artist delights in slippery, fast, virtuoso painthandling, the older bewilders despite a frankly boring delivery.

True, Mr. Pearlstein impresses skill-lovers with his nutty determination to paint each hair on a man’s chest, each stitch in a quilt, and with such pictorial feats as depicting things as seen through a transparent plastic blimp or reflected at odd angles in mirrors. But he is the kind of painter who is more likely to submit to awkwardness than to triumph with slick solutions. He is as obsessed with looking as Mr. Currin is with looks.

The real perversity of Mr. Pearlstein’s works is that, though he is fundamentally unpainterly, his (literally) incredible images couldn’t exist in any other medium. The camera, for instance, would obscure the discrepancies between two-dimensional rendering and three-dimensional observation. Precisely such weirdness is his true subject. That is why he has to paint.

The connection to Ingres has nothing to do with the French master’s ethereal beauty of surface, for which Mr. Pearlstein’s all-American deadpan is a poor substitute. Rather, it is in the license Ingres’ example gives him to distort in the name of a higher truth – a truth beyond first appearances. Actually, Mr. Pearlstein seems so excited by the problems of seeing and constructing that the actual making is merely a chore: Like that of another latter-day Ingres, Lucian Freud, Mr. Pearlstein’s unlovingly slow execution almost punishes the viewer for intruding upon his scopophilia, his own private obsessive absorption in the act of seeing.

Mr. Pearlstein’s idiom hasn’t essentially altered since the 1960s, when – deliberately provoking avant-garde taboo – he started to paint nudes, from life, in elaborate studio set-ups. He brought a ruthless modernity to a time-honored (and dishonored) academic practice. Unexpressive touch, stylized cropping and foreshortening, and awkward, affectless poses became his instantly recognizable trademarks.

Yet within the tight constraints of this style there has been development. Despite the labor-intensity of his mode, he is prolific; despite the initially alienating uniformity of his production, he is fascinatingly diverse. Once seduced, the eye is delighted and surprised. His paintings have grown wackier from show to show – and better, too.

The current one, for those with eyes to see it, is an apotheosis. His compositions have become notoriously crowded, both with objects and effects, and his art seems to have as much to do with the arrangement of his set-up as with its rendering in paint. It is almost as if he were an installation artist whose “work” could be seen only in paintings, rather than as objects in a gallery. The youngsters Mike Kelley and Vanessa Beecroft would have to collaborate to produce anything as startling in flesh and toys.

Mr. Pearlstein’s models compete for space with a plethora of still-life objects – which is, essentially, what they are, too. He is a compulsive collector of Americana and other artefacts. “Mickey Mouse Puppet Theater, Jumbo Jet and Kiddie Tractor With Two Models” (2002), places two of his familiar models amid the eponymous memorabilia. The game played is the cops-and-robbers that adults never tire of in art: the battle of reality and artifice.

In this case, the artist reverses the dichotomy of the organic and the mechanical. The depiction of bodies is more stylized, that of things more animated. Mickey’s features, for instance, are fixed in astonishment, while those of the models are resigned. The hairline of the male sitter rhymes with the black-and-white division of Mickey’s face, as the model’s beard does the mouse’s eyebrows. Mr. Pearlstein has poked fun at his own nerdishness by placing the name “goofy” on the Disney puppet theatre so as to preside over his composition.

This is typical of a testing and teasing of meanings in Mr. Pearlstein. An African-American woman, who in his last show was posed with a bird-house model of the White House, is seen in two canvases here with a swan decoy. Such playfully un-PC gestures are worthy of Mr. Currin, or for that matter David Salle or Eric Fischl. Or indeed, of Picabia, the dada provocateur about whom Mr. Pearlstein wrote his MA thesis at the outset of his career.

In the pictorial universe of Mr. Pearlstein’s studio, fluorescent lamps mercilessly democratize surfaces, abetting the anti-painterly rendering of flesh, tin, wood, and fabric as equal reflectors of light and color. The shadows in two relatively sparsely populated canvases from 2003, “Model with Butcher’s Sign” and “Model with Old Iron Butcher Sign #2” is, by Mr. Pearlstein’s standards, voluptuous.

Besides the shadowplay, there is also play between the flatness of rusty cutout metal and the sinewy bulbuousness of smooth flesh in dangerous proximity to it. In each picture, the woman’s legs open to form a “V,” which rhymes invitingly with the arrangement of knife, hook, and saw in the sign. (The artist, who delights in visual and verbal punning alike, might like to know that in East London Cockney rhyming slang the phrase “Butcher’s hook” stands in for “look”).

In these compositions, however, the shadows, a fleeting presence, are the most intense, involved, observed “objects.” They seem to say that seeing is more sexy than skin, that the real erotics of painting has to do with the phenomenology of perception, not the existential facts of naked bodies in time and space. Yet, to prove the point, the presence of the latter is required.

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