Two Female Models on Hammock and Floor

Philip Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh and graduated from the Carnegie Institute in 1949, before moving to New York with his classmate and friend Andy Warhol. He gained recognition in the late 1960s and early 1970s for his starkly unidealized paintings of nude models in domestic settings. Pearlstein's pictures are often abruptly cropped and sport exaggerated perspectives. A classic example of the discrepancy between artistic intention and viewer reception, Pearlstein's paintings have been contextualized within European traditions of nude figure painting. Furthermore, his work has often been interpreted in sexual and psychoanalytic terms, given his choice of subject matter. However, Pearlstein claims that his allegiances lie in abstraction and formalism, not realism and the psychosexual. He characterizes his use of the nude as a convenient way to describe surfaces, contours, and their relationship to other forms. Pearlstein counters the emotional and spiritual transcendence associated with art and offers instead a visual and material discipline based on a rigorous matter-of-fact attitude. For these reasons, he has perhaps more in common with Conceptual and Minimal artists than with either Abstract Expressionists or fellow post war realists.