Ken Johnson writes:
Realism returned from the dead in the 1960s, and Philip Pearlstein was one of its chief revivers. His seven-decade career is the focus of “Philip Pearlstein: Objectifications,” a small, surprisingly varied exhibition at the Montclair Museum of Art. The show offers proof that Mr. Pearlstein, 84, has been an artist of greater range than his signature nude works.
Around 1961, when he was in his late 30s, Mr. Pearlstein began to paint pictures of nude people from life. It was an old-fashioned idea, but in his hands, it became shockingly modern. He stripped the nude of almost all its customary associations. Beauty, eroticism, mythology, allegory: all the traditional justifications for nudity in painting were gone, leaving only the bare fact of the naked human body.
In some ways, the most interesting part of the show is the selection of works that predate the artist’s signature nudes. Maybe the most remarkable early piece is an image of a bulgingly muscular Superman painted in a roiling expressionist style. Part of a series of canvases from 1949 to 1952 that were based on cartoon characters, it is a curious anticipation of Pop Art.
But Mr. Pearlstein abandoned pop-culture imagery and threw himself into nature and landscape. “Tree Roots” is made in a nondescript, Cézannesque-expressionist style. Its conventionality highlights what a daring leap Mr. Pearlstein was about to make with his nudes.
A large 1967 painting of his two daughters, then 4 and 6, sitting on a chaise and looking bored to tears is unusually touching. But Mr. Pearlstein’s portraits are not nearly as innovative as his naked figure paintings.
In landscape and cityscape, Mr. Pearlstein has been adept and industrious. A nocturnal picture of New York viewed from a 12th-floor window in 1992 is absorbingly complicated, luminous and spacious. But if it’s a question of contributing something original and influential to 20th-century art, only Mr. Pearlstein’s nudes will answer.
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