Page 53 - Studio International - March 1972

and to a lesser degree the cityscapists such as
Richard Estes, take liberties with the
photographs from which they begin, but depend
heavily on the camera's system of chiaroscuro
for effects. The old academic concentration on
the well-rendered detail enters the picture.
Estes, surely, delights in getting a highlight
just right, or painting a window with its
reflections perfectly rendered. The kind of
`information' they purvey is not about paint, nor
about photographs really, but about a distanced,
emotionally uninvolved game of mimetics. The
slight adjustments they offer are not sufficient
to bestir even philosophic speculation.
Naturally, there is a hierarchy in this New
Realism. The degrees of intelligence in the
reality game is always very important. The kind
of games the nude painters play are for the most
part not very intelligent. In fact, their reference
to the old 'wiped style' of the studio piece, and
to the impassive tradition (those meticulous
likenesses of male models in nineteenth-century
academic studies even by romantic painters like
Géricault) is surprisingly docile. Yet there is,
as Nochlin has pointed out, a chef d'école, and
he is Philip Pearlstein. If there was ever any
doubt about the value of Pearlstein's
undertaking, it will be dispelled by this
exhibition, in which his work leaps out of the
context so definitively that it even overwhelms
the waxwork businessman.
Pearlstein's studies of the nude fulfil most
of the criteria set for the uncompromising new realism and which is so much like the
positivists, but like Courbet, whom drone of information-dealing language is not
Pearlstein's admirers are always invoking, he Pearlstein's intention. In fact, he suppresses
does a little more. Roger Fry was right, I think, detail, perhaps unconsciously, in order to allow
when he said that the theoretical grounds the strange distortions to make their eloquent
Courbet chose were gratuitous and cumbersome. plea for attention. It is true that Pearlstein
Courbet was right in practice, Fry thought, forgoes the emotional tremolo an affectionately
`because for him personally, as for many other painted nude can evoke (think only of
great artists, the fullest liberation, the most Rembrandt's bather, lifting her shift as she
effective functioning of his plastic imagination pensively enters the water). And it is true that
occurred when his whole sensibility was intent he is programmatically objective, but he cannot,
upon the thing seen.' as Courbet could not before him, suppress his
The thing seen, for Pearlstein, is paramount, plastic imagination. Nochlin can point to his
and it does invigorate his plastic imagination. `opposition to expressionist insistence on the
While his bland palette and occasional clumsy picture surface as an arena for ego-tripping',
drawing sometimes dull the impact, his paintings thereby lining him up in the battle against those
nevertheless function as works of art because sinful expressionists, and admire his 'cool self-
something excessive and strange occurs when effacement', but the fact remains that
he carries back to the canvas his impression Pearlstein's images at their best are obsessively
of that which is before him. The power of the eccentric even within the realist tradition. q
image resides in the secret modifications
Pearlstein's plastic sense effects, and not in its
John de Andrea
verisimilitude. Two Women 1971
Inasmuch as metaphor always alerts the Glass fibre and polyester resin, polychromed
imagination to something else, the complex Life size
Courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
systems of relations, and allusions from one Photo : Eric Pollitzer
aspect of the canvas to another in Pearlstein's
images can be said to have a metaphorical 2 Malcolm Morley
US Marine at Valley Forge 1968
power that all of the other realists —at least in Liquitex on canvas 6o x 5o in.
this exhibition—lack. In the shock of a bulging Courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
thigh and knee almost bursting out of the picture Photo: Eric Pollitzer
plane there is the suddenness, the concreteness 3 Philip Pearlstein
Female Model Sitting on Green Sofa 1971
of the metaphor which will not be forgotten.
Oil on canvas 48 x 6o in.
The dull and tiresome ticking-off of Courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
surface detail which so often characterizes the Photo: Eric Pollitzer
127