PHILIP PEARLSTEIN American, 1924-2022 Nude Curled Up, circa 1969 lithograph in brown on Arches wove paper A nude figure lies curled on their side atop draped fabric, knees bent and one arm tucked beneath the head. The plain background keeps all attention on the carefully rendered form. Pencil signed lower left. Framed. Not examined out of frame. sheet: 45.72 × 58.42 cm (18 × 23 in.) $350-540
ARTIST PROFILE: Philip Pearlstein (1924–2022) was a towering figure in American Realism whose unflinching, large-scale figurative paintings helped reestablish the human form as a serious subject in postwar American art at a time when Abstract Expressionism dominated the cultural landscape. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology alongside Andy Warhol before earning his MFA from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. Rejecting both the idealization of academic tradition and the emotional charge of abstraction, Pearlstein developed a distinctly cool, detached approach to the nude figure, depicting models in unconventional poses and cropped compositions that emphasized formal relationships of light, shadow, and spatial geometry over psychological narrative. His work stood in deliberate contrast to the prevailing trends of his era, earning him recognition as a founding voice of the New Perceptual Realism movement. Over a career spanning more than seven decades, his paintings, prints, and watercolors entered the permanent collections of major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, cementing his legacy as one of the most disciplined and influential realist painters of the twentieth century.
