ABSTRACT
Mr. Philip Pearlstein has wrested from a very unpromising source—namely, realism, with all its attendant fallacies, pitfalls, and banalities—an art of extraordinary lucidity and power. By the early sixties, then, Mr. Pearlstein's art was firmly established on a venerable but not very popular principle—the principle of working directly from nature—but he had not yet found a style. Mr. Pearlstein has, to be sure, the kind of technical mastery of his medium that such a "return" would ideally require—if, that is, it existed as a real artistic possibility rather than a form of nostalgia for a lost world. But this technical mastery has, in Mr. Pearlstein's case, been firmly placed at the service of a sensibility that is completely up-to-date—a sensibility that is cool and analytical in its emotions, ruthless in its rejection of the old painterly rhetoric, utterly positivist in its attitude toward both the painter's medium and his subject matter.
