Philip Pearlstein Obituary

Philip Pearlstein was an American painter best known for Modernist Realism nudes. Philip Pearlstein died Saturday, December 17, 2022, morning in Manhattan. He was 98.

The death was confirmed by Betty Cuningham of the Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York. No cause was given.

Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 24, 1924. At the age of 18, he won a national competition sponsored by Scholastic Magazine with two of his paintings in 1942.

He enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology’s art school in Pittsburgh in 1942, where he painted two portraits of his parents that are now held by the Carnegie Museum of Art.

His artistic career took off in the mid-1950s when he painted a series of rocks and trees that he had sketched one summer in Maine.

His next work was of realistically painted nude models, based on a conscious decision to purge the last traces of brushy expressionism from his art.

He taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, from 1959 to 1963, and then spent a year as a Visiting Critic at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Finally, he was Professor, and then Distinguished Professor Emeritus, at Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, New York, from 1963 to 1988.