Promotional photo

Nudes for Pearlstein were objects devoid of emotional content.

Philip Pearlstein: Recent Work
Ends Nov. 24. Chauncey Stillman Gallery, Lyme Academy College of Fine Art, Old Lyme. Free. 860-434-5232, lymeacademy.edu.

The Lyme Academy College of Fine Art is unabashedly among the most conservative art schools in the country. Unlike other schools where artists crank out disembodied conceptual projects, videos, and installations that are fashionable today, Lyme Academy College focuses on rigorous mastery of traditional drawing, painting, and sculpture, and on exhaustive perceptual study.

So at first glance, the current exhibition of Philip Pearlstein's figurative work from 1990-2007 in the Chauncey Stillman Gallery seems perfectly at home. But deeper reflection unearths a distinct incongruence between Pearlstein and the college's chosen approach.

Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pearlstein (b. 1924) has been known for his calculated, closely observed images of nude models, unnaturally twisted, often cropped, and posed in shallow, claustrophobic spaces. In the work on display here, the expressionless models stare blankly at the presumptively nostalgic trappings of childhood past — airplanes, ships, wooden whirly-gigs, Disney figurines and other toy-like objects.

Each element, both model and toy, has been carefully arranged, usually on a colorful woven rug, to create a dynamic, circular composition. For Pearlstein, the shadows and spaces between objects is as important as the objects themselves. Although the paintings depict human beings, they aren't about the human condition. Pearlstein doesn't think of his paintings as metaphors, and they don't generate a narrative. Instead, he simply considers the naked human figure "the most interesting object available," and paints it devoid of emotional content.

Distinct from the students at the Lyme Academy College, whose training is solidly in the classical European tradition, Pearlstein's work sprang from his commercial art training at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now part of Carnegie Mellon University, in 1940s Pittsburgh. According to a 2005 interview in The Brooklyn Rail, after a year there, Pearlstein was conscripted by the Army, where he worked as a draftsman making charts, weapons diagrams and other training materials. After the war, stationed in Italy, he was put to work painting road signs. In 1946, he returned to Pittsburgh and resumed his studies at Carnegie, where he met a classmate then known as Andy Warhola. In 1949, they moved to New York City to pursue careers in commercial art.

For the next eight years, Pearlstein worked during the day for graphic designer Ladislav Sutnar and painted at night. At one point, he spent a year as a layout artist for Life magazine, where he learned how to crop images. These early vocations provided a firm foundation for what would be a novel engagement with abstract form.

Pearlstein's influences in the 1950s included modernist painters Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. He was especially drawn to their use of machine shapes that were similar to the ones he had been drawing at work. Stylistically, though, Pearlstein was working in the Abstract Expressionist mode. It wasn't until 1958, on a Fulbright in Rome, that Pearlstein began to embrace realism.

In a series of drawings of the ruins around the city, Pearlstein's goal was to draw exactly what he saw. No more and no less. Once back in New York, he continued this exploration of austere, objective reality, rejecting the mannered theatrics of the waning Abstract Expressionist movement and dedicating his art practice to an orderly, hard-edged formalism.

Later he began to paint nude models, which, in a Duchampian twist, he interpreted on the canvas as objects akin to machine parts, flattened and drained of expressive content. His fascination with looking has continued for over 50 years. "The price for my concern with objectivity," Pearlstein once said, "has been lovability."

Thus, Pearlstein's aesthetic DNA is more closely related to Minimalists like Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd, who used non-objective, geometric forms to create a new rationalist and intensely visual strain of realism in which outside referents were eliminated. Perhaps it's no coincidence that after serving in the military during or shortly after World War II, all three of these artists rejected the overtly personal and highly emotive approach of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a more concrete, impersonal, and ostensibly pacific strategy. Objects were simply objects, shapes shapes and color color.

Yet compared to the work of the Minimalists, insofar as Pearlstein's paintings at least reference people, they can seem warm and friendly. So casual visitors to the Pearlstein exhibit at Lyme Academy College might not apprehend that his work, which is technically superb, is not really part of the great figurative tradition in which the Lyme Academy College students are immersed but rather an iconoclastic fusion of hard-edge Minimalism with intractable realism. I'm certain, though, that they will feel the chill in the air.

Sharon L. Butler is an associate professor of art at Eastern Connecticut State University. She blogs at Two Coats of Paint (twocoatsofpaint.com).