Philip Pearlstein
Iron Bed and Plastic Chair, 1999, oil on canvas, 59.5 x 39.5 inches, ©Philip Pearlstein, courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York.

The interview was conducted by Ilana Stanger of TheArtBiz.com.

You earned your BFA in 1949. Right now BFA and MFA programs are exploding, but I imagine that they were less common then. What pushed you to study art from the beginning?

I started doing art seriously more or less in 10th and 11th grade, in public school in Pittsburgh. We had a terrific teacher. A lot of the students in my class--this was the late 30s--did go into art. One just retired as head of a major Midwest museum, another became one of the first female art historians. It was quite an exciting and ambitious group.

And then along came the war. I was in the army for three years, 1943 to 1946, and I was in Italy for two of those years. That was my first major museum experience. Even during the war the British army had art historians who organized exhibitions on works hidden away. They even wrote catalogues, which they handed out for free. I got to know old master painting through those catalogues; they were my basic art education.

I came back to Pittsburgh, where Andy Warhol was one of my classmates. Most of us were older vets, and we became good friends. We moved to New York together--his brothers let him come here only if we lived together; they considered me a man of the world because I’d been through war. We came to New York in the spring of 1949 and he was an immediate success. We had a friend who worked as assistant to an art director and he had access to all the New York art directors’ numbers. We used those numbers. At the end of the first week Andy had major illustration work from Seventeen Magazine. I had no ambitions to be an illustrator--well, I tried and it didn’t work-I wanted to be an art director. I became an assistant to Ladislav Sutnar, a graphic designer. He was highly influential, and I met all sorts of people--Josef Albers used to drop by to visit.

And then you went to NYU for an MA in Art History?

By the end of my first year in New York I got married. I went back to school and studied art history while working part-time for Sutnar. I wrote my MA thesis on Francis Picabia, and it was a groundbreaking effort. At the Institute [NYU Institute of Fine Arts] I learned to write in English and in French at the same time. Picabia died while I was writing my thesis and I was suddenly the only person with access to all this material. I was contacted by art magazines to do an article. At the same time, I had my first one-man show at a co-op gallery down on 10th street. This was 1955; it was one of the earliest co-ops. I came onto the scene as a writer, and a couple of months later I had a show, and since I knew the art editors they sent good reviewers.

Does it matter that much whether art magazines send good reviewers?

At the time the art world was fairly small. You ran into the same people all the time. You’d see people on the trains transporting work to galleries. Knowing editors and getting good reviews made more of a difference than it would now.

That said, no one sold any work. I worked for Sutnar, and then Life Magazine. Then I won a Fulbright to Italy. By that time I’d had two one-man shows; everything seemed to follow its own logical path. I wouldn’t know how to tell anyone how to get started, because I never really knew.

Almost every time your name is mentioned it seems the label “realist” follows: did you see yourself as purposefully going against the 1940s Abstract Expressionism that was in vogue when you were a student?

My first ten years in New York I was highly expressionistic and abstract. Only on return from Italy did I begin taking realism seriously. I came back and got a teaching job at Pratt, largely because I had a parallel background as a graphic designer, exhibiting artist, and published writer. And that’s how I survived for the next 30 years. The teaching career supported my family--my wife and I had three children--and the artwork supported itself. I got involved in working from life; it was an intellectual idea.

Does it seem strange to you to be so closely associated with--and against--a particular movement?

It wasn’t a movement to be associated with. I felt alone, and gradually became aware of others. Some friends’ work, like Alex Katz and Alfred Lesley, had certain characteristics I could identify with. Those became part of what became a movement--a hard look at reality without sentimentality, without attempting to be expressionistic and without getting involved in atmosphere visually or emotionally. There were a couple of big shows--one at the Corcoran Museum produced a catalogue that defined contemporary realism at that time. In 1976 the Department of Interior organized a traveling show for the Bicentennial. It was an enormous show, but it was the last--both the climax and the end of the movement. There were no further large museum surveys. Some of us continued to have great careers, but as individuals.

What did you try to teach your students?

I taught a combination of art history and studio art--students would take one image and translate it into 12 major stylistic ideas. I taught the grammar of art, rather than chasing after one style. It taught students to define a problem, and to be aware of what’s been done in the past. One of the failures of the contemporary art world is that so many ideas have historical precedence, and yet some young artist comes along and everyone calls it original. Our century comes out of the Italian Futurists, who haven’t received as much credit as they should. There’s also been a big influence from Oriental Art, Pre-Colombian Art, and African Art.

Is your inclusion of African and Oriental artifacts in your paintings a nod to that influence?

No. They’re strictly visual. I know they will be interpreted, but I try not to interpret them.

How has the art world changed since your entrance?

It was small--that’s the biggest change. There were six galleries that dealt with contemporary art. Now one building alone has 21 galleries--it’s undergone a fantastic explosion. The nature of art has also changed. In the 50s it was about painting. It was very profound and very exciting--we were searching for basic meanings in making paintings. The big switch came in the 80s and 90s, when art became about “concept” rather than the act of making a painting. This came out of departments of Philosophy and English and had almost nothing to do with visual arts.

What advice would you give to young artists?

You have to decide what kind of artist you want to be. You have a choice. Don’t jump on the first bandwagon. Don’t try to be like everyone else. You have to keep making an effort to show your work and to meet your peers in whatever art scene you’re involved in, because they become your chief critics. Or supporters. They’re the real influence on the structure of the art world. The reputation of an artist in the 50s and 60s came from the seriousness with which their work was taken and discussed by other artists. It can’t be built up by dealers or collectors, though they try. It’s the work itself that eventually grabs attention--not the shenanigans of the artist.

This article was originally created for TheArtBiz.com. It appears on NYFA Interactive courtesy of the Abigail Rebecca Cohen Library.