Philip Pearlstein, an artist who with his friend Andy Warhol rebelled against abstraction in the 1950s, then built a legacy that rests on realistic, even daring paintings of nude models, died Dec. 17 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 98.
The death was confirmed by Betty Cuningham of the Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York. No cause was given.
A Pittsburgh native like Warhol, Mr. Pearlstein studied art and design in the years during and after World War II at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he and Warhol met and studied under teachers who brought the vanguard of painting from New York to western Pennsylvania.
After graduating in 1949, the ambitious young artists moved to Manhattan, carrying their belongings in shopping bags, and supported themselves as illustrators and designers for magazines and department stores. Warhol achieved nearly instant success as a fashion illustrator, but Mr. Pearlstein was the first to find his way as an artist.
Inspired by an idea for an illustration, Mr. Pearlstein painted a large dollar sign in the center of a canvas, which led to a series of what he called “paintings of icons,” which included the Statue of Liberty, Dick Tracy and Superman. Exhibited in New York in 1952, the works prefigure the Pop Art movement by a decade; Warhol began drawing and painting dollar signs in the early 1960s.
By that time, Mr. Pearlstein had moved on to drawing and painting human figures directly from observation in the studio. This technique was nearly as old as painting itself and continues to be used, mostly in art schools, but in a decade that featured Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art, it seemed retrograde.
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