No matter what school of painting happened to be ascendant in the U.S. during the postwar years, a small number of good painters continued to paint realistically. In most cases, their canvases reflected the prevailing mode. When abstract expressionism was in its heyday, such figurative painters as the late David Park and Richard Diebenkorn employed the smeary technique and turbulent palette commonly associated with Pollock and De Kooning. In the current era of cool, disengaged pop and hard-edge abstraction, a hardy band of realists has developed a cool, precise, in fact almost surgical style.
The most powerful exponents at the moment are Alfred Leslie and Philip Pearlstein (see color opposite). Both are former abstract expressionists. Pearlstein, 43, is a shy, bespectacled native of Pittsburgh who studied at Carnegie Tech, painted signs for the infantry in World War II and moved to New York in 1949. Not until a decade later, while sketching the ruins of Rome on a Fulbright in 1958-59, did he rediscover the joys of literally recording reality. Since 1962, his paintings of models, male and female, standing, sitting or lying in unglamorous poses round about his studio, have won well-nigh unanimous critical acclaim.
Some gallerygoers are disgruntled by the way Pearlstein details every sagging muscle and bulging abdomen, but the artist does it because he is fascinated with the way the folds and hollows flow into abstract compositions. “I’m not painting people,” he maintains, and to emphasize this, lets the edge of his large-scale canvas lop off hands, heads or feet. “I’m dealing with what you see, how you see and how you depict what you see. The more you stare at something, the more it fills your whole field of vision.”
Magnifying Fact. Al Leslie, 40, is, if possible, even more concerned with making his paintings fill the viewer’s whole field of vision. The 9-ft. by 6-ft. portraits, mostly of naked women, which he executes in steely tones, have an unnerving frontality arising from the fact that Leslie’s brush goes beyond what the naked eye would see. He cunningly divides his figures into four sections, then paints head, chest, abdomen and thighs separately, each viewed from eye level. He elevates his models on platforms, or for self-portraits, uses a male model posing in his clothes.
“I use this device to magnify the fact that the viewer is being confronted with another human being,” explains Leslie. A slight, loquacious, onetime physical-culture enthusiast from The Bronx, he abandoned a successful career as an abstractionist in 1960 because “modern art had, in a sense, killed figure painting. Painting the figure had become the most challenging subject an artist could undertake.”
Leslie obviously means his portraits to be as challenging to others as the act of painting them is for him. His own self-portrait is a mixture of honesty and defiance. “If a person stands in front of you,” he points out, “with his hands in his pockets and his shirt open, someone can stick a knife in his stomach.” Thanks to Leslie’s technical mas tery, the painting captures both his sullen antagonism toward the world and, at the same time, makes him look as innocent and as vulnerable as any of Pearlstein’s coldly viewed nudes.
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