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Philip Pearlstein White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelley, Morning, 1974 oil on canvas 60 x 60 in. I don't know (why ruins). I've always been attracted to geology. I'm happiest in museums, but the only other time I'm really enthusiastic is when I'm in a ruin."1 Philip Pearlstein Although Philip Pearlstein is best known for his studies of the nude, landscapes painting formed the foundation of his art. Many of his early paintings in the 1950s were interpretations of fractured, primordial rocks painted in an abstract expressionist style and influenced by a 1952 visit to the Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest. Moonlight Landscape (1955, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro) is a dark, brooding mountain panorama with an emphasis on tectonic planes of space that forecast the color and treatment of flesh in his later paintings. When Pearlstein changed direction in 1961 and began painting models from life in the studio, he interpreted the figure as a landscape. Solidly built up and modeled like peaks and valleys, Pearlstein's cool, detached figures shocked the art world in their departure from the prevailing expressionist style and references to traditional naturalism. His emphasis on the importance of perception in art bridged the move from landscape to the figure. Landscape reemerged as a viable subject matter for Pearlstein after a trip to Italy in 1973 and to the Southwest in the summer of 1974, courtesy of the United States government. In celebration of the Bicentennial, The Department of the Interior commissioned a group of artists to paint American scenes from across the continent and sponsored a touring exhibition, America 1976, that premiered at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C.2 Pearlstein, a member of the Advisory Panel for the project, painted two views for the show, White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly rendered in both morning and afternoon light. He began painting in the summer of 1974 and returned the following summer to finish the canvases. They are rare examples of the artist's experimentation with large-scale, plein air painting in oil.3 In the Patton's painting, Pearlstein brings the sandstone cliff close to the foreground of the canvas, presenting a portrait of its structure. As a result, the looming rock striation, tinged pink from the glowing light, appears sublimely dramatic. The artist's viewpoint is slightly elevated in relation to the dwarfed, prehistoric Anastazi dwellings, suggesting the precarious location and conditions in which the artist must have worked. Pearlstein's plein-air approach was based on a desire to capture and evenly paint every detail of the scene. He departed from the momentary and abstracted sensations of nature painted by Impressionist artists who pioneered the depiction of light effects in landscape. Painting in oil outdoors proved too difficult and the artist soon turned to the watercolor medium to interpret scenery, a practice that continues to appeal to the romantic side of Pearlstein's sensibility. Barbara Matilsky
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