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Nude on Dahomey Stool is a soft ground etching with a tonal range from deep inky blacks to light highlighted areas and a white background. A nude female model is posed frontally and sits on a stool that is diagonal to the picture plane. At the top, her face is cropped just above the nose; at the bottom, her left leg is cut off just below the knee. She sits on her right hand, with her right leg bent across her lower torso, and her left elbow resting on her thigh so that her left hand can support her chin. She has black shoulder-length hair. In the background, the molding of a baseboard is visible.
Typically, Pearlstein works in four-hour sessions, with breaks, and positions himself close to his models. As a result, many of his compositions are severely cropped, as a photograph might be. Pearlstein, however, does not use a camera for his work, and explains, “I think the work gets confused with photography because of the cropping, that’s the most obvious relationship. I seem to do a lot of what a wide-angle lens does. But that’s simply because I work close to the model.” [2]
In Nude on Dahomey Stool the model’s limbs are dynamically arranged so that her upper arms are virtually parallel, while her left leg and lower left arm define the central axis. The bold diagonals of her other leg and upper arms run counter to the diagonal stool, which resembles a ceremonial object used in the Dahomey region of West Africa. The resulting visual energy is reminiscent of the work of Franz Kline’s, an artist Pearlstein is known to admire. The tension of the pose and the intersecting angles of her arms and legs complement the inherent tension created by his subject’s nudity. He explained in an interview, “But in my work I sense an anxiety that comes through dealing with a naked body, which is supposed to be erotic. Everybody assumes it’s erotic, because of our conditioning. But to deal with it in a cold, objective, clinical way sets up a pictorial tension, which I like in my paintings. It is the kind of tension I find in Mondrian.” [3]
Notes:
[1] Pearlstein, quoted in Linda Nochlin, “Philip Pearlstein: Realism is Alive and Well in Georgia, Kansas, and Poughkeepsie,” in Philip Pearlstein (Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, 1970), unpaginated.
[2] Pearlstein, quoted in Sanford Sivitz Shaman, “An Interview with Philip Pearlstein,” Art in America 69, no. 7 (September 1981), 124.
[3] Pearlstein, quoted in Shaman, “An Interview,” 125.
ProvenanceTo 1983
Barbara B. Millhouse, New York, NY and Winston-Salem, NC. [1]
From 1983
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, given by Barbara B. Millhouse on December 29, 1983. [2]
Notes:
[1] Deed of Gift, object file.
[2] See note 1.
Exhibition History1976
Twentieth Century American Print Collection opening
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (12/3/1976)
2010
Looking At/Looking In: Bodies and Faces in Contemporary Art
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (5/11/2010 - 8/8/2010)
Published ReferencesReynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories , with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 200, 201
DepartmentAmerican Art
Nude on Dahomey Stool
Artist
Philip Pearlstein
((1924 - 2022))
Date1975-1976
Mediumsoft-ground etching
DimensionsFrame: 35 7/8 x 29 7/8 in. (91.1 x 75.9 cm)
Image: 23 3/4 x 19 7/8 in. (60.3 x 50.5 cm)
SignedPearlstein: 1976
Credit LineGift of Barbara B. Millhouse
CopyrightBetty Cuningham Gallery
Object number1983.2.32
DescriptionPhilip Pearlstein’s drawings, paintings, and prints have been controversial for three reasons: their utter realism, their nude subject matter, and their spatial illusionism at a time when most artists valued the flatness of the picture plane. He dedicated himself in the early sixties to the depiction of nudes as abstraction began to fade as the dominant trend. His nudes—often pairs of females, or a female and a male—were starkly realistic, lacking narrative and eroticism. With their deep shadows and references to walls and floors, his images imply the existence of a three-dimensional space. For Pearlstein, “the flatness of the picture plane is no more a truth than was the flatness of the world before Columbus. It’s all a matter of how you look at it.” [1]Nude on Dahomey Stool is a soft ground etching with a tonal range from deep inky blacks to light highlighted areas and a white background. A nude female model is posed frontally and sits on a stool that is diagonal to the picture plane. At the top, her face is cropped just above the nose; at the bottom, her left leg is cut off just below the knee. She sits on her right hand, with her right leg bent across her lower torso, and her left elbow resting on her thigh so that her left hand can support her chin. She has black shoulder-length hair. In the background, the molding of a baseboard is visible.
Typically, Pearlstein works in four-hour sessions, with breaks, and positions himself close to his models. As a result, many of his compositions are severely cropped, as a photograph might be. Pearlstein, however, does not use a camera for his work, and explains, “I think the work gets confused with photography because of the cropping, that’s the most obvious relationship. I seem to do a lot of what a wide-angle lens does. But that’s simply because I work close to the model.” [2]
In Nude on Dahomey Stool the model’s limbs are dynamically arranged so that her upper arms are virtually parallel, while her left leg and lower left arm define the central axis. The bold diagonals of her other leg and upper arms run counter to the diagonal stool, which resembles a ceremonial object used in the Dahomey region of West Africa. The resulting visual energy is reminiscent of the work of Franz Kline’s, an artist Pearlstein is known to admire. The tension of the pose and the intersecting angles of her arms and legs complement the inherent tension created by his subject’s nudity. He explained in an interview, “But in my work I sense an anxiety that comes through dealing with a naked body, which is supposed to be erotic. Everybody assumes it’s erotic, because of our conditioning. But to deal with it in a cold, objective, clinical way sets up a pictorial tension, which I like in my paintings. It is the kind of tension I find in Mondrian.” [3]
Notes:
[1] Pearlstein, quoted in Linda Nochlin, “Philip Pearlstein: Realism is Alive and Well in Georgia, Kansas, and Poughkeepsie,” in Philip Pearlstein (Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, 1970), unpaginated.
[2] Pearlstein, quoted in Sanford Sivitz Shaman, “An Interview with Philip Pearlstein,” Art in America 69, no. 7 (September 1981), 124.
[3] Pearlstein, quoted in Shaman, “An Interview,” 125.
ProvenanceTo 1983
Barbara B. Millhouse, New York, NY and Winston-Salem, NC. [1]
From 1983
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, given by Barbara B. Millhouse on December 29, 1983. [2]
Notes:
[1] Deed of Gift, object file.
[2] See note 1.
Exhibition History1976
Twentieth Century American Print Collection opening
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (12/3/1976)
2010
Looking At/Looking In: Bodies and Faces in Contemporary Art
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (5/11/2010 - 8/8/2010)
Published ReferencesReynolda House Museum of American Art, Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories , with contributions by Martha R. Severens and David Park Curry (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Reynolda House Museum of American Art affiliated with Wake Forest University, 2017). pg. 200, 201
Status
Not on view