Nude Torso

In an era dominated by new media and abstraction, Pearlstein has helped to refocus attention on the human figure-particularly in painting, drawing, and printmaking-since the early 1960s. Pearlstein nevertheless credits abstraction as his most important influence: "The lesson we learned from the action painters and those who immediately preceded them was the idea that a unique, unexpected combination of forms could take place in front of you. It made going back to nature a meaningful thing." The artist's unconventional angle of vision, radiating shadows, truncated body, and individualized figure found in "Nude Torso" are each distinctively modern aspects of Pearlstein's work that have helped to revitalize life study, and realism itself, in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.