Philip Pearlstein moved away from abstraction in the 1960s and has since concentrated on painting what was in front of him, including a series of portraits. He focuses on “the human figure as a found object.” Many of his subjects were friends from the art world, including the painter Al Held (1928–2005) and sculptor Sylvia Stone (1928–2011). They were all friends from Held’s and Pearlstein’s early days showing in galleries on Tenth Street, and both Stone and Pearlstein taught at Brooklyn College. But their work was different: Held was well known for his thick, visceral geometric abstractions, and Stone was experimenting with shaped canvases and geometric plexiglass sculptures. Pearlstein’s cropping and composition, creating sharp angles and psychological distancing, results in a portrait that is as “cool” as his subjects’ own work. As curator Frank Goodyear once noted, Pearlstein’s subjects “arrive as individuals and leave as Pearlsteins.”