The paintings that Philip Pearlstein crafted as a teenager growing up in Pittsburgh during the Depression were complex and brimming with detail—much like the ones he would do decades later as a renowned artist. Look at his paintings of the merry-go-round that he would pass on the way to a Saturday art class and of the barbershop he went to in an African-American neighborhood, and you can see that this was not work of a kid who shied away from complex imagery.
Pearlstein’s paintings “Merry-go-round” (top) and “Wylie Avenue Barber Shop” (lower right) appeared in the June 16, 1941 issue of LIFE when he was 17 years old.
You can also see how, in 1941, at age 17, his work earned prominent display on the pages of LIFE magazine, after winning first and third prizes in a competition run by Scholastic Magazine.
Pearlstein, now 96 years old, credits his high school art teacher, Joseph Fitzpatrick, for getting Pearlstein and his classmates—many of whom also went on to careers in art—so enthused. “He talked about art as one of the most important things that the human race had done, and we took it seriously,” Pearlstein says.
Appearing in LIFE at age 17 gave Pearlstein a dose of notoriety, and he says it helped him graduate high school: “I got passing grades because I became famous for those images in LIFE magazine.”
The LIFE appearance also shaped his military career. Pearlstein brought the issue when he went for his Army intake interview after being drafted in 1943, and after four miserable months of basic training in Camp McLellan, Alabama, instead of going off to combat, he went to Camp Blanding in Florida to help work on instruction manuals. Instead of carrying a weapon, he was creating guides on how to use those weapons, while also getting an education in the fundamentals of graphic arts from the advertising industry professionals who ran the operation.
Pearlstein was eventually deployed to Italy during the end of World War II, where he was put to work creating roadsigns. In his downtime he was able to visit the city’s great museums, where his art education continued.
After the war, Pearlstein and LIFE magazine again crossed paths. He had moved from Pittsburgh to New York, where he roomed with another aspiring artist and friend from Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol. Though Warhol constantly downed the cans of tomato soup and bottles of soda that would become icons of his artwork, back then both Warhol and Pearlstein were both working in graphic design. Warhol was impressed by his roommate having been in LIFE at age 17. When Warhol asked him what it like to be famous, Pearlstein responded, “It was only for five minutes,” an exchange which presaged Warhol’s oft-repeated quote about a future in which everyone is famous for 15 minutes.
In 1957 Pearlstein, who had been working in graphics and painting on the side, took a full-time job in LIFE in part because his wife was pregnant with their first child (they would have three) and LIFE offered health benefits. His primarily responsibilities at LIFE were in page design, but one day Pearlstein overheard editors talking about needing a graphic for a story on high school drug abuse and recommended Warhol for the job. Warhol created the graphic, but the piece never ran. Pearlstein’s LIFE tenure came to an end in 1958, when he received a Fulbright scholarship and moved with his family to Italy for a year, where he painted landscapes.
Through much of the 1950s Pearlstein attempted to paint in the Abstract Expressionist style made famous by such artists as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and which was the dominant mode in the New York art world.
But after a point Pearlstein realized that wasn’t for him. He saw the abstract expressionists as people who were working through dark issues—but with his marriage, his Fulbright scholarship, living in Italy, he was a happy guy. “You have to be unhappy to be an expressionist,” he says. “I didn’t want to fake it.”
After coming back from Italy he turned to teaching, first at the Pratt Institute and later at Brooklyn College, and he began to gain recognition for the realistic nude portraits that would become his defining works. In 1966 he crossed paths with LIFE magazine again when John Loengard photographed Pearlstein at work in his studio for a story (which never ran) on modern figure painting.
Philip Pearlstein painted one of the nude portraits for which he became famous, 1966.
Pearlstein describes his paintings as being driven primary by the balancing of graphic elements. Even in most of his figure drawings, the background will have plenty to draw the eye, whether it be a cityscape seen out of a window, a richly detailed rug on the floor, or random objects such as a blow-up dinosaur or a carousel lion. In a writeup of a Pearlstein career retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum titled “Objectifications,” the New York Times wrote about one such painting, titled Two Models With Four Whirly-Gigs, and how the interplay between the models an objects “yields a gripping optical complexity.”
That retrospective took place twelve years ago, in 2008, but even today Pearlstein is still at it. When interviewed, he was on vacation with family for a week in Wellfleet, Mass., and he brought his brushes with him, painting watercolors of the wooded scene outside his house.
Even at 96, Pearlstein speaks with a vitality and clarity that would be the envy those years younger. Asked how he was able to stay so sharp, his answer was simple: “I never stopped painting.”
Philip Pearlstein
Painter Philip Pearlstein, 1986. (Photo by Jack Mitchell/Shutterstock)
This November, the LIFE Picture Collection—in collaboration with Cornette de Saint-Cyr Auction House, Bring It To Light Agency, and Philippe Labro—will host an exhibition and live online auction of nearly two hundred unique photographs. This will mark the first auction of modern LIFE prints in Europe.
LIFE Auction Paris
This sale of 191 photographs is a unique selection of works by some sixty LIFE photographers from 1930 to the end of the twentieth century, including Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Andreas Feininger, and Gjon Mili. Each photograph will be a limited edition of one with a special embossed stamp. The black and white prints are all made exclusively using the archival piezography process and printed on Hahnemühle paper.
The French author and filmmaker Philippe Labro, co-sponsor of the event, shared his thoughts on the importance of LIFE in the exhibition catalogue. We were “all ardently determined to reproduce our lives à la LIFE,” he writes. “Was there ever a better title for a publication: four letters in white on a red background, a logo, a brand, an asset, a heritage? I remember when I was a foreign student on an American campus in the mid-fifties; every week we would wait with impatient anticipation for the new issue of LIFE…Reality was interpreted and depicted by true artists who probed contemporary times and were shrewd observers of current events and the famous: photojournalists belong to a truly noble corporation.”
“This outstanding selection, curated by Agnès Vergez amongst several thousands of shots, are a perfect illustration of what LIFE was, not just a news magazine. Indeed it was a breeding ground for the greatest photojournalists of the second half of the twentieth century,” notes Jean-Luc Monterosso, founder of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.
A catalogue featuring all photographs is now available online, as is registration for the auction. Selected images from the show are available in the gallery below.
Marilyn Monroe
A 24-year-old Marilyn Monroe, wearing a bikini top, relaxes with a script in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, California, 1950. (Ed Clark/LIFE Picture Collection)
Dust Bowl
Abandoned car and farm in Dust Bowl, 1942 (Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Picture Collection)
Albert Camus
French author Albert Camus smoking cigarette outside Theatre des Mathurins where rehearsals of his play “Caligula” are taking place, 1957. (Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection)
Surfer
Surfer racing into water with board in relay race at International Surf Festival, 1965. (Ralph Crane/LIFE Picture Collection)
Post-War Europe
American soldier chatting with a sunbathing German girl in postwar Berlin, 1945. (Margaret Bourke-White/LIFE Picture Collection)
In 1941 LIFE staff photographer William C. Shrout joined a group of kids for their Halloween mischief and festivities. His photographs show a night of activities not too different from our modern-day celebrations: pumpkin carving, games, bobbing for apples, and, of course, lots of treats!
Halloween parties increased in popularity during the roaring twenties, and even more in the late 1930s. A number of companies in the emerging party industry started creating party idea books, craft templates, and mass-produced costumes. Yet, as seen in the group photo below, homemade costumes were still the most common. Clown and skeleton costumes were especially popular, as you’ll see in the crowd photo below.
A party isn’t complete without delicious food. Bobbing for apples and eating contests were frequent at early Halloween parties, as well as a table full of sweet goodies like donuts and pies. Shrout’s photos show gleeful children dunking their heads into water and enjoying Halloween snacks together. Delight in this vintage Halloween party and we wish you many sweets this holiday season.
Children wearing costumes at a Halloween party in Zionsville, Indiana, 1941.
During LIFE’s near 40-year history as a weekly publication, it produced one Halloween cover story. The cover, an experimental photograph taken by LIFE staffer George Silk, is a skeleton-costumed boy leaping into the air with a pumpkin.
Most of LIFE’s covers featured current events, politics or celebrities. This makes the October 31, 1960 issue unique: the Halloween photographs were an artistic spread, free from an accompanying news article. Each image grouping was composed across double pages of the magazine and was paired with short paragraphs of Halloween poetry:
“Listen! Was that a knocking? Only a trickster, you say, wrapped up in a shroud, and bent on a treat. Or masked impostors caught by a camera with a crooked lens.”
Silk’s ‘crooked lens’ was an altered strip camera. Strip photography, sometimes called slit photography, is a technique that creates a 2-dimensional image using a sequence of images over time. The final image is a collection of thin vertical or horizontal strips patched together to make one.
Silk used a strip camera to photograph running movements at the 1960 Summer Olympics, and was one of the earliest photographers to use the technique for creative use. In doing so he produced the epitome of Halloween. Children masked and cloaked, gleefully running to fill their bags with treats and goodies before the night is up.
As the original foreword in the 1960 issue advises, please enjoy this “gaudy gallery of characters who ride the night wind, clank skeleton shins and make a trick picture treat. It’s funny and it won’t scare the kids.”
A multiple exposure photograph of a child in a skeleton mask.
Time and again, LIFE photographers such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Bill Ray, Thomas McAvoy, Ed Clark, Gjon Mili and others found ways to capture the drama, tension and, occasionally, the humor inherent in big-time politics. And with the possible exception of election night, there’s no more dramatic, tense or humorous time (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not) to watch the strange, imperfect mechanism of representative democracy at work than during a national convention.
In recent years, much of the drama around conventions has been leached out of the proceedings. The way that COVID-19 has impacted the conventions in 2020 has added an extra note of nostalgia to the images of conventions from years past.
Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of LIFE’s best pictures from the Republican national conventions across several decades. More than a few famous GOP stalwarts are here—Ike, Nixon, Goldwater, Thomas Dewey—as are other long-forgotten pols who were players in their day, and the delegates who, in the end, provide both parties’ conventions with their real energy
The 1968 Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1968 Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida.
Lynn Pelham/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A go-go girl entertained delegates during the 1968 Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida.
Lynn Pelham/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Arizona politician and future U.S. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst (left) conferred with Nebraska’s Richard Herman during the 1964 GOP National Convention in San Francisco.
Bill Ray/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ronald Reagan at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco.
Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago.
Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
During the 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Martin Luther King Jr. led a demonstration calling for a strong Civil Rights plank in the GOP campaign platform.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago.
Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago.
Michael Rougier/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1956 Republican National Convention, San Francisco, California.
Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Left to right: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, his wife Mamie, Richard M. Nixon and his wife, Pat, at the 1956 GOP National Convention, San Francisco, California.
Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1956 Republican National Convention, San Francisco.
Leonard McCombe/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Chairman of the Republican National Committee Arthur E. Summerfield spoke on the telephone during the 1952 GOP National Convention in Chicago.
George Skadding/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Control booth, 1952 GOP National Convention in Chicago.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Bertha Baur, a prominent figure at conventions for decades and a long-time member of the Republican National Committee, in an elephant hat at the 1952 GOP National Convention in Chicago.
Francis Miller/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Pennsylvania Governor John Fine (left) and Arthur Summerfield chatted in private during the 1952 Republican National Convention in Chicago.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Republicans held an informal conference in a kitchen during the 1952 GOP National Convention in Chicago.
Cornell Capa/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Vice-presidential nominee Richard Nixon and his wife Pat spoke with photographers during the 1952 GOP National Convention in Chicago.
Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1952 GOP National Convention in Chicago.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1948 GOP National Convention in Philadelphia.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The 1948 GOP National Convention in Philadelphia.
Gjon Mili/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Pennsylvania delegates to the 1944 Republican National Convention in Chicago pulled cold beers from a tub of ice after a caucus meeting.
Thomas McAvoy/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Delegates listened to Herbert Hoover during the 1944 Republican National Convention in Chicago.
Gordon Coster/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A model wore a bathing suit in a fashion show at Ohio senator Robert Taft’s headquarters during the 1940 GOP National Convention in Philadelphia.
William C. Shrout/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A young Republican rested on a sofa in the Hotel Adelphi during the 1940 GOP National Convention in Philadelphia. (“Van” was Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who was long considered a front-runner for the GOP nomination; instead, the Republicans nominated Indiana’s Wendell Willkie, who lost the election to the Democratic incumbent, Franklin Roosevelt.)
The 2020 Republican National Convention has become a virtual event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, just as the Democratic Convention had the week before. Here LIFE dips into its archives for a colorful look at what the GOP event was like when people could safely convene.
LIFE’s first major coverage of a Republican National Convention was in its issue of June 24, 1940. At that gathering in Philadelphia, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie for the tough and ultimately futile task of challenging the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt in the general election.
The Philadelphia Convention Hall teemed during the 1940 Republican National Convention.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon at the 1956 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where they accepted their party’s re-nomination.
The 1956 Republican National Convention, which took place at the Cow Palace just outside San Francisco, re-nominated incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon. It was the first RNC to take place after that year’s Democratic National Convention, rather than before. After 1956, it became an informal tradition that the party holding the White House held their convention second.
Vice President Richard Nixon with his wife, Pat Nixon, at the 1956 Republican National Convention.
Many of the color photographs taken during the 1956 RNC were shot by LIFE staff photographer Leonard McCombe. His beautiful frames imparted elegance to the sometimes-gimmicky qualities of a party convention.
LIFE photographer Leonard McCombe looked for captivating images at the 1956 Republican Convention in San Francisco.
Eisenhower and Nixon went on to win the 1956 election, easily defeating Adlai Stevenson. Four years later Vice President Nixon stepped up to lead the Republican ticket, and he had no opponents for the 1960 nomination.
The LIFE cover from August 8, 1960, featured Richard and Pat Nixon at the Republican National Convention in Chicago.
The 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago nominated Richard Nixon for president and former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts for vice president. It was the 14th time Chicago hosted the RNC, more times than any other city.
Presidential nominee Richard Nixon greeted a supporter at the 1960 Republican National Convention.
During the convention Nixon promised in his acceptance speech that he would visit every state during his campaign.
“I announce to you tonight, and I pledge to you, that I, personally, will carry this campaign into every one of the fifty states of this Nation between now and November the eighth.”
These Nixon supporters wore matching dresses for the 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago.
The 1960 presidential election was closely contested, and Nixon lost to the Democratic nominee, Senator John F. Kennedy. Some believed that Nixon’s convention promise of visiting every state—while Kennedy focussed on popular swing states—was one of the reasons that Nixon lost.
The July 24, 1964 cover of LIFE featuring Barry Goldwater with his wife Peggy at the 1964 Republican National Convention.
The 1964 Republican National Convention was held in the same location as the 1956 RNC, the Cow Palace Arena outside San Francisco. The Republican primaries pitted liberal Nelson Rockefeller of New York against Conservative Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater secured the nomination for president, and New York representative William Miller received the nomination for vice president.
Goldwater’s winning of the nomination meant a change for the party, as described by LIFE in its July 24th, 1964 issue, with Goldwater on the cover:
In a crescendo that thrust Barry Goldwater into control, the Republican changed both its course and its nature. In flashes of anger and pathos, of bitterness and exultation – captured on these pages by the color cameras of LIFE photographers – the G.O.P. was seized by its unyielding right wing.
Gold coins rained down on delegates after Goldwater won the presidential nomination at the 1964 Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.
The 1964 gathering was the first in which a woman was entered for nomination at a major party convention. Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a moderate Republican, placed fifth in the initial balloting.
Delegates at the 1964 Republican National Convention held signs supporting the candidacy of Senator Margaret Chase Smith for president; she placed fifth on the first ballot.
Goldwater was an outspoken conservative and an opponent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Goldwater’s candidacy fueled several days of protests outside the 1964 RNC.
Marchers dressed as KKK members to condemn Barry Goldwater outside the 1964 Republican National Convention.
Goldwater lost the general election to incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in a landslide, but his nomination contributed to the Republican party’s modern conservative movement.
Presidential nominee Richard Nixon (right) and Vice Presidential nominee Spiro Agnew shared the podium during the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach.
The 1968 Republican National Convention took place in the Miami Beach convention center in Florida. As they had eight years before, Republicans nominated former Vice President Richard Nixon for president, and Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew was chosen for vice president.
An enthusiastic crowd greeted Richard Nixon standing at the 1968 Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida.
The release of balloons celebrated the nomination of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, who took in the scene from the podium at the 1968 Republican Convention.
Though Nixon was the frontrunner during the convention, California Governor Ronald Reagan and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller also received several hundred votes. LIFE’s coverage of the Miami Beach RNC was the most colorful yet. An article written by Paul O’Neil in the August 16, 1968 issue of LIFE details go-go music, ‘gaudy’ headgear, costumes, and even a Rockefeller showboat that moved up and down a river by the convention’s hotels.
A Rockefeller supporter on a showboat waved to a Nixon boat during the 1968 Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida.
Nixon defeated Democratic nominee, Herbert Humphrey, in the the 1968 presidential election. The election year was chaotic, marked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and widespread opposition to the Vietnam war. Nixon ran on a platform to “restore law and order.”
President Richard Nixon accepted a renomination at the 1972 Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida.
The 1972 Republican National Convention was supposed to take place in San Diego, but because of labor costs and scandals, the GOP changed course three months beforehand and decided to return to Miami Beach to re-nominate Richard Nixon for president.
The 1972 RNC set a new standard for party conventions, as it was a scripted media event with a schedule of speeches, setting the stage for the modern party convention.
First Lady Patricia Nixon spoke at the 1972 Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida.
Richard Nixon’s daughters and their spouses— from left to right, Edward Cox, Tricia Nixon Cox, Julie Nixon Eisenhower and David Eisenhower—joined the party at the 1972 Republican National Convention.
