Debbie Drake: America’s First Female TV Fitness Guru

In its January 26, 1962 issue, LIFE’s profile of Debbie Drake opened with a bold proclamation from the 29-year-old woman from Indiana. “I want to be the most important exercise girl in the world,” she said.

Drake did make her mark on history, as the first woman ever to host a national fitness instructional show on television. Her show launched in 1960 and stayed on the air through 1978. In 2015 she was inducted into the National Fitness Hall of Fame.

LIFE’s 1962 story on Drake, headlined “A Pretty Parer of Poundage,” talked about how she grew up “scrawny” but then put on weight after an unhappy teenage marriage and divorce, before turning to fitness. “That’s when the ugly duckling turned into a 38 ½-22-36 swan and an expert in figure improving exercises,” LIFE wrote. The story said that her show was viewed by millions, her syndicated column appeared in 40 newspapers, and her income was “in the $100,000 bracket.” The story also praised her “naive, unrehearsed, girl-next-door sincerity.”

If her persona was charmingly unrehearsed, it was also entirely of her era. In 1964 Drake released a record album of fitness instruction titled How to Keep Your Husband Happy, in which the cover showed a lounging man thinking of Drake going through various exercise poses.  At least one cultural critic drew a line from Drake to the controversial Peleton ad that got run off television in late 2019 for its view of women’s fitness as being about pleasing men, rather than its physical and mental health benefits.

While many of Drake’s routines will be familiar to anyone who has taken modern fitness instruction, some of the exercises showcased in LIFE make dubious claims, such as a move while resembles yoga’s cobra pose, and which she said could help erase a double-chin.

Drake also wasn’t shy about appealing to a male audience. Her photo shoot for LIFE magazine included cheesecake poses in a bathtub. In a bit of footage from the Dick Cavett Show (she comes on at the 4:28 mark, after Woody Allen) Drake engages the host in a two-person, face-to-face stretching routine that was nominally about loosening Cavett’s back but also meant to weaken his knees.

It’s a far cry from the you-go-girl messages of personal strength advocated by the legions of Drake’s contemporary progeny on YouTube.

But there’s also no denying that she was in at the start of something big. For Drake, the medium was the message that lasted.

Debbie Drake filmed an episode of her fitness instructional show in a studio in Indianapolis, 1962.

Photo by Alfred EisenstaedtThe LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Debbie Drake led an exercise demonstration at the National Federation of Grandmother’s Club members in Indianapolis in 1962

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

TV fitness pioneer Debbie Drake demonstrated an exercise which she claimed could help eliminate double chins and tone the body all over.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

One of the exercises that Drake demonstrated for LIFE readers was the “rear kick,” designed to strengthen the core muscles.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

ebbie Drake recommended this “leg-over” for, as LIFE put it in 1962, “smiting hip and thigh.”

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Debbie Drake, having remade her figure, took to television to show others how to do the same.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Fitness guru Debbie Drake posed for a LIFE photo shoot in 1962.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Debbie Drake played basketball with children in the driveway of her home with her son, nephew and niece.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Three-year-old Barbara Glidden was a frequent guest on Debbie Drake’s fitness show.

Alfred Eistenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

This episode of Debbie Drake’s fitness show featured comedian Phyllis Diller as a guest star.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Debbie Drake led comedian Phyllis Diller through a fitness routine.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Fitness star Debbie Drake shared a light moment with LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt during her shoot.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Van Halen: The Magic of Their Debut

Excerpted from LIFE’s new special issue, Van Halen: The Life. The Music. The Joy. It’s available here.

I wasn’t aware of Van Halen’s debut album when it came out in 1978, but I did become aware of it some years later at a time when the consideration of albums, and CDs, was still made with a sense of the whole. How the songs were ordered, how the experience unfolded from the opening track to the last, was one measure of the music itself. In that time it was part of a collective understanding that there had rarely, or never, been a debut album quite so audacious, cocksure, excellent, and embraceable as Van Halen. Who were these guys? The first three tracks went like this. 1) Here’s the band: “Runnin’ with The Devil.” 2) Here’s our guitar player: “Eruption.” 3) Now here’s a cover of a seminal rock song (in which, while paying all due homage, we proceed to kick the s— out of the original): “You Really Got Me.”

They never looked back.

“Runnin’ with the Devil” encapsulated Van Halen’s brashness and joie de vivre, all under a title so succinctly evocative the band’s manager later took it as the title for his book. The song has story, hoots and hollers, the big steady bass notes, and (one more time) Eddie’s joyously melodic guitar runs. “Eruption”—gorgeous, ecstatic, technically astonishing— reframed the potential of the electric guitar. The rest of the 11-song album follows suit, replete with the vocal harmonies on “Feel Your Love,” Alex’s tom-tom riff on “Jamie’s Cryin’ ” (sampled by Tone Lōc on his megahit “Wild Thing” 10 years later), and a kind of, well, call it a coupe de glace in the playful near-finale, “Ice Cream Man.” The band members couldn’t wipe the smiles off their faces, and neither could we.

For rock DJs, 1978 was a fertile year: Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness at the Edge of Town and the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls came out within a week of each other in June. Billy Joel’s 52nd Street and the Police’s Outlandos D’Amour arrived in the fall. None of those records deliver the crucial feeling—how lucky we are to be alive right now—in the way that Van Halen’s lid-lifter does. The feat of yea-saying harkened to the Beats of the ’50s (Is “Runnin’ with the Devil” a three-minute, 36-second interpretation of On the Road?) while also auguring the decade of celebration ahead. February 10, 1978, when Van Halen appeared on record-store shelves, was the day, as Americans would come to find out, that the 1980s began.

The images below are excerpted from LIFE’s new special issue, Van Halen: The Life, the Music, the Joy, which is available here.

Photo by Mark “WEISSGGUY” Weiss

Eddie Van Halen displayed his virtuoso skills at a performance at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1978.

Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns

David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen (right) posed backstage at Lewisham Odeon in London in 1978.

Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns

Band members (left to right) Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, David Lee Roth, and Michael Anthony in Osaka, 1979,

Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Shutterstock

David Lee Roth, Alex Van Halen, Eddie Van Halen and Michael Anthony on a joy-skate at Osaka Castle Park in Japan, 1979.

Photo by Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Shutterstock

Van Halen performed in Tokyo in 1979.

Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Shutterstock

David Lee Roth heeded his own counsel to “jump” at a 1983 performance in Devore, Calif.

Uncredited/AP/Shutterstock

The band took an encore during the tour for their album Fair Warning in Detroit, 1981.

Photo by Ross Marino/Shutterstock

By 1986 David Lee Roth was out of Van Halen and the role of lead singer had been taken over by Sammy Hagar (center).

Photo by The LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock

Baseball: The Greats We Lost in 2020

The following is excerpted from LIFE’s special issue on the Baseball Hall of Famers who died in 2020: Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, Joe Morgan, Whitey Ford and Al Kaline.

There’s an avid sense of community among Baseball Hall of Famers, due in part to their collective understanding of what it means to play the game at such an exceptional level for so long, as well as for the not-unrelated realization that there are so very few of them. Seventy-six living members by the Hall of Fame’s November 2020 reckoning. In early April there were 82. “I don’t want to keep posting the passing of another @baseballhall friend,” tweeted Dave Winfield, Hall of Fame 2001, on October 12. “With Joe Morgan today, it’s just too much. We’re talking about extraordinary people and great players we’re losing.”

Some years ago, early 2010s, I rode to a charity event in a large limousine with five such Hall of Fame players—Johnny Bench, Wade Boggs, Mike Schmidt, Robin Yount, and Lou Brock, who is among the extraordinary people and great players we lost this year. There was a fair amount of horsing around and sharing stories, and Bench told of the time early in his career when he’d thrown out Brock at second base by 15 feet. “True,” Brock acknowledged, and Boggs gave Bench a clap on the back. And then Brock, the greatest base stealer planet earth has ever produced (it is understood within baseball circles that Rickey Henderson arrived here from somewhere else) told everyone something they didn’t know. He said that while leading off of first base he could tell what pitch the catcher was calling for because when a catcher put down two fingers for a curveball, it caused a ripple in the muscles of his forearm that putting down one finger for a fastball did not. “If I saw that lit- tle movement right here in his arm,”— Brock had pushed up the right sleeve of his suit jacket and was showing the others what he meant—“then I was gone.” Schmidt and Yount looked across the seats at one another, impressed.

The criteria for induction to the Hall of Fame, beyond the most minimal technical standards (at least 10 years in the majors, at least five years since retirement) is nowhere defined. But like Justice Potter’s threshold for obscenity, you know a Hall of Famer when you see one. The players who died in 2020—Brock, Morgan, Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, and Whitey Ford within six weeks in the late summer and fall, and Al Kaline on April 6—were no-doubters. They combined periods of pure dominance with longer periods of sheer excellence, and they played their best when everyone was watching.

They produced statistics to charm any baseball fan, and images to charm anyone at all. Do you remember the way the dirt accumulated on Tom Seaver’s right knee as he followed through again and again, pitching deep into another summer night? Did you know that over a stretch of 96 2⁄3 innings pitched during the 1968 season Bob Gibson allowed two runs, earned or otherwise? Two. Isn’t it something that Whitey Ford, who was there at the Copacabana with the Mick and Billy Martin that night in 1957 when the fight broke out, said he knew to drink in moderation from growing up around his father’s bar in Queens, New York? And then he lived to be 91 years old and was married to his wife, Joan, for 69 years? And remember how Morgan flapped his elbow in the batter’s box as if pumping himself full of air and swagger? And wasn’t it just like Al Kaline, the boy-next-door superstar, to finish his career with 399 home runs, just shy of the prestigious 400 club? One percent of all major-leaguers ever have been inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Brock was 81 years old when he died. Gibson was 84, and Morgan 77, and Seaver 75, and Kaline 85. Yet all of them will never be anything but in their primes in our mind’s eye, on top of the game in ’61 or ’68, in ’69 or ’75, fixed forever in their time of glory, forever young.

The below images are among the many in LIFE’s special tribute to these baseball greats, available here.

Tom Seaver

Ron Vesely/MLB Photos via Shutterstock

Tom Seaver dominated for the Miracle Mets in 1969, going 25-7 and winning the first of his three Cy Young awards.

Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Tom Seaver in 1972, one of his 12 All-Star seasons and one of the ten years in which he topped 200 strikeouts.

Photo by Stephen Green-Armytage/Sports Illustrated via Shutterstock

Bob Gibson unfurled his imposing delivery to Game 2 of the 1964 World Series, in which his Cardinals defeated the Yankees in seven games.

Photo by Walter Iooss Jr. /Sports Illustrated via Shutterstock

Bob Gibson won two Cy Young awards and was a two-time World Series MVP.

Bettmann/Shutterstock

Whitey Ford has the highest win percentage in the modern era and also won the most games (236) of any Yankee pitcher.

Mark Kaufman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Whitey Ford warmed up before a game against the Red Sox in Yankee Stadium, 1955.

Photo by Hy Peskin/Sports Illustrated via Shutterstock

Whitey Ford was a Cy Young winner, World Series MVP, and 10-time All-Star.

Photo by Louis Requena/MLB via Shutterstock

Lou Brock slid into second base in a 1968 World Series game in Detroit.

Photo by Herb Scharfman /Sports Illustrated via Shutterstock

Lou Brock had 3,023 career hits and established a record for stolen bases with 938.

Bettmann/Shutterstock

Al Kaline batted in the 1968 World Series, in which his Detroit Tigers topped the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games.

Photo by Focus On Sport/Shutterstock

Al Kaline had 3,007 hits for his career and won 10 Gold Gloves in the outfield.

Bettmann/Shutterstock.

Joe Morgan showed his defensive prowess in a game against the Mets in 1973, the first of his five Gold Glove seasons.

Rich Pilling/MLB Photos via Shutterstock

Morgan, shown with the Giants in 1982, began his career with the Astros and won two MVP awards with the Cincinnati Reds in 1975 and ’76.

Photo by Rich Pilling/MLB Photos via Shutterstock

Cards: From Stars to Soldiers, a Pastime for All

As distractions go, playing cards have plenty to recommend them. A deck of cards is inexpensive, easily available, portable, and doesn’t need charging. And as the photos in this gallery show, the many games that people play with cards have the power to mesmerize folks from all walks of life.

LIFE’s photos of card players include a number of celebrities. Joe DiMaggio passes the time on a road trip playing casino with his teammates. Sophia Loren uses cards to pass a slow moment on a movie set. Actor Yves Montand gets in a few hands while his actress wife, Simone Signoret, gets made up for the Academy Awards.

But star shots aside, card games—whose history traces back to 9th-century China—are a truly democratic entertainment. Young boys play on the streets of Brooklyn, as do older gentlemen on the sidewalks of Paris. College girls play in a Connecticut dorm room, as do adults at an Illinois social club.

The games that they play vary: poker, bridge, gin rummy, hearts, pinochle, solitaire. Perhaps most striking is the variety of situations in which the cards come in handy. For the soldiers on the eve of battle in Luzon, the games may be a relief from stress, or boredom, or both. In a photo from a bridge club in Mapletown, N.J., a woman appears to be waging a battle against existential boredom—and losing.

That woman is an unhappy exception to the rule, though. In most photos, the players are utterly absorbed by their cards, their attention devoted to assessing what they have in their hands and figuring out what their next play should be.

For such a humble thing as a deck of cards, the depth of distraction they can achieve is really quite an accomplishment.

Actress Sophia Loren played cards with photographer Pierluigi in her trailer while fans waited outside during location filming of “Madame Sans Gene” in 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Sailors played cards below decks the night before the invasion of Luzon in the Phillipines in 1945.

The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation.

Joe DiMaggio played casino with his Yankees teammates on a 1939 train ride to a road game.

Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Green Berets played poker at an outpost in Buon Brieng, Vietnam, 1964..

Larry Burrows/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Neighborhood boys played an intense card game of Hearts on the sidewalk next to an intersection in Red Hook, 1943.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Comedy legend Ernie Kovacs (left, light shirt) played poker with friends in 1957.

Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Kenneth Trout and actress Ella Raines played gin rummy at the deck of a Nevada hotel; the couple were high school sweethearts who had married before his deployment as a bomber pilot during World War II, and LIFE chronicled their first real vacation together in its July 30, 1945 issue. The couple divorced in December of that year.

Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

A couple played cards in their motor home, 1970.

Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Actor Yves Montand (second from the right) played cards while his wife, actress Simone Signoret, had her hair done in a Beverly Hills Hotel room hours before the 32nd Annual Academy Awards in 1960; she would win Best Actress.

Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Men played pinochle at a club in Rockford, Ill. in 1949.

Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Pin-up photos adorn the walls of a bomber-crew shack on Adak Island, Aleutian Campaign, Alaska, 1943.

Pin-up photos adorned the walls of a bomber-crew shack where soldiers played cards on Adak Island, Aleutian campaign, Alaska, 1943.

Dmitri Kessel / The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Women dressed up for an afternoon at their bridge club in Maplewood, N.J., 1947.

Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Ed Sullivan interfered with wife Sylvia, as she tried to play solitaire in their apartment, 1967.

Arthur Schatz/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Students in a Connecticut College dorm room, 1945.

Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Parisian men sat around packing crate and played a game of cards in square of the Ile de la Cite, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

James Jones (right), author of From Here to Eternity, played cards with a group that included, from left to right, his wife Gloria, Bernie Frizzell and Addie Herder played poker during a party at his Paris residence, 1967.

Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The card game went on a coffee house in New Hampshire as Estes Kefauver, in the background, campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president in 1952.

Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Designer Christian Berard played solitaire at his Paris home, 1948.

Dmitri Kessel/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The American Way of Lunch

Lunch is the meal most likely to be either wolfed down or skipped entirely. It is as true in modern life as it was back in 1955, when LIFE cast its lingering gaze on the oft-hurried mid-day ritual.

“At the daily shriek of the factory whistle, clang of school bell or simple growl of an empty tummy, workday America rushes eagerly to cafeteria, lunch box, bean wagon, or executive dining room for its meridian meal,” LIFE said in its June 3, 1955 issue, introducing a photographic essay on the topic by Alfred Eisenstaedt. That entire issue was devoted to food, and the American way of lunch, LIFE wrote, was seen as offensive by “….European gourmets, to whom the hurried inhalation of hot dogs, hamburgers and poor boy sandwiches is an abomination.” But LIFE’s conclusion was that lunch, “if no epicurean triumph, still fulfills its chief function—the revitalization of a busy nation.”

Eisenstaedt photographed a wonderful variety of subjects—from the solitary meal of a construction worker or U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to communal gatherings at the farm table or the midtown diner. Some of the midday diners enjoy themselves, like workers at the Boeing plant who not only eat but play shuffleboard during their lunch break. But the photo that captures the essence of the American lunch, then and now, is the one of actress Angela Lansbury.

Lansbury is shown downing a hamburger at the Paramount Studio commissary. She sits at a table with Basil Rathbone, her costar in the movie The Court Jester. The movie was a musical comedy set in medieval times.

Lansbury sits in full costume, for her role of Princess Gwendolyn. But the meal is no royal treat. between the burger in her hand and the expression in her eyes, she looks like just another worker in need of a break, and some sustenance. So, thank God for lunch.

And then, back to work.

Carpenter Chuck Haines relaxed on a sixth-story I-beam of a bank being built in Beverly Hills, Calif., while lunching on a ham and cheese on white.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The Chock Full O Nuts in Manhattan’s Herald Square was chock full of people—many of them either shoppers or department store workers.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Army trainees stood in line for a meal of veal, gravy, mashed potatoes, greens, relishes, jelly roll and coffee at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

Alfred EisenstaedtThe LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Army private John Lambert took a 40-minute lunch break during training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Harvest farm hands ate lunch served by their wives in kitchen of a farmhouse.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Eddie Frank prepared to eat lunch next to his dog in front of his lighthouse.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Actress Mamie Van Doren ate a frozen dessert at the Universal Studios commissary.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Billie Ryan drank coffee as she waited for her turn at shuffleboard during the second shift’s 7:45 p.m. lunch break at the Boeing aircraft pIant in Benton, Wash.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation.

The Methodist churchwomen had quite a spread at their covered dish social in Augusta, Kan.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Methodist churchwomen in Augusta, Kan. enjoyed their monthly covered-dish luncheon.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Emil Kantola, a faller and bucker for the Weyhauser Timber Co., warmed himself by the fire as he had a sandwich and coffee in Snoqualmie Falls, Wash.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Mailman John Ronayne wolfed down the 75-cent specia—spaghetti, roll and; coffee—at the stand-up sandwich shop in the Statler Hotel in

Mailman John Ronayne wolfing down 75-cent special of spaghetti, roll & coffee at stand-up sandwich shop in the Statler Hotel in Boston.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles ate a healthy office lunch that included cottage cheese, an apple, lettuce and tea.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Philip Pearlstein: A Life in Art, From Student to Master

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.

Photo by John Loengard/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

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)

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