[18][19] He was initially assigned to the Training Aids Unit at Camp Blanding, Florida, where he produced charts, weapon assembly diagrams, and signs.

[20] While in Italy, he took in as much renaissance art as was accessible in Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan, and also produced over 100 drawings and watercolors depicting life in the Army.

[24] Immediately after graduating in June 1949 with a BFA, Pearlstein and Warhol moved to New York City, at first sharing an eighth-floor walkup tenement apartment on St. Mark's Place at Avenue A.

[21] In April 1950, they moved to 323 W. 21st Street, into an apartment rented by Franziska Marie Boas, who ran a dance class on the other side of the room.

[20] After graduation, he was hired by Life magazine to do page layouts, and was then awarded a Fulbright Hays fellowship, enabling him to return to Italy for a year, where he painted a series of landscapes.

[21] From 1959 to 1963, he was an instructor at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York, and subsequently spent a year as a Visiting Critic at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

In an article published in Arts Magazine in April 1963, Sidney Tillim wrote that "[Pearlstein] has not only regained the figure for painting; he has put it behind the plane and in deep space without recourse to nostalgia (history) or fashion (new images of man) ...

Pearlstein's work is in many museums collections in the United States, including: His personal papers are held in the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art.