In today’s Post-Studio art world, filled with anti-object sentiment, conceptual social critique and contextual public art practice saturating theoretical discourse, most do not think of Richard Estes as an avant-garde trailblazer. However, in the 1960s he was viewed as a groundbreaking artist who employed photographs to produce a new style of painting.

Right: “Joe” Diner (1979), oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 48″. Private Collection.

Estes, outside of such Conceptualists as Douglas Hubler, John Baldessari and Edward Rusha, was one of the first painters in the late sixties to utilize photography as a significant source for image making.  He is thought to be an originator of the worldwide new Photo-Realist movement, emerging in the 1960s.  His art is linked with artists who used photography as a visual aid to produce images on canvas that replicated scenes of everyday life with precision and accuracy.  In the 1960s, Estes gained acclaim at a time when Abstraction, Conceptual Art, Pop Art, and Minimalism flourished and realist painting was slow to elicit the art world’s radar.

Right: “Double Self-portrait (1976), 24 x 36”. Museum of Modern Art, NY.

Despite his depiction of recognizable street scenes, objects and landscapes, Estes’s did not aim to create a mimesis of ‘reality’.  As an alternative, his paintings of precise lifelike details of telephone booths and escalators evince an eccentric invention derived from multiple snapshot shots of comparable scenes.  The final composition is a type of bricolage that is a reinterpretation of a particular place with a heightened level of coexisting components within an ‘alike’ whole.  According to Patterson Sims’ “Estes is an illusionist whose individual paintings are a compilation of his inventive imagination.” [1]

Although artists, as Chuck Close, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack and Malcolm Morley made Photorealist art concurrently, never were they deem themselves were part of any movement. Each had a very dissimilar emphasis, employing diverse methods of the application and painting of distinct subjects.  It was the dealer, Louis K. Meisel, owner of the Meisel Gallery in SoHo, who coined the term ‘Photorealism’ in 1969, and the Whitney Museum of Art organized an exhibition in 1970 titled “Twenty-two Realists”, that brought attention to these artists exploring the genre of realism.

Right: “Automat” (1967), oil on Masonite

Although Photorealism emerged close to the time of Pop art, it was not a rejoinder to it.  What the two styles have in common is a shared visual ground: each was indebted to an overwhelming circulation of the photographic media sweeping contemporary popular visual culture, in the mid-twentieth century United States.  This was the age of “Mad Men” [1] and television. Regarding Pop Art, Estes expressed in an interview back in 1972, “The trouble with pop art is that it made too much comment,”—“Once you get the message, you lose interest.” [2]

When examining Richard Estes’ oeuvre, spanning fifty-plus years, it is apparent that although he is a painter, he also shares a kinship with a diverse range of noted photographers of that era who also delved into probing cityscapes and their fascinating details. Amongst them are Eugene Atget, Bernice Abbott, Harry Callahan, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander.  All were determined to capture essences of street scenes and did not waiver from their approach. Este’s work demonstrates his sensitivity to light and an ability to portray the ordinary in an extraordinary fashion.  Here the influence of Edward Hopper is indisputable, because his finely calculated renderings reflect a personal vision.

Right: “Diner” (1971), oil on canvas, 40 1/8 x 50″. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Wash., DC. 

Furthermore what also becomes apparent is Estes’ kindred spirit with 19^th century master, James McNeil Whistler.  Throughout both artists’ striking work, one perceives that the specific subjects function primarily as vehicles for exploring concepts concerning color, form, and space, along with presenting a scrupulous application of conventional oil paint.  However, Estes re-creates his own distinct elucidation of a particular place through a multi-layering of several photographs of the same scene, perceiving the transitory nature of reflection and an integrated approach to image building.

The retrospective Richard Estes’ Realism at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through February 8, 2015, was jointly organized by the Portland Museum of Art in, Portland, Maine.  This extensive show, long over due, presents an in-depth array of compelling work by this prolific artist. The two-venue exhibition includes paintings from the mid-1960s to 2013, collectively encapsulating the evolution of Este’s oeuvre.  This is his first serious career survey in the U.S. in over three decades.  A significant exhibition was organized by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1978, demonstrating how Estes initiated a photographic translation of urban prosaic storefronts and streets scenes into hard-edged, detailed paintings, capturing details of an era.

Though his work has been rather ignored over the past twenty-five years, he remains a recognized name in the art world, despite being perhaps one of America’s most neglected artist’s. This comes as no surprise because of the shifting tide of the art world in the 1980s, when it became engulfed with graffiti-inspired street art, “bad-painting,” German Neo-Expressionism, Multiculturalism and Neo-Conceptualism.  Moreover, the evolution of Post-Modernism and the embrace of critical theory among artists, critics and curators, further pushed Estes’ brand out of art fashion.

The works in this exhibition were chosen by Patterson Sims, an independent curator, along with Jessica May, chief curator at the Portland Museum of Art. Smithsonian American Art Museum chief curator, Virginia Mecklenburg, coordinated the exhibition in Washington, D.C.  Comprised of some 46 paintings, it includes both noted cityscapes and—for the first time— Estes’ panoramic landscape paintings of Antarctica and several nocturnal scenes of New York.  According to Mecklenburg, “Estes is a master of contemporary realism whose sharply focused technique goes beyond the photograph to create complex constructions of light, reflection and perspective”. What becomes apparent in this well thought-out retrospective is that Estes has progressed not only in technique, but also with subjects.  This is particularly evident in his compositions of the 1980s and 1990s.

The exhibition showcases the full range of Estes’ career as painter, revealing his profound emphasis on the streets of urban centers including London, New York, Paris and Tokyo; also radiant sundrenched scenes of Venice, Antarctica and the Maine coast, especially the wondrous woods of Mount Desert Island, where Estes has spent much time since the late 1970s.  Although the latter are astutely executed, demonstrating Este’s exquisite painterly technique, they are less thought-provoking and do not hold the edgy complexity of his impressive mirrored cubistic cityscapes, constructed with layers of assorted vantage points.

Below: “Beaver Dam Pond, Acadia National Park” (2009), oil on board, 12 3/8 x 29 7/8 . Portland Museum of Art, Portland Maine.

Throughout this display, the viewer observes Richard Estes’ journey and interpretation of visual culture across time and space. Consistent throughout this show is his unfailing infatuation with windows and their powerful, reflective power to enhance, distort and recreate, as well as his fabrication of a three-dimensional sensibility on a two-dimensional canvas.  In these luminous images one seldom finds trash or disorder, because it is believed that such would detract from an amazing compilation of architectural detail and seemingly infinite variety of intertwined visual elements found within each picture.  The haunting stillness pervading empty streets and scenes leads one to conclude that Estes photographed on weekends, holidays, or early Sunday mornings, when the city was asleep and devoid of superfluous material. In spirit, he is closer to realists such as Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler, than to his photorealist contemporaries.

Moreover, throughout much of this work there is an echo of the photographs of Walker Evans, who too captured contemporary surroundings with clarity and immediacy. People are often absent in Evans’ pictures, just as they are in Estes’ work: streets, signs, structures and other artifacts stand in as their equivalents.

Right: “Bus with Reflection of the Flatiron Building (1966-67), oil on canvas, 36 x 48”. Private collection.

Ten pieces made before 1975 are included in the exhibition and are a hailed presence.  A real gem titled “Automat” (1966-1968), is perhaps the earliest work and one of Estes’s renowned, idiosyncratic paintings. From a bird’s eye perspective, one observes four seemingly middle-aged individuals seated at a square table, engaged in taking tea and cakes, as an afternoon repast. It is one of his more somber paintings, devoid of reflective surfaces; yet it is an image demonstrating his astute sense of organization.  The grid pattern of the tiled floor provides a framing for the centrally positioned table and figures set at an angle with its highlighted surface. Moreover, “Bus with Reflection of the Flatiron Building” (1966-67) [painted when he was working on “Automat”], with its shimmering reflective surfaces, is of particular interest since it evinces an assured compositional arrangement that appears again in the 1980s work depicting less confined space.

Right: “Horn and Hardart” (1967), oil on Masonite.

“Horn and Hardart Automat” (1967) is a benchmark work—one that perhaps represents a significant bridge foreshadowing what will become the foundation of Estes’ mature, structured style.  In the lower left corner a man sits at a table starring out at nothing.  In this canvas, the complex outside city space and cafeteria’s dark interior meld, becoming one continuous scene through a large plate glass window, drenched in brilliant sunlight reflecting multiple planes.

“Central Savings” (1975) reveals the artist’s meticulous application of paint, so as to create an in-depth composition capturing the fleeting nature of reflections and shadows through the day.  Unlike the snap and split photographs of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, who recorded impromptu urban scenes with hand-held Leica cameras, Estes’s painting encapsulates a type of liminal urban world, where a row of counter seats in a deserted diner’s are simultaneously contrasted with characteristic scenes of tall skyscrapers, corporate signage and horizontal and vertical planes. Off in the lower right corner, the reflective shadow of the artist emerges. The presence of Estes’s self-portrait shadow is there, perhaps, to reveal the exact moment when he snapped this window scene.

Right: “Bridal Accessories” (1975), oil on canvas.

Another captivating painting, “Bridal Accessories” (1975), depicts an empty, melancholic New York City street filled with silent storefronts. As in Abbott’s, Changing New York project [2], Estes, too, freezes a moment in time—as he eternalizes the nuptial fashions of that era in the form of a window display depicting packed rows of disembodied, veiled heads.  Although the shop is the focal point of the image, the overall composition is a nostalgic anthology of typographic styles evident in other store windows in his, “Paris Street Scene” (1972). Here, he discloses richness in clarity and depth, revealing various perspectives of a bisected street scene.  In this centrally-split picture, one observes two views of a street: one is a straight-on perspective of the road, and the other a reflective kaleidoscopic interpretation of an identical location.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Estes traveled to Europe and Japan painting perspectives of bridges and views along their waterways.  “Tower of Bridge”, London (1989), and “Accademia”, Venice (1980), provide examples of this work.

Right: “Water Taxi Mount Desert” (1999), oil on canvas, 35 x 66 1/4″. Kemper Museum of Contemporary  Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

His use of photography and its distinct surface characteristics are prevalent throughout this exhibition.  Photography provides him with a foundational core for his pictures.  If one attempts to identify a scene from one of his paintings, it would be very difficult to recapture what Este portrays, since he regularly amalgamates pieces from numerous photos. He disguises the painterly quality of his compositions by appling paint with cool, flat colors and clean brushwork. An example of Estes’s use of open space and his profound simulation of reality is seen in “Water Taxi, Mount Desert” (1999). An enigmatic-appearing girl riding in a boat seems awed by the scene’s crashing waves and views.  Of interest is that her hand appears improperly foreshortened.  Este’s expertise in using light and space is evident here, demonstrating a precise spatial depth within a formal pictorial structure.  A mysterious expression on the girl’s face is provocative, causing the composition to succeed without Estes’ usual multiple, reflective viewpoints.

The work entitled “Checkout” (2012), again demonstrates Estes’ shift in compositional arrangement and seems to sanction the figure even more, although the resulting picture appears awkward. One observes a bustling store filled with chocolates gifts, floating hearts and individuals engaged in buying and selling. The focal point of the painting is a multifaceted reflection in the glass mirror capturing the transactions and activities of this busy market. The kitschy love commodities jointly connect the shoppers and clerks on Valentine’s Day.  Estes produces an inventive depiction of a frenzied real-life activity.

Recently, Estes has produced nocturnal pictures of New York City. “Columbus Circle at Night” (2010) presents the junction of Eighth Avenue and Columbus Circle with its illuminating window lights generating a prismatic, theatrical outcome. Several of his infrequent portraits and self-portraits are included in the exhibition. “Self-Portrait” (2013) is a quiet, but alluring image. It hints at his earlier dense style of compositional arrangement; however, its framing is different.  A viewer must look through what appears to be a porthole framed by orange zips and a text stating, ‘NO SMOKING.’ Taken from the Staten Island Ferry, Estes’s centrally positioned portrayal melds with the interior setting of the vessel filled with clusters of tourists admiring the statue of Liberty. It is a captivating, mysterious conflation of place, replication, perspective and light.

It is astonishing to know that Richard Estes has painted over 500 works.  When asked about what drives him, his reply was, “It’s just a habit.”  And why he chose Photo-Realism, “I’m just an old fashioned artist.” [3] Absent throughout this exhibition is the edgy tension often found in contemporary work riddled with angst and ugliness.  In its place, a tranquil sensibility prevails. “Making a picture out of something is a way of putting oneself in control of it, like the cavemen and their pictures of wild animals,” Estes explained in the catalog for the 1968 exhibition, “Realism Now.” “Maybe making a picture of your environment is a way of coping with it.”  This is a significant statement given that the sixties was an era of racial unrest, Vietnam protests and horrific assassinations. 

His photorealist paintings over time have aged well, much as great wine.  Each holds information about time past, as well as time present. Hopefully, this exhibition will prompt a serious reevaluation Richard Estes’s work and his contribution to the realm of painting and artistic invention.  His dramatic, multifaceted paintings are a spectacular mélange of puzzling proficiency that evoke an innate technical subtleness capturing the nuance of life’s commonplace veracity.

By: Elaine A. King, Contributing Writer

The exhibition, Richard Estes’ Realism is on view at the American Art Museum (8th and F Streets, N.W., Washington, DC) 1st floor West, now through February 8, 2015 Visit the show on line at: http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2014/estes/

Footnotes:

[1] The term ‘Mad Men’ is taken from the television series that showcases the rise of advertising and business agencies in the 1960s.  It is a time of Madison Avenue’s heyday and the changing social values and the rise of consumer culture across the United States.

[2] Patterson Sims gave a talk about Richard Estes at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on 10 October 2014. He was the co-curator of the exhibition Richard Estes’ Realism.

[3] Chase Linda, Nancy Foote, Ted McBurnett,  “The Photo-Realists: 12 Interviews,” Art in America, 60, no. 6, November-December, 1972. pp.73-89.