Richard Estes

Last updated
Richard Estes
Richard Estes 4479.JPG
Richard Estes at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2014
Born (1932-05-14) May 14, 1932 (age 91)
Nationality American
Education Art Institute of Chicago
Known for Painting
Notable workTelephone Booths
Movement Photorealism

Richard Estes (born May 14, 1932, in Kewanee, Illinois) is an American artist, best known for his photorealist paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with such painters as John Baeder, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, and Duane Hanson. Author Graham Thompson writes "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs." [1]

Contents

Early life

At an early age, Estes moved to Chicago with his family, where he studied fine arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1952–56). He frequently studied the works of realist painters such as Edgar Degas, Edward Hopper, and Thomas Eakins, who are strongly represented in the Art Institute's collection. After he completed his course of studies, Estes moved to New York City and, for the next ten years, worked as a graphic artist for various magazine publishers and advertising agencies in New York and Spain. During this period, he painted in his spare time. He had lived in Spain since 1962 and, by 1966, was financially able to paint full-time.

Work

Estes stayed true to the photographs he used: when his paintings include stickers, signs, and window displays, they are always depicted backwards because of the reflection. His work rarely included litter or snow around the buildings because he believed these details detract from the buildings themselves. The paintings are always in daylight, suggesting "vacant and quiet Sunday mornings." Estes' works strive to create convincing three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional canvas. His work has been described in terms ranging from super-realism, sharp-focus realism, neo-realism, photo-realism, to radical realism. The most common one is super-realism. [2] Estes' paintings from the early 1960s are typically city dwellers engaged in everyday activities. Around 1967, he began to paint storefronts and buildings with glass windows and their reflected images. The paintings were based on Estes' color photographs, which captured the evanescence of the reflections, changing with the lighting and the time of day.

Telephone Booths (1968), Oil on canvas. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Richard Estes.jpg
Telephone Booths (1968), Oil on canvas. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Estes paintings were based on multiple photographs of the subject. He avoided famous New York landmarks. His paintings provided fine details that were invisible to the naked eye, and gave "depth and intensity of vision that only artistic transformation can achieve." [3] While some alteration was done for the sake of aesthetic composition, it was important to Estes that the central and the main reflected objects be recognizable, and that the evanescent quality of the reflections be preserved. He had a one-man show in 1968 at the Allan Stone Gallery. His works have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1971, Estes was granted a National Council for the Arts fellowship. The same year, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and he became a full Academician in 1984.

Public collections

Estes is represented in several leading public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, in Budapest, the Centre national des arts plastiques, in Paris, the Museo Botero, in Bogota, the Tate collections, in England, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, in Madrid. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]

Notes

  1. Thompson, Graham: American Culture in the 1980s (Twentieth Century American Culture) Edinburgh University Press, 2007
  2. Richard Estes Summary . Retrieved Apr 26, 2021 via www.bookrags.com.
  3. "Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's Questions". Answers. Retrieved Apr 26, 2021.
  4. "Richard Estes". Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  5. "Richard Estes". Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  6. "Richard Estes". Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  7. "Richard Estes". Whitney Museum of American Art. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  8. "Richard Estes". National Gallery of Art. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  9. "Richard Estes". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  10. "Richard Estes". The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  11. "Richard Estes". Cleveland Museum of Art. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  12. "Richard Estes". Detroit Institute of Arts. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  13. "Richard Estes". High Museum of Art. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  14. "Richard Estes". Tate. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  15. "Richard Estes". Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Retrieved January 6, 2023.


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Delaunay</span> French painter (1885–1941)

Robert Delaunay was a French artist of the School of Paris movement; who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract. His key influence related to bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lewis Baltz</span> American photographer

Lewis "Duke" Baltz was an American visual artist, photographer, and educator. He was an important figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s. His best known work was monochrome photography of suburban landscapes and industrial parks which highlighted his commentary of void within the "American Dream".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yves Tanguy</span> French surrealist painter

Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy, known as just Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photorealism</span> Genre of art

Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be used broadly to describe artworks in many different media, it is also used to refer specifically to a group of paintings and painters of the American art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catherine Opie</span> American fine-art photographer (born 1961)

Catherine Sue Opie is an American fine-art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theodore Robinson</span> 19th-century American impressionist painter

Theodore Robinson was an American painter best known for his Impressionist landscapes. He was one of the first American artists to take up Impressionism in the late 1880s, visiting Giverny and developing a close friendship with Claude Monet. Several of his works are considered masterpieces of American Impressionism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph Goings</span> American painter (1928 - 2016)

Ralph Goings was an American painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was best known for his highly detailed paintings of hamburger stands, pick-up trucks, and California banks, portrayed in a deliberately objective manner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audrey Flack</span> American artist (born 1931)

Audrey Flack is an American artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.

Denis Peterson is an American hyperrealist painter whose photorealist works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Tate Modern, Springville Museum of Art, Corcoran MPA, Museum of Modern Art CZ and Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyperrealism (visual arts)</span> Genre of painting

Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph. Hyperrealism is considered an advancement of photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the United States and Europe that has developed since the early 1970s. Carole Feuerman is the forerunner in the hyperrealism movement along with Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.

Robert Alan Bechtle was an American painter, printmaker, and educator. He lived nearly all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose art was centered on scenes from everyday local life. His paintings are in a Photorealist style and often depict automobiles.

Thomas Leo Blackwell was an American hyperrealist of the original first generation of Photorealists, represented by Louis K. Meisel Gallery. Blackwell is one of the Photorealists most associated with the style. He produced a significant body of work based on the motorcycle, as well as other vehicles including airplanes. In the 1980s, he also began to produce a body of work focused on storefront windows, replete with reflections and mannequins. By 2012, Blackwell had produced 153 Photorealist works.

Idelle Lois Weber was an American artist most closely aligned with the Pop art and Photorealist movements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Neffson</span> American painter (born 1949)

Robert Neffson is an American painter known for his photorealistic street scenes of various cities around the world, museum interiors and for early still lifes and figure paintings.

Louis K. Meisel is an American author, art dealer and proponent of the photorealist art movement, having coined the term in 1969. He is also the owner of one of the earliest art galleries in SoHo at 141 Prince Street. In addition to Photorealism, Meisel is responsible for the resurgence of interest in the sub-set of American illustration identified as "Pin-up", and is the largest collector of original art of both genres. Louis and Susan Meisel own the largest collections of Photorealism and pin-up art in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Greene (artist)</span> American painter

Stephen Greene was an American artist known for his abstract paintings and in the 1940s his social realist figure paintings.

Roberto Bernardi is a photorealist painter who explores the beauty of everyday life though the reflections and transparencies in his still life paintings, using as his main subject plates and glasses, kitchens appliances, dishwashers, fridges and more recently lollypops and candies.

<i>Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape</i> Painting by Jean Metzinger

Baigneuses: Deux nus dans un paysage exotique is an oil painting created circa 1905 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape is a Proto-Cubist work executed in a highly personal Divisionist style during the height of the Fauve period. The painting is now in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Spain.

<i>Composition for "Jazz"</i> Painting by Albert Gleizes

Composition for "Jazz", or Composition , is a 1915 painting by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. This Cubist work was reproduced in a photograph of Gleizes working on the painting in the Xeic York Herald, then published in The Literary Digest, 27 November 1915 (p. 1225). Composition for "Jazz" was purchased in 1938 by Solomon R. Guggenheim from Feragil Gallery, New York and forms part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. The painting is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.