Richard Estes
http://www.artcritical.com/studiovisit/GPEstes.htm
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/estes_richard.html
A Dialogue Between Gregory J. Peterson and Richard Estes
original portrait drawings by
Damon Lehrer
I wanted to convince my friend, the Photo-Realist artist Richard Estes, to
consent to this interview. We were at dinner, and I said to him, "Richard, I
shall lead the story by saying 'Among the giants in the world of Contemporary
Realism Richard Estes is a god.' How does that sound?" I suppose it worked
because a few weeks later I am in his apartment and we are having lunch, the
tape recorder is going.
Well, what I said may have sounded like flattery, and to any other artist
probably would have been, but let the truth be known, Richard Estes is a god
among artists today, with legions of followers acknowledged and
unacknowledged, aspiring to his masterly style (and few, if any succeeding)
and decades of lofty prices in the commercial market place also attesting to
his preeminence. Of course, the art itself, at its best, transcends all outward
indicia of success. Only by looking at his paintings and contemplating them
deeply does one find the secrets of his stature. His work is at once traditional,
contemporary, and timeless. His urban landscapes capture the essence of the
moment they are created without wallowing in pop ephemera.
I first became aware of Richard's work in an art history course I was taking in
the early seventies while a student at Columbia College. There we were
shown a slide of his famous "Telephone Booths" painting, as the instructor
introduced us to the school of Photo-Realism. That picture has remained
etched in my mind for decades, and I always daydreamed about it and
wondered where it was. Many years later I started collecting Realism myself.
Then in the galleries I encountered Richard's grand and stately cityscapes.
His utterly precise, muted, portraits of Manhattan have an air of authority and
definitiveness about them, their bravura technical feats hinting at the
haughtiness and arrogance that typifies the metropolis they depict. What kind
of man could produce works of such distinction? Would he share their cold
aloofness? The thought of ever meeting him was kind of scary.
But getting to know Richard has been as astonishing as his artwork in its own
way. He is an unique individual, a man of humility, openness and humanity. A
gathering at his house is likely to include art world luminaries, members of the
oldest, wealthiest families in America, nine-to-fivers, struggling artists and just
plain strugglers, all treated with equal respect. His utter lack of arrogance,
hauteur or self absorption is a jolting surprise considering how much he could
get away with were he so inclined.
That is, however, unless one is on the subject of art. Go to an exhibition with
Richard at your peril. His hypercritical eye can rip apart anyone, anyone, and
your own eyes will never see that hapless artist the same. On a trip with
Richard to see Matisse one day Matisse was taken down a notch when
Richard disdainfully pointed out how the Frenchman was sloppy and inept at
painting hands. Now I have problems with Matisse. When we went to the
Metropolitan to see Vermeer he-well, let me spare you those cruel truths.
Richard cooks lunch and serves it in his immaculate, very grand apartment
and studio overlooking Central Park. The first course dishes are washed
before we're into the second course. This meticulous side of his personality of
course comes through in his paintings.
GJP: Richard, where were you born and when did you start painting?
ESTES: I was born in Kewanee, Illinois, population of four or five thousand.
That was the major town, but wasn't where we really lived. That's only where
the hospital was located. We actually lived in Sheffield, 20 miles from there.
These towns are about 120 miles from Chicago.
GJP: How did you start painting?
ESTES: I don't even remember. I always liked to draw. I was not much more
than eight or nine years old when I got a Christmas present of an oil painting
set. I guess they encouraged me to draw a little bit. If you go into the other
room on the shelf you'll see a little thing I did when I must have been about
four years old about so big, signed "Dick Estes."
GJP: When did you seek to become a professional? Did you go to an art
school?
ESTES: I went to the Chicago Art Institute. I never really thought I'd end up as
a painter, rather, I thought I would probably do commercial art or design or
something like that. I didn't think I'd be successful as a painter although I
always wanted to do it. In school I concentrated on painting but I figured I'd
have to face the music and do illustration when I got out, which I did for about
ten years.
GJP: How did you cross over to fine art?
ESTES: I took work around and most galleries didn't like it but finally I hooked
up with a couple who did, Allan Stone, and Ivan Karp who worked at Castelli.
That must have been around '68 or '69 when I had my first show.
GJP: Did the work have pretty much the look it has now?
ESTES: Pretty much. I had things like this picture here with wrecked cars
which probably struck their pop fancy.
GJP: But your work isn't really "Pop" at all. It doesn't have the superficial feel
of pop art. However, there was a sort of school developing at that time. Did
you identify with the other Photo-Realists?
ESTES: I didn't know any of the Photo-Realists. It's funny, but a lot of people
sort of developed it independently..
GJP: What about your Telephone Booths painting. When did you do that?
ESTES: That was one of the very first, I think I did that about 1968. Allan
Stone sold it. Some investment banker bought it first, with four or five
paintings from that show, but when there was a stock market crash a couple
of years later and he sold all my works. They sort of saved his neck. Then
Allan sold it to Thyssen [referring to the late Baron Hans Heinrich ThyssenBornemisza, one of the greatest collectors of Western Art of the 20th
Century], he was a friend of his, and told him, "buy this", so he did.
Estes remained with Allan Stone until about 1990 because "Allan had
basically closed his gallery. He had a fight with the Landlord, just moved out
and didn't find another space for about three years. So that's when I went to
Marlborough." Estes remains there to this day.
GJP: How do you find the subject matter for your pieces?
ESTES: I just wander around and look at things and take a lot of pictures,
then if something strikes me and I think it's interesting . . ..
GJP: When did you start figuring reflective surfaces into your images?
ESTES: Right away. At this certain point when I did those telephone booths. I
went through a phase of going and sitting in cafeterias and drawing and going
out and doing drawing,but I knew from all my work in advertising that the
illustrators all use photographs, and I said "Why am I doing all this? It's
masochistic" It just makes it more difficult, not necessarily any better. The
photographs are what makes it possible to do all these things with reflections
and things that are just there for a moment when the light hits. It seemed a
little absurd to get an easel sitting in the street, with the wind blowing and
people stopping you to ask stupid questions. And I didn't really want to do
things just out of my mind; make up things. . . Whatever I would make up just
turned out trite.
GJP: Did you ever dally with pure abstraction?
ESTES: Not really. I think abstraction is just another part of painting. You
always have to have that quality, but it's just one element of the painting. Pure
abstraction is like having a lot of sound without any melody.
GJP: Mondrian doesn't appeal to you?
ESTES: Not really. Jackson Pollack is really quite pitiful. I mean, only the 20th
Century could come up with something like that.
GJP: Who are some other painters whom you admire? How about some
historical figures; have you any particular favorites, or people whom you think
about when you're painting?
ESTES: Actually I like Canaletto and Bellotto a lot, people like that. You name
it. That's like asking a musician whether he likes Beethoven and Wagner, and
whatever, they're the classic ones. So it's kind of silly to ask whether you like
Michelangelo and Goya. . . .
That Richard is an admirer and follower, in a way, of Canaletto and Belotto is
abundantly clear if one looks at a number of paintings he's retained in his own
collection. Hung in his dining room is my very favorite painting of his, a view of
the Arno in contemporary Florence, with the Ponte Vecchio in the
background. A few figures in contemporary dress indicate the period. Unlike
the earlier Telephone Booths which is downright jazzy in comparison, it
captures the same serenity and majesty of the above named Old Masters,
without introducing any artifice or romance. The marvel of Estes greatest
works is that they purport to record an empirical scene, but also hint of Godgiven orderliness and a enigmatic tranquility.
ESTES: (Continues) I think I like Eakins, he is what I like.
GJP: Were you aware when you started to work openly with photography that
Eakins had used it?
ESTES: I always knew Eakins used photography. He was rather famous for
that. Remember his association with Muybridge, for example, who did the
motion photographs. Now they've recently discovered Eakins used
photography a lot more than we thought, but it comes as no great surprise.
Degas used photography a lot, Manet. . . Soon as it was invented they started
using it. And Hockney says they always had these instruments for tracing
images. There's no way that way Bellotto or Canaletto could have done those
paintings without the camera lucida because they're too accurate. It's not a
matter of just approximating what everything looks like, it's quite nailed down,
down to how many windows you can see in the tower and things like that.
Once I went to Venice and I had a book of Canaletto's paintings and you can
find the sites and you can go there and see how accurate they are because a
lot of it is still there.
GJP: When you were in school did you feel a stigma if you were to use a
photo?
ESTES: Well I never did in school, only after I got out of school and started
working in advertising, then I started using photographs.
GJP: Do you remember any of the products you illustrated?
ESTES: Mostly I specialized in industrial advertising. We did power plants or
tires . . . Nothing glamorous, although we did do some annual reports for
corporations like IBM, things like that.
GJP: Were you freelancing all that time?
ESTES: I had periods when I worked for different studios. I worked for about a
year for Popular Science Magazine. Freelanced more after that.
That left him time to do his painting.
GJP: Whom do you admire working today?
Richard declines to discuss individuals (and this is a shame, really, because
his put-downs of artists he believes can't paint can be hilarious).
ESTES: I think there are some really good realist painters but they don't get
any recognition from the press. And yet they'll write these long articles in the
New Yorker and the Times about really dreadful stuff and they don't pay any
attention to Realism. It's sort of an ideology that's taken over the press. It's
like the old Communists. They just don't talk about anything they don't agree
with.
We take a little tour of the room Richard uses as his studio overlooking
Central Park; an expanse twice the size of my own apartment. (His main
residence is a very large house in Maine where his studio appears to have
been converted from a ballroom.) All is spotless. Perched on an industrial
sized easel, at the top of which are clipped an array of tiny halogen lamps, is
his current opus, a study of Broadway, facing south just below Lincoln Center.
Among the faint reflections in a storefront window under a scaffold is that of a
large American flag. Richard has a formidable collection of artworks here and
throughout the apartment which is decorated with Art Deco overtones. In
Manhattan the collection includes works by Arshile Gorky, Jean Cocteau,
Joseph Stella, Marsden Hartley and the exciting young Brooklyn artist Andrew
Lenaghan (whose work his highly influenced by Estes and his followers) on
loan from the George Adams Gallery.
Several weeks after our interview I am off to Madrid to see the Thyssen
collection. Baron Thyssen has passed away, and I'm told there is black
bunting surrounding the entrance to the museum. Finally, after thirty years I
will get to see the famous Telephone Booths. I see the entire museum from
top to bottom, dazzled by the collection, dazed in a fog of jetlag. Then I spot
the Telephone Booths in a framed poster in the museum shop. Somehow I
missed the actual painting. I go back and make inquiries of an official who
informs me that it's kept on the patio, currently under renovation. Telephone
Booths is out of public view. Maybe I'll see it in another thirty years!
The portraits of Richard Estes accompanying this article were drawn at Estes'
Maine residence on August 9, 2002 by Boston artist Damon Lehrer.