Artist/Maker Richard Estes (American, b. 1932)

Subway

1980

Acrylic and oil on canvas board

Unframed: 14 × 20 in. (35.6 × 50.8 cm)
Framed: 18 1/4 × 24 1/4 in. (46.4 × 61.6 cm)

Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City

IL2021.51.109

Richard Estes is one of the founding figures of American Photorealism. Like Ron Kleeman, Audrey Flack, Chuck Close, and Ralph Goings, he abandoned the subjective concerns and gestural techniques of Abstract Expressionism and the cool reductivism of Minimalism and Conceptualism, movements dominating mid-twentieth-century art. Instead, in the seventies, Estes and his colleagues created a fecund style using diverse idioms from two sources—Pop Art, with its antecedents in American Scene painting, and photography, then gaining recognition as an independent, museum-worthy medium. Their controlled and hard-edged realism described subjects of popular postwar life in New York with detailed sharp focus, convincing unified lighting, and often casual compositions resembling snapshots taken with Kodaks and color film. This composite art form pushed the boundaries of representational painting. Subway exemplifies Estes’s Photorealism. An uptown train pauses at a subway platform on its way to the 207th Street Station at the end of the line in northern Manhattan. The artist replicates with precision the effects of light on multiple surfaces: the glare of the train’s fluorescent strip lights reflected in its windows and on the corrugated ceiling of the station, and the undulating reflections on the train’s stainless steel-paneled exterior. These reflections turn the panels into abstractions. In fact, the two panels can be read as abstract paintings within the painting, both parallel with the picture plane—as if Estes insists that his work transcends the camera’s mechanical reproduction. Estes’s work remains, indeed, resolutely a painting. The artist warns against viewing his art in reproduction because the process dulls perception of the materials and facture that evidence its painted quality: the reproduced images read as photographs, not as the meticulously rendered realistic paintings they are. His compositions often combine multiple perspectives based on separate photographs of the same subject, with the goal of compositional unity. And they often appear overly ordered and largely empty of human beings. Subway includes only two people, spaced far apart inside the train, their faces concealed. Estes alludes to the millions of other commuters who fill the New York City subways, but only through the traces they leave behind—the stained floors, scuffed doors, worn seats, and graffiti tags. The ghostly echoes of human presence invite reflection on the ebb and flow of city life and the absences felt even within New York’s packed urban environment. The painting is the source in one-to-one scale for a limited-edition silkscreen print; it is one of eight views in the portfolio Urban Landscapes III. Alongside images of a bus interior, airport tarmac, and shopping mall arcade, among others, Subway demonstrates the acute attention to the everyday that distinguishes Estes as one of the most commanding painters of the contemporary urban landscape.

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