Richard Estes

Richard Estes (b.1932) is one of America's leading photorealist painters. This new large-format book will cover fifty-five years of Estes's work, from 1950 to 2005, and will include paintings, watercolors, and preparatory sketches. Estes is regarded as one of the most important painters of the New York urban landscape. The crisp clarity of Estes's paintings is reminiscent of photography, yet upon closer inspection his work reveals elements and perspectives that do not exist in reality and have more to do with minimalism and realism than with traditional landscape painting. The book will also include his work of the last ten years, much of which will be published here for the first time. A detailed chronology and list of exhibitions and public collections are included.

Library Journal

Photorealism was an anomalous moment in the postwar American art of the 1970s: just when artists were moving away from the easel and experimenting with dematerialization and deskilling, along came a group of painters whose meticulously worked canvases could almost pass as photographs. Among these, Richard Estes is best known for his urban scenes of New York and Chicago. In this handsome new catalog, which coincided with a recent New York exhibition and marks the most comprehensive coverage of the artist's work to date, his paintings (depicted in 200 color illustrations) pop off the page with their realistic effects. Despite some later, unexpected nature paintings, Estes's formula has changed little over the decades. The best paintings are still those that play with reflections and surfaces of commodity culture-whether a new car or shop window-or depict some interstitial space, like an empty subway car passing over a bridge. Art historian and curator Wilmerding (Princeton Univ.) paints a thorough portrait of Estes's career that falls back on the artist's own opinions and trademark banal delivery. Recommended for larger art libraries or private collections.-Prudence Peiffer, Cambridge, MA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

John Wilmerding is the Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton University and visiting Curator in the Department of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.