Organized by Jake Palmert and Nolan Simon
June 23 to July 29, 2016
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 463 8634

Art dealer Jake Palmert and painter Nolan Simon, both from a thriving Midwest art scene, have put together a group show this July that is worth a stroll over to Marlborough Chelsea. Called simply “Landscapes,” its uncomplicated title implies, misleadingly as it turns out, a conventional look at a conventional genre.

The key sentence in a densely formulated curatorial statement doubling as a press release explains how they sought to “…tease out the developments in visual culture that have so fundamentally realigned relations between the artist and the art work, art’s content to its audience, and the art-world to society at large.” Despite the somewhat muddled argument that follows this sweeping outline, Palmert and Simon’s choices for the exhibition were certainly adventurous, offering juxtapositions highlighting the many intriguing dilemmas facing those concerned not just with landscape, but with any basic genre’s survivability in a whirlpool of media-soaked contemporary art.

The theme I gathered from the selection was how much and how permanent are the changes to the landscape genre that are hinted at in the show. What effect can radical change have on a genre that has been both flexible and consistent for several centuries? For instance, a stark and cold vision of the Himalayas called View of Nepal (2010), by photo-realist founding father Richard Estes, hangs next to a pair of untitled and clearly kitschy forest scenes that Ull Hohn created in the 1990s as an overtly ironic take on the Bob Ross painting method. Placing Hohn’s jarring cultural critique beside Estes’s subtle dissociation from traditional realism reinvigorates an early judgment that Estes was primarily concerned with the media properties of the photographic image.

Palmert and Simon characterize this aspect of Estes’s work as “National Geographic.” But does their media metaphor explain Estes’s only motivation? It’s worth noting that Estes’s recent canvases remain unpopulated, carrying over a feature of his work that dates back to his often depopulated views of upper Broadway in the late 1960s. Could it be that his figureless sensibility, which has deep roots in 19^th century American landscape painting, led him to the naturally barren landscapes at the Earth’s poles? And if so, is this not a development one might associate with a conventional landscape approach, seeking views to match a sensibility?

How often such questions arise in “Landscapes” is a function of the curators’ having admirably avoided the easier path of choosing exclusively from artists dedicated to painting’s realignment (their term, not mine) and wisely including less radical examples of the genre. Rackstraw Downes’s Presidio: In the Sand Hills Looking West with ATV Tracks & Cell Tower (2012) fits the show’s thesis to the extent that it is a view of a somewhat industrialized location. However, the expansive and near greedy absorption of a site that has long been Downes’s métier, is also one of the older and more sustaining tropes of landscape painting. It is no surprise to me that his feeling for landscape as open space is unmatched in this show.

The conceptual touchstone of the exhibition is Simon’s own work, of which there are three examples around the gallery. They range from blatantly illustrative of the idea of a “…discourse on truth as a distorted image of itself,” as in Unisex Medium (2016), to New Location (2016) where Simon is at his best, offering an interior looking out onto a courtyard with the upper windows revealing a partial view of the walls surrounding the space, while the lower windows replace the courtyard with a shepherd and a flock of sheep surrounded by green mountains. Why he chose May in Mount Carmel, Texas (2016) as his third entry is difficult to assess. It is as unpretentious a landscape as one can imagine, though its unadventurous color and brush handling exemplify Simon’s stated determination to keep the viewer’s focus on idea over execution.

A few notable inclusions seem, with respect to the exhibition’s thesis, neutral at best. An aptly seasonal watercolor called Summer (1913) lets John Marin hold the line on landscape as a concentrated study of nature; John Miller’s Untitled (1984) Fauvist inspired waterfall is both lively and benignly distant from its subject; and FLAME’s beach scene is vaguely Picasso-like acrobats (or perhaps Dali-like self-immolating hulks). All three strive to complete the landscape context that serves as a counterpoint to the more radical entries. FLAME, possibly a reference to the high-end video editing program of the same name, serves here as a moniker for a collaboration between multi-media artists Taslima Ahmed and Manuel Gnam, whose computer graphic vision, though technically exotic, maintains a conventional sense of space.

I read Sylvia Pilmack Mangold’s Untitled (yellow painting) (1977) as a provisional work that ended up in a strange place. Cropped with masking tape, perhaps as an adjustment to a reconsideration of its original idea, the outer canvas received several shades of yellow before the artist either gave up on it or found its unfinished look appealing. The latter is more likely, as Mangold actually completed a series of similar canvases in the mid-1970s.

Alex Katz’s North 2 (2015) could be construed as a view from the artist’s studio. It has that sense of the rediscovery of an overly familiar sight. With its blank wall punctured by windows, uniform in appearance but for one, it echoes the sunlit cheerlessness of Edward Hopper’s city views. Moreover, hinting at the poetry of old age — looking to the cold north (could Estes be doing the same thing?) — it brings a poignant human vulnerability to the show’s otherwise cerebral orientation.

Paintings by several artists in the show suffer from not having enough examples available to provide more than a glimpse of each artist’s unique conceptual framework. Assuming these frameworks were the essential element for their inclusion in the show, their sparse representation inadvertently pointed to the weakness of their individual pieces. These include Keith Mayerson, Paul Thek and Mary Ann Aitken. In contemplating Aitken’s painterly riffs on billboards, Thek’s watercolors, and Mayerson’s Grand Canyon (2016), it became obvious that each needed a fuller representation of their self-defined contexts.

John Kelsey’s four watercolors are focused on landscapes surrounding politically charged institutional buildings, including an Apple Data Center in North Carolina, an NSA building in Utah, the VMWare Data Center in Washington State, and an unidentified Google facility. As a side note, Google’s undisclosed location infers that Kelsey feels Google to be most ubiquitously threating of the lot — a consistent position considering the show’s focus on media imagery. As watercolors they are nothing special, but the artist’s allegiance to disaffection, expressed in his mounting and framing each piece on a cool aluminum sheet, comes through loud and clear.

Mathew Cerletty’s Almost Done (2015), a witty rendering of a lawn mower’s progress across a carpet-smooth hillside, makes for quite a contrast to Jeanette Mundt’s Heroin: Cape Cod, USA paintings, made this year. Underscoring a grim subject — the paintings were inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name — each canvas offers a somber bluish New England landscape, some with narrow strokes of white scattered across the surface in a manner similar to Van Gogh’s attempts at painting rain. In an exhibition bent on addressing painting and media imagery, Mundt’s landscapes are a perfect fit. How they address the disturbing subject of drug addiction is less clear.

Marring an otherwise thoughtful selection is the seemingly transparent decision to include a work by radical feminist Betty Tompkins. Though an argument can be made for a nude in a landscape context — Titian, Giorgione, Joan Semmel, Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) — Tompkins’s uncompromising Cunt Painting #9 (2008) is fiercely feminist, and in this exhibition shows just how stubbornly her work resists attempts to transpose its intensity to a disinterested environment.

Considering that the exhibition was limited for the most part to Marlborough’s holdings, I thought the show managed to address its subject broadly and with imagination. Painting’s current struggles with a welcome rebirth of subject matter is the story of the decade, and how this story unfolds, specifically how the merging of media imagery with fundamental genres like landscape resolves itself, will likely remain the heart of the narrative.

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Blockbuster exhibitions can be extremely small. When recently the Frick presented the London Cimabue alongside its Manhattan mate, in the small room next to the bookstore, a revelatory visual relationship was displayed. Emulating that American practice, this vast German museum, which usually displays only old master paintings, showed within one tiny gallery just three pictures, two small Giottos and one Rothko, all from Berlin collections. Between Giotto’s Crucifixion on the left and his Death of the Virgin Mary on the right, was Rothko’s No. 5 (Reds), in a marvelous intimate setting. In The Artist’s Reality written in 1940, Rothko described Giotto as the master of plastic-tactile art. A phase from that book is quoted on the wall at the entry to this exhibition: “It is Giotto’s color . . . that produced the great effect of tactility.” Rothko was interested in how, without using perspective, Giotto could create pictorial space. And he was fascinated with Giotto’s capacity to present tragedy, which was the goal, also, of his own classical abstractions. He wanted that his pictures have the same intimate relationship to spectators as the paintings of Fra Angelica, another early Renaissance figure he admired, as found in the monk’s cells at San Marco, Florence.

As the thick catalogue notes, there is a long critical tradition relating Rothko’s art to sacred European painting.  Building upon, and criticizing this literature, the catalogue contains nine essays on Rothko’s ways of thinking about spirituality, Giotto’s iconography, and, also, the story of how the director of the National Gallery in Berlin came to purchase this Rothko. What light does all of this interesting information share on our visual experience? I grant that this juxtaposition allows us to sharpen our attention to the fabrics represented in the Giottos. But Rothko never saw these paintings. Following Greenberg, very many commentators have sought to link Abstract Expressionism to old master tradition. And emulating Rothko, numerous art writers have related his abstractions to sacred European painting.  Turning from the catalogue to this display reveals the basic problem inherent in such comparisons. No. 5 (Reds) looks different from these Giottos. That Giotto fascinated Rothko does not show that viewing his pictures had any influence on his own art.   The catalogue drives some exhibitions. Its catalogue sank this one.

After minimalism and pop art came photorealism. Prominently featured in Documenta 5 (1972), this art form provided German collectors with their image of America.  But while the best minimalists and pop artists established their credentials, most of the photorealists had less satisfying careers. Chuck Close went on to become famous, though with portraits somewhat different from those here on display. Richard Estes, who deserves to be revived, continues to make magnificent pictures. Wonderfully successful in Nedick’s (1970), he falls into banality in The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, Summer, 1979 (1979) when he makes no use of the reflections that give life to his representations of urban architecture. Recently Robert Bechtle has had a major retrospective. But Tom Blackwell, Charles Bell, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Audrey Flack (the one female photorealist), Ralph Goings, Ron Kleemann , Richard McLean,  John Salt, and Ben Schonzeit, who are interesting minor artists, have effectively disappeared.

Deutsche Guggenheim generously allows us to reflect on this recent history. Readers of Charles Baudelaire’s greatest essay “The painting of modern life,” and the now famous account of Impressionism by his Marxist academic champion, T. J. Clark, can understand why these paintings attracted  attention. When the photorealists show contemporary subjects—depicting automobiles, family scenes, motorcycles, public advertising, storefronts and the other apparatus of everyday life– are they not doing what Baudelaire’s hero, Constantin Guys, wanted an artist to do?  They present the pleasurable beauty of contemporary life. But whether because they inspired no distinguished theorizing; or because these paintings are fatally close to their photographic sources; or simply because in the 1980s the American art world moved on: in any event, these artists have not established their place within the postmodernist canon.  Perhaps the problem is that photorealism was too neutral, too little involved in political critique. In the wings of this show one can envisage Jeff Wall, whose altogether more aggressive take on our culture turned out to be the wave of the future. Unlike him, these photorealists merely show what they see. There is one masterpiece in exhibition, Malcolm Morley’s Open Golf Championship (National Open) (1968),  a picture that shows that even a sports event can inspire a painter.  It deserves comparison with Adolf Menzel’s pictures found nearby in the Altes Museum. But in this mean-spirited hanging, which is much too tight, this great painting lacks breathing room. (And in the catalogue, I could hardly believe my eyes,  Morley’s image is bled across the centerfold.) Having assembled this magnificently revealing exhibition, the Guggenheim failed to carry through.

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I wanted to convince my friend, the photorealist 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 Photorealism. 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 Photorealists?

ESTES: I didn’t know any of the Photorealists. 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 Thyssen-Bornemisza, 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 Pollock 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 God-given 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!

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