Richard Estes -
D-Train
American, b.1936
D-Train, 1988
Screenprint, 36 x 72
Edition 111/125
Parasol Press, Ltd.
00.013
Gift of Thomas S. Porter (MBA '67)
Estes is a Photo-Realist, a distinction he shares with another major American artist, Chuck Close, also represented in the Business School collection.
Known for his detailed scrutiny of urban scenes, Estes here makes us feel immediately present in a subway train that speeds across a bridge to lower Manhattan. The "photographic" image comes to us as through the viewfinder of a camera. Vistas seem additionally framed by windows, the support beams of the bridge outside, and by the stainless steel poles of the subway car. The large window to the left presents a self-contained landscape that includes the adjacent Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Towers and Woolworth Building that loom in the distance. With the scene devoid of any human presence, Estes rivets our attention on the act of seeing and on various competing realities registered by eye and mind: inside/outside, daylight/artifical light, movement/stillness, actual/reflected. What seems "photographically" straightforward is optically complex. The ordinary becomes mysterious.
