Richard Estes

Ansonia
1977

A hyperrealistic painting depicting an urban street scene with a focus on a corner building's entrance. The foreground shows a planter with greenery, and the background features a mix of modern and older buildings under a clear blue sky. Street signs, a pedestrian, and a van are visible, contributing to the city atmosphere. The painting's perspective is from the sidewalk, looking across the street, with a torn poster on the right edge adding a touch of urban decay.

Not on view

Date
1977

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on linen

Dimensions
Overall: 48 1/8 × 60in. (122.2 × 152.4 cm)

Accession number
77.33

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Frances and Sydney Lewis

API
artworks/663

This painting depicts one of Richard Estes’ favorite landmarks, the Beaux Arts Ansonia building near his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, here seen from about West 69th Street and Broadway looking north. The extraordinary detail and precision of the painting has led many to mistake it at first glance for a color photograph. Yet unlike a camera or the human eye, Ansonia depicts every detail in precise focus. And while the stone column functions as an axis on which the two sides of the painting hinge, creating a rough symmetry, Estes throws the composition off balance by taking small pictorial liberties that are revealed in the reflection of the glass window. The Ansonia is absent in the reflection, a Visa card sticker obscures the McDonald’s, and the colors have become slightly warmer. With the exception of a single figure, mostly obscured by shrubbery and a bus that seems stopped indefinitely at a red light, the painting includes very few signs of life—a near impossibility in daytime Manhattan.

Richard Estes
5 works in the collection

View artist

Richard Estes

Ansonia 1977

Richard Estes 5 works in the collection

Ansonia
1977

Richard Estes
5 works in the collection