Getty Images, Fairgoers ponder a painting by Chuck Close at Art Basel Miami Beach December 2008.
Are you looking at me? I’m the only one here. So I painted myself.
In full swing by the late 1960s, the epicenter of the contemporary art world had shifted to New York. The field was crowded with movements of all stripes—Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual, Photo-realism, Earthwork, Light and Space, Color Field, and so on. How could an artist stand apart intellectually and visually in such heavy traffic?
Along comes Chuck Close. His first solo show at the Bykert Gallery in 1970 stunned the New York scene. It took barely a half a dozen huge black and white paintings—massive mug shots, his own included, in unsparingly hyper-realistic detail. These giant pictures depicted single, straight-ahead portraits of Close and friends, each enlarged from a snapshot to fill a 9 by 7-foot canvas. Rendered in painstaking detail in black paint on a white ground yet no visible brushstroke, these paintings surrendered no emotional clue to their apparent subjects. All that was visible was their likeness, their hair, their pockmarks, their pores, their wrinkles, and the pallor of their skin. Despite all this excruciating minutiae, the unique combination of lines and crevices on each face offer little more than a roadmap to the sitter’s age. Why? Their persona had nothing to do with the subject. Instead, Close focused on the process and structure of making a painting. He not only chose to eliminate emotion from his sitter’s face, Close also removed any evidence of his paint-strokes. But why the disappearing act?
Maybe he wasn’t so different from his New York art-world brethren when his work first drew serious attention in 1970. A decade before, Jasper Johns and the Pop artists had dispensed with illusion in painting. By the late 1960s, the Minimalists had done the same for sculpture and, in the extreme, erased any evidence of expression or the artist’s hand. Top billing for this trend, of course, belonged to Andy Warhol, who pointedly employed others to make his paintings. With his freshly minted MFA around the same time, Close started out like other artists by emulating the Post-War era’s reigning master of bold brushwork, New York Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. Rather than reject or rebel against this dependence on thick, expressive strokes of paint, Close abandoned any sign of the brush and used as little paint as possible.
He found that a little black paint could go a long way if airbrushed on a white ground on canvas. Consciously or not, he may have borrowed an influence or two from de Kooning’s early black and white paintings and drawings. Short on cash in the early Post-War years, de Kooning depended on the economy of black and white house paint. At the same time, Jackson Pollock’s flings with house paint gave the medium new meaning.
Or, Close could have looked to another influence from one rebellious yet prescient act by the notorious Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased De Kooning Drawing” (1953). Coincidentally, Rauschenberg had dabbled in solid white paintings and solid black paintings back in 1951-52. Ellsworth Kelly soon followed, exhibiting even greater economy. One wonders if movements like Minimalism and Conceptual Art weren’t just born out of lean times.
Economic necessity aside, black and white have long shared prominent roles in photography. Back in the 1960s when Kodak Instamatic cameras were introducing the joys of color photography to the masses, black and white snapshots retained the power to strip subjects bare of emotion. The standard police-work mug shot excelled at detachment. Both Warhol and Close recognized this. Warhol, however, also delighted in death and disaster photojournalism. Close preferred the paradox he found in portraits—the unsmiling stranger or close friend. It’s not surprising that thirty years later, he would add black and white photography as a formal art form rather than just a stepping-stone to his oeuvre. Executed in 1999, his daguerreotypes explore the same theme of the human face dominating the foreground of his pictures in unforgiving detail. The antique daguerreotype process wrought anew, yet with Close at the helm, still rigorous and central to his art.
No stranger to technology as technique, Chuck Close went digital long before computer imaging was commercially available to the average consumer. Granted, he did it by hand. Like the fresco painters of the Renaissance, he employed a grid to break down and enlarge his images. Close used each square in his grids like digitized pixels to construct his paintings in varying degrees of detail from small grids, employing a minimal number of squares where the image barely comes into focus, to his huge early portraits in hyper-detail. Until the 20th Century, artists for the most part treated the grid merely as a tool to enlarge images. The Cubists, Mondrian, and others would eventually co-opt the grid making it an innovative and prevalent theme throughout the course of Modern Art. Close grasped both the grid’s utility and its aesthetic possibility.
While many of the faces, his own included, in his paintings belong to his same friends, albeit older, Close keeps pushing the grid in search of different ways to construct his images. In recent years, Close has filled the squares in his grids with strokes, shapes, and a multitude of colors naked to the eye, revealing an intuitive perhaps arbitrary layer in his process of making art, hence at the risk of exposing a little of himself. Still drawn from photographs, his larger paintings are as arresting as ever and more vibrant. Up close, they may even betray his friends a bit with his affectionate outbursts of color. Yet from afar as these amazing faces sharpen into recognition, his process remains resolutely the point.
Switch to grayscale or black ink on your printer. Or turn it off all together. Art still comes out.
-toa
