“Phil” (1969) by Chuck Close (b. 1940)

MICHAEL SALCMANserved as chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. As art critic and neuroscientist he writes and lectures on art and the brain; see him on The Knowledge Network of The New York Times. As a poet his work appears widely: Alaska uarterly Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, Raritan, and New York Quarterly; collections include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises, 2007), nominated for The Poets1 Prize and a finalist for The Towson University Prize in Literature, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011).The human face is the most expressive mechanism for meta-communication in our environment; we read the face for recognition and understanding, in joy and sadness, in the home and in the theater stall. That which is said or thought is not believed unless the speaker's face registers a congruent emotion. We decorate our faces to emphasize fierceness in war and attractiveness in love. By analyzing subtle structural similarities in familiar faces, we recognize children and grand children and certify membership in our kinship or tribe. Little wonder that the artistic portrayal of faces is one of the oldest forms of art making. From ancient Greece and China to the Renaissance in Italy and down to the present day, portraiture has been a sub-genre of painting and sculpture. Portraits of rulers and gods in stone, metal, plaster and crystal in ancient Egypt were highly stylized profiles; unique personality and facial features first appeared during the reign of Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE. The 3300-year-old painted limestone Bust of Nefertiti (c. 1345 BCE) in Berlin's Neues Museum is one of the most famous examples. From ancient Greece, similarly realistic sculpted heads and coins of leading rulers and personalities survive, including representations of Alexander the Great and Socrates. According to literary evidence, the lost paintings of Greece possessed a similar verisimilitude. The Chinese portrait tradition goes back at least a thousand years BCE but the oldest surviving paintings, such as the Court Portrait of Emperor Shenzong of Song (c. 1067-1085, National Palace Museum, Taipei) come from about 1000 CE. Many Roman portrait busts survive but paintings from that period are rare, except for a few frescos and the marvelous full-face portraits used as funeral panels in the Fayum district of Egypt (2nd to 4th century CE). The first major decline in accurate portraiture occurred during the Middle Ages when realistic likenesses of religious donors and rulers became relatively uncommon. Notable exceptions include the early self-portrait by history's first great composer, the mystic polymath Hildegard of Bingen (1152) and the secular portrait of Charles IV by Master Theodoric in Prague (c. 1360-1380). The great turning point in the history of the portrait occurred during the Renaissance, both in Italy and in the North, when artists rediscovered the art of ancient cultures and attention turned to secular, humanistic subjects such as the human body. Change in philosophic and societal norms was accompanied by a variety of technical advances including anatomical dissection, the perfection of single-point perspective and the invention of oil-based paint. Willem de Kooning, the American Abstract Expressionist, famously said that oil paint was invented for the depiction of flesh. In fact, the reputed inventor of oil painting, Jan van Eyck (c. 1395-1445), was himself a great portraitist. Van Eyck's pioneering work was deepened and enlarged by virtually every important artist who followed him: in the North by Cranach, Durer and Holbein, in the South by Leonardo, Raphael and Titian. For the first time it was possible to form some estimate of the character of a person by studying their portrait. The world's most famous painting, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, is a portrait, Las Meninas by Velázquez is a group portrait and fully 10% of Rembrandt's paintings are self-portraits. From the Baroque and Rococo (van Dyck, Rubens, Velázquez), to English and American painters of the 18th century (Gainsborough, Reynolds, Copley, Stuart), and the Neo-Classical, Romantic and Realist artists of the 19th century (David, Ingres, Goya, Delacroix, Courbet) portraiture has thrived. The Philadelphian Thomas Eakins ranks among the greatest portrait artists since Rembrandt; surgeons and scientists are the subjects of many of his finest works.1 John Singer Sargent and Whistler were also exceptional portrait painters. Among the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Manet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne were expert and enthusiastic portraitists, often picturing one another. Vincent van Gogh, a sensitive Dutchman like Rembrandt before him, similarly devoted 10% of his paintings to self-portraits documenting every stage of his life. Although the development of photography in the early 19th century sharply reduced the need for painted likenesses, both Eakins and Degas were enthusiastic about the new medium and used it to help shape and inform their paintings. In the 20th century, photography freed painting from a strictly reproductive function and important painted portraits incorporated distortions of color and structure for emotional or philosophical purposes. This was true of the Fauves (Matisse, Derain), the Cubists (Picasso, Gris), the German Expressionists (Otto Dix, Max Beckmann) and the artists who moved in Dada or Surrealist circles (Miró, Max Ernst and Picabia). With the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, portraiture by major artists dropped off for the first time since the Middle Ages. Their art and that of the Minimalists was so anti-realist that no portraits were thought possible. In the 1960s, only the Pop artists, primarily Andy Warhol and Jim Dine, created a substantial number of drawings and paintings devoted to the human face. The few artists who continued to paint recognizable portraits, like the realists Alice Neal, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein, were considered “old fashioned” and marginalized by critics and art historians. Despite the work of Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud in London, it did not seem that a type of contemporary portraiture could be built on the same conceptual principles as Minimalism and Post-Minimalism.CHUCK CLOSE, b. 1940, Phil, 1969.Synthetic polymer on canvas, 108 1/4 x 84 x 2 3/4in. (275 × 213.4 × 7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Mrs. Robert M. Benjamin 69.102. © Chuck Close, courtesy The Pace Gallery. Photo by: Ellen Page Wilson/Courtesy The Pace Gallery.Into this void stepped Chuck Close (b. 1940), a member of the most distinguished graduate class in the history of any American art school. Charles Thomas Close was born in Monroe Washington and studied at the University of Washington in Seattle (1962) before obtaining his M.F.A. at Yale (1964). His friends in New Haven included 2 of the most significant Minimalist painters, Robert Mangold and Brice Marden, and a classmate, Richard Serra, arguably the most important Post-Minimalist sculptor. Surrounded by budding conceptualists and minimalists, Close was known for his brushwork and described himself at that time as a “junior” abstract expressionist. In 1966 he abandoned expressionism and started painting from photographs. Given his educational background the decision to become a portrait painter must have seemed perverse. After living in Europe and teaching in Massachusetts, he made the choice, in 1967, to make things even harder for himself by renouncing his facility with the paintbrush and forcing an artistic breakthrough. As Close later said, “I threw away my tools, I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before.”2 At first, Close was considered a conventional photo-realist and his work was linked to that of painters like Richard Estes or Audrey Flack, artists who projected photographs onto the canvas and who, with meticulous technique, turned their paintings into believable simulacra of the original transparencies. The comparison of his work with theirs was easily made but facile and superficial. Close did not project slides but used a modular grid, did not use color but painted in black and white, did not use brushes but a spray gun and, in order to counter the machine-like impersonality of the process, restricted himself to monumental portraits. The subject matter of the other “photo-realists” was almost always limited to inanimate objects: shiny cosmetic cases on a vanity (Audrey Flack), automobiles (Ralph Goings), reflective storefronts (Richard Estes), pinball machines (Charles Bell) and street signs (Robert Cottingham). Moreover, Close, in giving up his paintbrushes and thick luxurious paint, became a serious photographer who preferred shooting his friends with a large-format camera and black and white film. In recent years he has even started making Daguerreotypes. Close began his first paintings by tightly gridding a normal-sized photograph he had taken and then gridding a similarly sectioned (enormous) canvas in a ratio of 1 to 10. By graphing the photo and the canvas in strict proportion to one another he was ready to transfer all of the information contained in the photographic image to the ¼” squares of the painting. In this laborious cellular method, Close did not project his photograph on the canvas. The process was so accurate that he could tape off all of the adjacent cells on the canvas and do one at a time; it would still come out perfectly. The canvas might contain 1000 squares but Close would need only a few drops of paint and several months to create the transfer. Each cell within the grid received a spray of paint in a single average tonal value (ie, from black or very dark through grays or whites) that matched the one found in the corresponding cell of the gridded photograph. The technique echoed the dot screen matrix used by industrial printers to achieve tonal variations. Further manipulations of the paint by airbrush, rags, a razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill were carried out until a perfect match was achieved. His first picture using this method was Big Self-Portrait (1968, Walker Art Center), 107.5 inches tall and 83.5 inches wide; it took him over 4 months to make and it is one of the least ingratiating self-portraits in the history of art. The 9-foot tall head of Chuck Close stares out at us through giant glasses, uncombed and unshaved, a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, every pore and imperfection of his face intensely magnified. Thereafter, the inexpressive faces of his friends and himself, warts and all, blown up to gargantuan size, always seen from dead ahead (no profiles allowed) would comprise the sole subjects of his art! Within that narrow frame, Close has carried out an extraordinary exploration. Close had discovered an almost purely mechanical or machine-like way of creating a portrait. Except for the identity of his sitter, virtually every subsequent artistic decision was predetermined: the image taken from a gridded photograph, the modular method of applying the paint with an airbrush, the lack of color (en grisaille), the size and shape of the canvas (9-by-7 feet, vertical), the head, face and shoulders as sole subject, and the orientation of the sitter (face forward) were all part of a standardized process. Individual brushstrokes, ie, autographic evidence of the artist's hand, could not be seen and the surface of the painting was as flat as the surface of the source photograph. The use of arbitrary and repetitive rules completely divorced Close from the preceding generation of Abstract Expressionists and aligned him with the conceptual and minimal artists of his own time. Indeed, his mechanical way of working with the grid, a repetitive and identical form like the cube, recalls one of the fundamental organizing principles of Minimalism. As I have discussed elsewhere, the grid has been used as a tool to transfer pictures from small drawings to large surfaces since Renaissance times but only in the modern period did the grid itself become the subject of a painting or the shape of an object.3 Sol LeWitt's cellular structures and early drawings consisted entirely of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional grids.4 Given the mathematical organizing principles of geometric shape and repetition, Judd's objects and LeWitt's structures could be fabricated from simple drawings or even written instructions supplied by the artist to workmen in a distant factory; the artist's hand was not necessary for realization of the object. For this reason, Conceptual art became a natural outgrowth of Minimalism and LeWitt famous for saying “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” For Close, the grid is both the painting's plan and the method by which he transfers spots of paint to the canvas, the artist working almost like an ink-jet printer, not to directly enlarge the image but to imitate the source photograph. In his first black and white paintings Close obscured the presence of the underlying grid; as his art matured, the grid became physically evident in the painted image. Given his mechanical way of working and the absence of visible brushstrokes, the early paintings of Close could, in theory, have been made by sending a photograph to a printer who would lithograph or silkscreen the image onto the canvas; in point of fact, the paintings derive some of their considerable power from our knowledge that a machine did not make these large, immaculate objects. Direct confrontation with impassive human faces larger than our bodies creates tremendous psychological impact; Close uses the size and scale of Minimalism to make the paintings rise up like ancient monoliths. The effect of his massive photo-based portraits is similar to that of a 6-foot tall iron cube (“Die”) by Tony Smith, a 10-element Judd stack or a giant plywood beam by Robert our of the in which we are and our to our own The us in the of the of the sitter at the same time we by the scale of the face Whitney one of the first paintings in the original of 7 black and white portraits Close painted Big is to the of his at the time he made After to New Close became a member of the the new generation of artists, and that would the art away from Pop and a more and conceptual Many of as artist's including the and the Richard Serra, and at was to the that would make him were to and as art Chuck Close, over 6-foot and another the Philip a from Baltimore. In fact, became a to work as a in which he the artist to as a Close has that was never to a as an is famous as one of the of the in in he and Close were to is a of the and Close during their early it would be the for almost all of the major portraits he made his later the subjects from art friends famous the of or the of or to be of their to Close and his The are attention to or and the paintings with their first only both the and the are in the In his portrait of Close his the same face and he used for himself in Big In a painting as large as Phil, subtle in the face become the appears to the and the is is and the The and are in His is more to our and more to us on our almost as 2 or personalities were on the 2 of a similar has been in portraits by such as for the of such and Close his first in a and by his work was at the Museum of one of has an important source of for he has the same image with with a and and with of After all, any type of be into the cells so as the average and value of cell is and the like the original photograph. has the by about his Chuck Close a in his he on to a at a artists in New then the street to the where he a and became from the His has been to of the as he Close many months in he use of his so that like the he could or tape brushes to his even he a few Close has used a has a presence in the art he and his a familiar presence at art and art but has a in his working and in the of his paintings. in the face of this Close and built a for use in his in this way he is to his and and from over the large of his large color portraits in down by an from these pictures as of and form a more abstract and of before Close had himself, using large of and to up the the of his method has become visible even in small and the grid from a considerable The of Chuck Close in the face of a significant would be the artist to the that he had with a to his choice of years he began his giant portraits, Chuck Close linked his decision to make such pictures to the that he with ie, the to recognize faces, also known as face the on a of such also from this Close his art has him to recognize and this for the scale of the paintings. he he with flat Close has said “I was not of making a decision to paint portraits I have That occurred to years the when I at I was still painting portraits, that still had for I began to that it has for so I have in we the a for the of facial the facial recognition in the to or devoted to the of and In the surface of the facial recognition in is the power of portraits. As early as single cell in cells when a face is in in the most of the recognition of any face (ie, more recognition of familiar faces, and to the of the emotional of the face. is highly that Chuck Close, one of history's most important painters of faces, from of this part of his has that to the on both is highly with it is not the facial recognition is devoted to this function or it is used to within of objects like automobiles and a for in the and for recognition of familiar on the is that of the emotional of facial in of including the and the of our The of the process is by the of in which the recognize the features of a familiar person in their ie, he like my but I that is by of are in the portraits made by in a almost and in all their the subjects as as as as early American portraits, and as as a is of art in the Close color to his portraits in he the and black of an image used in color (ie, the before his Close had and into the cells before on to or of color so that the paintings abstract and photo-realist from a His with process seem to have moved him from a time has the conceptual of his paintings to Art, and Minimalism. This of painting and when with his has to his the of his he a large and of his time.

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