Close Encounters

By ROBERT HUGHES

The great 19th century French realist Gustave Courbet once said that an artist ought to be able to render something--a distant pile of sticks, say, in a field--without actually knowing what it was. The hyperrealist Chuck Close has gone one better than that. In 1971 he painted the face of his father-in-law Nat Rose. The huge, minutely detailed likeness was bought by a Maryland collector who lent it to the Whitney Museum in New York City. There it was seen by an ophthalmologist who, not sure whether he was intruding or not, got a message to Close. Did he know that one eye of the man in the painting showed signs of carcinoma? No, Close didn't, but his father-in-law had a checkup, and it turned out to be true. People always hope their lives will be enhanced by works of art, but this was the only time an American's sight was saved by one.

It's unlikely that Close's current retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art will produce any further medical revelations, but Close emerges from it as a remarkable artist all the same, and well served by a couple of excellent interpretative essays by curators Robert Storr and Kirk Varnedoe. Close's reputation as a stick-to-it, intensely focused, all-round-good-guy of the American art world has been gathering strength for years; and since 1989, when he was paralyzed from the neck down by a catastrophic stroke and had to learn to paint all over again from a wheelchair, he has become something of a legend. None of this bears on the quality of his art, of course. But you can't help reflecting, as you look at his infinitely laborious portraits in which one vastly enlarged face after another is elaborated into a moonscape of pores, wrinkles, blackheads, stubble and multiple highlights, that sheer determination is the common factor of both Close's art and his life.

Chuck Close has to be the most methodical artist that ever lived in America. He goes at the canvas with all the afflatus of a silkworm eating its phlegmatic way across a mulberry leaf. His way of painting, once set up, becomes an effort of pure transcription that relocates the acts of imagination way back in the roots of its system, and spends months on it. Essentially, what he does is copy faces large from small photographs. "Large" means enormous--canvases 8 ft. or 9 ft. high, filled with the staring face of someone you probably don't know and who has no special public existence. (All Close's sitters were his friends, mostly artists such as the sculptor Richard Serra or the painter Joe Zucker, none of them well known at the time. He has never done a commissioned portrait.) He began his big faces in the late 1960s, working directly from black-and-white photographs he took himself. The results were very strange. The images weren't "expressive." Their obsession is with fact, an overload of fact--not in the least with character. Their eyes don't contact the viewer: they look right through you. They were as anticosmetic as mug shots (some disconcertingly so: young Richard Serra looks like a dockland thug; his wife, artist Nancy Graves, like a snaggle-toothed nut). And it's interesting that Close's heads, then and later, work best when they are either strictly frontal or in profile; any turn or tilt of the head, suggesting that the sitter has noticed you, weakens the image.

Close's take-it-or-leave-it approach to the human face was deeply related to the growing interest among his Minimalist peers in sculptural materials set forth as they were: strips of rubber or felt on the floor, cinder blocks, polystyrene or slabs of rusty steel propped together. The paint Close applied was molecule-thin, spritzed on the painstakingly prepared gesso surface with an airbrush, in strict accordance with the grid to which Close enlarged the original photo. It suggested an obsessive involvement on the artist's part, but kept the viewer distant, with nothing sensuous to hook onto--unless you had a thing about freckles and wens. This idea of deadpan, photo-derived "objectivity" was much in the air at the time--a small movement, Photo-Realism, was one of the spin-offs from Pop Art--but nobody took it as far as Close, or with such riveting effects. These are lost in reproduction--the image shrinks back to being just another photo, and its command on your attention (huge, august, frontal, like the head of a Pantocrator from a Byzantine apse) vanishes. Only from the originals can one grasp what Close means when he says, in a catalog interview with curator Storr, that "I wanted to make something that was impersonal and personal, arm's-length and intimate, minimal and maximal, using the least amount of paint possible but providing the greatest amount of information possible."

From black-and-white, Close moved to color, but again in a system-dominated way. Color printing is done with three colors: cyan (a greenish blue), magenta (a purplish red) and yellow. Close took his photo, had color separations made, and then proceeded to render each square of the canvas with each of the colors, successively, exquisitely controlling the amount of each hue per pixel. There was a yellow face, then a blue overlay, and then with the magenta one--presto, full exact color. No room for deviation or correction. Paint-by-numbers raised to the nth degree. It goes so far out in the direction of illusion that it hits abstraction coming back.

At what point does an array of colored squares in a regular grid begin to turn into a recognizable image? The question touches on the mystery of Realist painting--how it is, for instance, that when looking close up at a Velasquez you see a flurry of gray-and-pink spots and streaks, and when you move back a couple of feet, that same patch has become a glistening silver embroidery on rose velvet. All of Close's art recalls his fixation on this effect, the brain seeking illusion in pattern, questing for clues: Close will break a face down into round dabs of oil paint (as in Self-Portrait, 1986), or spots of pastel, or even thickly textured platelets of papier-mache glued on top of one another, looking to extend the ways in which repetitive, grid-organized painting turns into the irresistible semblance of a face. All the time, the surface gets richer and more baroque, a far cry from the uninviting air of the early work.

Close, when a student at Yale, was enraptured by the work of the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning: he loved his color and luscious paint surface, while realizing that they couldn't possibly be imitated. Imitating de Kooning was the bane of student existence: no originality could come of it. But Close, in his ruminative way, hankered after the paradise of the senses that de Kooning's touch represented, and it surfaces in the work that he had begun to do just before his paralysis in 1989 and was able to develop after his partial recovery. The dots and pixels become thick-painted squares, with highly colored microforms--lozenges, doughnuts, figure-eights--tossing around in them. The image of the head coarsens and blurs, breaks off at some edges, acquires a mysterious density. It's like looking at someone through ripple glass, and it produces striking results--as in Roy II, 1994, a portrait of the painter Roy Lichtenstein, whose profile (owing to the constraints of Close's grid) hardens into the likeness of Dick Tracy while keeping a beautiful fluidity of surface. Finally, Close has been able to get some vibrancy into the results of his system: the work of the imagination has been moved up from background to foreground, from the planning of the image to its actual execution. Some artists get stuck in their style as they age. Others get wilder; they are among the lucky ones, and this show makes it clear that Close is one of them.