1999-02-Art in America

Art in America Feb, 1999 Four Close-Ups - and One Nude - Chuck Close paintings by Linda Nochlin, Richard Kalina, Lynne Tillman, Jerry Saltz Four authors (Linda Nochlin, Richard Kalina, Lynne Tillman and Jerry Saltz) each focus on a single painting by Chuck Close, whose traveling retrospective is on view this month at the Seattle Art Museum. LINDA NOCHLIN on Nancy (1968) It looks just like Nancy, but Nancy didn't look like this. What I mean is, the photo, and even more, the painting after it, have frozen certain atypical, momentary aspects of the sitter--the turned-in eye, the lifted lip, the crooked tooth, the straggling strands of hair--into prominent, permanent features. The painting is a memorial to what was contingent to Nancy Graves, but of course, being photo-based, it purports to tell the truth, the way a mug shot claims to give us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the criminal. This is a realist image in that it testifies at once to the existence of the subject in the "real" world beyond the painting and, at the same time, to the concrete, material presence of the acrylic on canvas: a testament to the labor that created this nonvirtuoso display of the artist's patient handwork. The austerity of the production--its lack of color, its stark presentation of image, its refusal of painterly self-indulgence or "personal sensibility"--is also part of the realist ethic. And its exactitude, the unflinching depiction of hairs, wrinkles, askew glance, the gleam on a random tooth, reminds us of the origin of portraiture in magic and memorial. Myths about the birth of painting--e.g., the young woman capturing the silhouette of her departing lover--stress the miraculous replacement of bodily absence by pictorial presence, while the first portraits were literally memento mori, images of defunct ancestors, often taken from death masks. Not beauty but accuracy was of the essence in this task of commemoration. By the Renaissance, a debate over idealization versus realism was going full tilt: could a mighty prince be depicted warts and all, or did nobility of birth and spirit demand, if not allegorical elevation, at least some tactful smoothing away of surface defects--enough reality to make Cosimo de' Medici recognizable, but not enough to make him look, well, exactly like himself? There are plenty of exceptions to this rule of tactful accommodation, of course. Think of Piero's hawk-nosed, baggy-eyed Federigo da Montefeltro or Jan van Eyck's weirdly etiolated Arnolfini Wedding Portrait. The sitters were paying for these images, so they must have wanted to look memorably, realistically peculiar rather than ideal, and they do. They wanted their images to look like what they saw in the glass, despite their deviation from a normative ideal. The high-art status of such portraits derives from the dignity of their subject's poses, the weightiness of their gazes--and the individuals' singularity. Art in America, Feb, 1999 Page 1 sur 9 But in Close's portraits, especially the early black-and-white ones, there seems to be no such negotiation between truth and elevation. He gives us stark confrontation--a head suspended in close quarters, staring, in Nancy's case, not out at us but somewhere above us. It is the cleft chin that meets us at eye level--that, and the V-shape at the base of the throat. Yes, you can tell that this is a lovely woman, but you can also tell that Close didn't want to make conventional beauty the basis of his image. Nobody is beautiful if looked at the right/wrong way. There is, in fact, something terrifying about Nancy. Partly, it's the sheer size of the canvas, over 9 feet high and nearly 7 feet wide. The isolated head overwhelms us with its domineering immanence. Larger than life but large as death, too, it seems, especially for those who know that Graves died in 1995 at the age of 54, like a warning of mortality, a poster advertising the transience of life. Nancy is one of a series of portraits of young artists, his friends and colleagues, that Chuck Close created in the late '60s; the series includes his self-portraits. Portraits of friends and fellow-artists or writers are rarely commissioned. Nancy continues a time-honored tradition of series portraits, group portraits, and portraits of artists and their friends, starting in the Renaissance, continuing with Courbet and the Impressionists and going on through Warhol and Pearlstein. Yet, in his solemn black-and- white representations of people who happen to be artists, Close chooses not to emphasize communal life or conviviality, as does, say, Alex Katz, but rather solitariness. This Nancy is not the Nancy Graves I remember, that daring and creative taxidermist whose hypnotic and unforgettable film, Issy Boukir, recorded the essence of camelhood; the alchemist who could transform shells and shards and plants into monumental sculpture, who could move from the microscopic to the cosmic without blinking an eye. Nor is it the charming and ineffable hostess at dinner, regaling us with weird tales of distant places, or the Nancy Graves, elegant and stately in a salmon-colored linen suit that picked up the dark red of her hair, at the luncheon following her reception of an honorary doctorate at Yale, where she had studied art and met Chuck Close. No, Nancy is not the essential Nancy; it is the contingent Nancy, the image the camera snapped at a certain moment in 1968 and that Close painstakingly transformed into a painting shortly afterward. It is an image that draws its austere and punitive strength from its recording of concrete details, not essence; its indexicality is guaranteed by its origin in a photograph. But is there, was there ever, an "essential Nancy"? An essential anybody? That's what always annoys me about Rembrandt's portraits (not the self-portraits, but that's another story). Rembrandt is not a realist but a trickster, tricking you into thinking that Jan Nix pulling on his glove is the essential, the profound, the transcendent Jan Six, quintessential Dutch-burgher-with-a-soul, the artist's dazzling technique seducing you with a few well-placed shadows around the eyes, the meaningful glance, the astute concatenation of glazes around the mouth. All Rembrandt's sitters look deep and soulful and surely they weren't: this was just Rembrandt's signature style: you paid your guilder and you got your profundity. Chuck Close's signature is surface; in his later works, in fact, the sitters are taken over by surface. The grid and its gorgeous abstract geometries triumph, the human individual must struggle to get through. To my way of thinking, there is not, and never was, an essential Nancy, any more than there is an essential Frank (Stella) or an essential Richard (Serra), other subjects of memorable Close portraits in 1969. There are many other aspects to all these sitters, no doubt, but no portrait will ever get them all, nor should we want it to. That is not the business of the portrait, certainly not the realist portrait. Art in America, Feb, 1999 Page 2 sur 9 Chuck Close's portrait will stand for Nancy as long as it lasts. And all of us who knew her will remember her differently. Advertisement RICHARD KALINA on Mark (1978-79) Mark was painted 10 years into Chuck Close's professional career, and comes at the end of what might be considered his first major period. Executed in airbrushed acrylics, using a meticulously hand-done and layered variation of the three-color printing process, it smoothly and faithfully replicates on canvas the look of a vastly blown-up photograph. This painting, 14 months in the making, was done before Close's technique-expanding forays into fingerpainting and paper-pulp collage, and prior to the general loosening up of facture that took hold in the middle '80s (a stylistic change well in the works even before the artist's partial paralysis in 1988 mandated it). Measuring 9 by 7 feet, Mark is typical of the size and format of Close's large paintings. In it the gigantic head of a man in his mid-30s, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a plaid flannel shirt and a dark sweater, stares straight ahead with that discomfited look of someone getting his picture taken for a driver's license. I'd always wondered about the sitter. With his neatly cut dark hair, serious glasses and earnest, slightly rabbity look, he seemed like a lawyer or an accountant, not the usual raffish SoHo type or A-list artist who appears in so many other Close works. As it turns out, he is Mark Greenwold, a good friend of Close and a painter of small, finely detailed depictions of violent, psycho-sexually charged situations. Since Mark was painted, Greenwold has returned the favor, so to speak, by inserting portrayals of Close in a number of his own works. The composition is tightly cropped. The head fills most of the painting's rectangle, and its oval is anchored at the bottom by the spread of shirt collar and a bit of dark, crew-necked sweater. The focal plane is deliberately shallow, reinforcing the image's photographic origin and, in the process, creating two distinct but interconnected optical zones. The sharpness ends at mid-cheek, with the sweater, shirt, neck and much of the hair blurring slightly. This interplay between sharp and soft focus is echoed by the balance of facial symmetry and asymmetry.

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