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Home , Chuck Close, George Tooker

Art in America Feb, 1999

Four Close-Ups - and One Nude - 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 by Chuck Close, whose traveling retrospective is on view this month at the 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 , 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.

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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, , 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.

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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. The light casts little shadow and while, at first, the subject's features appear bland and regular, the more we look, the more we notice that which is off: the lift at one side of the lip, the tilt of an eyeglass, or a nostril's displacement. The skin too becomes jarring. The harsh light and the extreme magnification engendered by scale and by the artist's insistence on recording the smallest visible details give the subject's complexion a topographical, chromatic and tonal variety that is viscerally off-putting.

Up until the considerably looser works of the last 10 years, a certain repulsion seems to be built into Close's painting enterprise. Of course, there is the inherent distance we wish to put between ourselves and huge things with big teeth, but in terms of portraiture, the accumulation of bits of bodily reference--pores, blemishes, hair follicles and the like--forces an unwelcome democracy upon us: we are all built out of this stuff, and, looked at too closely, we are all similarly scruffy and unattractive. In the work of someone like , the clearly obsessive nature of the artist's vision acts as a buffer, but with Chuck Close, as with Richard Avedon, the stylish coolness and ostensible neutrality undercuts humanistic sympathy for the subject and gives us little choice but to look straight ahead.

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But what exactly are we looking at? What is the subject of this painting, and in what manner and to whom is it being presented? Is the subject a specific person, Mark Greenwold, a man embedded in a variety of social and emotional contexts and well known to the artist? Is it merely an anonymous face embellished with a few clues indicative of time and place? Or is it a collection of small, systematic, conceptually generated marks that just happen to assemble themselves into a configuration we recognize as a head?

In this regard, it is interesting to look at Close's work in relation to Photo-Realism. Close has consistently resisted the connection, but Photo-Realism requires similarly meticulous, camera-reliant procedures, and its best practitioners have dealt with many of the same informational issues that he has. Unlike Close, however, Photo-Realists such as or balance process and image. Their methodical, inch-by-inch mark-making serves the nonhierarchical accumulation of photographically engendered details, which in turn creates a final image attuned to the plentitude and casual visual organization of a section of ordinary life. There's consistency at every level. In Close's work, by contrast, the final image operates in a manner not in accord with the dispassionate observational processes by which it is fashioned--each of Close's heads is monumental, centralized and psychologically dense. The Photo-Realists may make paintings that strike a better balance between technique and image, but Close's paintings achieve their undeniable power from their built- in discordance.

An additional level of discordance is at work in the way Close handles scale. In much significant postwar modernist painting, when the scale increases, so does the degree of simplicity. Even with Pollock's highly detailed works, the small-scale complexities and nodes are subsumed into an overall structure which formally mirrors them: the part becomes an echo of and a template for the whole. With Close, however, as one moves from detail to whole, there's a disconnect. The two scales have separate recognition systems which operate in quite different visual and social realms. The use of gridded facture, with its steady and evenly weighted accumulation of particulars, defines the painting as the sum of much dispassionate, quantifiable information, but the overall image leads into the socially mediated realm of ID photos, mug shots and surveillance cameras, a very different kind of objectivity.

It may be that Close instinctively opted for frontality, even lighting and low emotional affect in order to keep the faces in tune with his dispassionate painting method, but if so, it was to no avail. The psychological charge inherent in these giant faces will not be denied.

Mark wants to be as self-evident and no-nonsense as a Sol LeWitt wall drawing, but it clearly isn't. In contrast, Close's later work, by raising the visibility and painterliness of the technique and lowering the resolution of the image, detaches the paintings from the semiotic orbit of photography and pushes them into a more conventional psychological zone; the humanistic sympathy Close initially excluded returns. Occurring at the culmination of the early work, Mark is hardly so harmonious. With a presence that insinuates itself into consciousness like the hum of a fluorescent light fixture, it is puzzling and irritating, and ultimately more engaging than the recent paintings. In spite of the obvious public appeal of its high finish and mimetic virtuosity, it is complete, closed off and inaccessible. The painting's contradictions are neatly trapped inside of it, conditions of its making and of its premises.

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LYNNE TILLMAN on Cindy (1988)

"Madame Realism Faces It"

Madame Realism watched a documentary about an Englishman who kept great apes on his country estate. He had several children, too, and raised the apes and children together. They sat side by side, handling paints and brushes, concocting similarly artless or artful results. Humans and apes were developmantally comparable, Madame Realism learned, until the age of three. Then, suddenly, humans started drawing and painting faces. The apes continued their colorful abstractions. They never painted faces.

Human reflexivity manifested itself early, in baby line drawings, in renderings of funny faces. Faces were funny, Madame Realism thought, and human was a funny word. Having the capacity for language and self-consciousness, which often warped into self-absorption, humans were licensed to name themselves human and ascribe to the word many flattering qualities and high-minded concepts. Lofty human animals concerned themselves with their humanity and humaneness, and humanism was the world according to humans.

Madame Realism liked it when aggrieved people insisted: I'm only human. It was impossible to understand what that meant, since, on its face, it was simultaneously obvious, grandiose and self- effacing. Hearing it said reminded her of Sammy "the Bull" Gravanno, who'd ratted on Mafia don John Gotti. Gravanno was once interviewed on Diane Sawyer's TV show. Sawyer leaned forward, brow furrowed to mark her sincerity and perplexity, to ask him, one human being to another: "How could you kill your wife's brother? Didn't you ask yourself, `What kind of person am I?' Didn't you ask yourself, `Who am I?'" Like Atlas, Gravanno shrugged, nonplussed by doubts about his humanity, and answered: "I'm a gangster."

Being a human idea, Madame Realism was interested in herself and in others like her. On walks around the city, she scrutinized faces and mentally tore them apart, rearranging features, the facial furniture, as if she were an architect from outer space. Facial parts lost their sense and meaning, like words repeated over and over lost theirs. On strangers' faces, Madame Realism could impose her thoughts or lose herself. On its face, a portrait was meant for her to do that, shamelessly.

These ruminations were occurring in front of a vastly larger-than-life-size portrait by one artist, Chuck Close, of another, . Sherman's monumental face peered down at Madame Realism. For years it had been disguised or hidden in Sherman's work, masked to represent women emblematically, in movies, paintings, and in scenes of horror and fantasy. Now it was uncloaked and gigantic. But did the huge portrait reveal her? Advertisement

Madame Realism knew that things were often not what they appear to be, but now things appeared much larger. There were so many noses and words in the world, she mused to herself, little and big ones, as well as points of view. She knew she could never apprehend human diversity. She looked at people with sidelong glances or stared at them and thought that she wasn't. She made unconscious and conscious comparisons. They were like her, they weren't. People were human by comparison

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with animals, but animals didn't seem to make comparisons, at least they seemed incapable of embarrassment, which was produced by making comparisons. Inescapably, humans had relational fates and faces. All relatives are trouble, Madame Realism thought, and moved farther back from the painting.

Sherman's superlarge 1980s eyeglasses framed her eyes, like paintings within a painting. Or the eyes and frames were TV monitors, the eyes televisual, not windows to the soul. Sherman's head was tilted to one side, so Madame Realism mimicked the gesture, to feel what it meant. "Maybe," the position said, "I'm shy, modest, uncomfortable. Off-center." Madame Realism straightened her head.

Cultural production was centered on humans by humans. Art, novels, histories, movies, talk shows, sports, human studies were limitless; motives, reasons, interpretations endless. All versions were marked by irrationality, fantasy or contradiction. Much more was hidden than apparent. And, Madame Realism reflected, humans lie, animals don't. Probably. Too unaware to make themselves wholly readable in any form, humans were tarpits of self-reflection and streams of subjectivities. Madame Realism walked closer to the portrait. It stopped being a face when she was near enough to stick her nose against it, which she didn't do, because museum guards might pull her away from the painting. She feared embarrassment, but more, she feared being sent to jail.

Very close, the enormous face turned into a dotted surface, a molecular pattern, a map. If it were a map, she wouldn't know where she was, which suggested the experience of intimacy, when boundaries disintegrate or individuals collide in car-crash relationships. Up so close, the face dissolved and metamorphosed into a field of inquiry, offering evidence that the subject of the painting might not be the sitter. Bigness indicated other business than traditional portraiture.

The portrait overwhelmed Madame Realism or any creature, except for an elephant, who stood before it. Its size exaggerated the individual it depicted. So maybe, Madame Realism pondered, identity as a concept was being pictured. Fragile, thick, multiple, identity was sitting in the witness box--a value, an obsession, a claim. Individual psychology and self-recognition weren't the portrait's aims, but questions it raised about those ideas. Madame Realism could never impose herself on this face. Advertisement

She walked farther back. The painting asked: "What do human beings want? Do you know me? Do you want me to know you?" The image was, of course, mute, its expression indeterminate. What am I seeing? Madame Realism wondered. She had no immunity from how others saw her. Her hopes and intentions might be the result of a communicable disease.

Madame Realism touched her chin. To look like models, people had their faces sculpted surgically. Plastic surgeons were licensed counterfeiters of identity--deracinating, assimilating, de-aging it. Humans not only imitated faces, they also stole faces and names. Identity theft was easy. Photo IDs, fingerprinting, voice prints tried to protect "you" against another's claim on your face and good name. There was a lot of fraud and failure in the identity game. Suspiciously, Madame Realism glanced behind her, then she looked again at the painting.

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It identified a specific person, but its implications were social and cultural rather than psychological. Conceptualism peered through its nominal realism. Madame Realism narrowed her eyes. Now the portrait was a banner or flag, waving. Was it patriotic to human beings, defending their specialness, or subversive and treacherous? Madame Realism didn't know. She didn't trust herself, and before she left the museum, she checked that she had her wallet.

JERRY SALTZ on Paul III (1996)

This is one of the weirdest, least characteristic paintings of Chuck Close's career, and Close has been nothing if not consistent. For 30 years, while exploring a variety of processes, he has remained focused on a single format: portraits rendered in a more or less pointillist manner. Paul III, his third portrait of , is one of the few instances in which he deviates slightly from the norm. Instead of painting his subject's entire head, he zeroes in on the face alone.

Why does Close get so close to Cadmus? Well, it is a great face. Now 92, Cadmus has beautiful, soft, full-blue eyes, a dandyish, dignified, almost American Indianlike bearing, a strong nose and thin, sensual lips. With his flamboyant, shoulder-length silver hair and his wrinkled face he looks a little like Georgia O'Keeffe. It is also a face that has been portrayed often. In fact, Cadmus may hold some sort of record for "Most Appearances by an Artist in Other Artists' Work." Since 1907, when his father painted a portrait of him, Cadmus has been painted and photographed by George Platt Lynes, Duane Michals, Arnold Newman, , Carl Van Vechten, , Bruce Weber, Irving Penn and many others.

But great faces aren't exactly Close's primary interest. In the beginning he painted deadpan, full- frontal portraits of himself and his friends, the artists of his generation. I was in high school when these paintings were made, but when I first saw them, in the early 1970s, I was mesmerized. They were huge, blunt and imposing. They were paintings (in the early 1970s you weren't supposed to make paintings) and they were figurative (which was sort of against the rules too). You could connect them to Warhol or Richter (though most of us hadn't heard of him yet) or to TV, photography or wanted posters or even to (because of the nonhierarchical all-overness), but they really seemed to come fully formed out of nowhere: colossal, two-dimensional, blank-faced sentinels, Easter Islandlike totems from outer space.

In the early 1970s, I didn't yet know who the people in the paintings were so I invented personas for them, taking off from the first name titles. Joe was an alcoholic accountant; Richard was a thug cab driver; there was startled, distorted, slightly demonic Nancy; hippy, hammy "gangsta" Chuck; and angelic rock star Phil. Joe Zucker, , Nancy Graves, Close himself and only became recognizable artists to me afterwards. In the beginning, they were simply men and women portrayed at a heroic scale, with no particular feeling. Advertisement

But back to Cadmus. He's the oldest artist Close has painted. He's also one of only a handful of "out" gay people in Close's work. It's likely that you aren't as familiar with Cadmus's work as you are with that of many of Close's other subjects, art stars like Cindy Sherman, or Alex Katz.

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To recap: Cadmus's style was, and is, a sort of Renaissance-influenced, sexy (think Luca Signorelli by way of Tom of Finland). Cadmus was 29 in 1934 when he caused a scandal by exhibiting The Fleet's In at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The painting depicts a group of drunken sailors on leave trying to pick up some floozies, and it includes a scene of male-to- male flirtation. The secretary of the Navy had the painting removed from the exhibition, railing that it was "disgraceful and sordid." This and subsequent controversies didn't seem to hurt Cadmus's career. His New York solo debut in 1937 was attended by more than 7,000 viewers. He was the Robert Mapplethorpe of his day.

The first third of Close's retrospective was a tour-de-force of painterly process: intensive, maniacal, detached manual labor. The work is not about touch but about being made. In front of Close's paintings the public behaves like artists, who always seem to have their noses right against the surface of the work, examining how it was made, stealing licks. Each time I walked through MOMA, I thought the place was filled with artists. Then I realized that this is the magic of Close's best work. It forms an invisible bond between how the work is made (with dots, circles, fingerprints, daubs, etc.) and what it is (a head, an eye, whatever). Even though most viewers may not realize it, when they stand before one of Close's canvases they're not looking at a portrait: they're seeing the act of painting itself.

The Cadmus portrait appeared near the end of the show. It's a hallucinogenic, fantastically wavering painting composed in the familiar, step-by-step, every-square-inch-counts concentric circles, each one an arena where Close zeroes in on his subject. The jewel-like colors are clear and aquatic. But something changes in this painting. After 30 years, the contour of the head disappears. In the paintings that follow Paul III, Close moves still closer to the face, so that it fills the entire canvas. These paintings are also a little smaller than the preceding works. You can see that Close knows he's on to something. In these paintings he's clearly pushing himself, reaching for something new. Advertisement

It's too bad that the first "mature" painting Close made, Big Nude (1967), an over 9-foot-high, 21- foot-long depiction of a naked woman, was excluded from the show (even though it is the largest reproduction in the catalogue). I'm no psychoanalyst, but I can't help wondering about the motives behind the big change in Close's subject matter following Big Nude and thinking that this painting somehow relates to Paul III. In Big Nude, Close painted an outrageously large-sized odalisque, an enormous, almost monstrous female, a vision of sexual overload: her pudenda are over a foot long, the scar on her belly stretches some 2 or 3 feet. He gazed directly at this awesome spectacle of femaleness ... and then he looked away. Elsewhere. Up at the face of whoever was looking at him, and he kept on doing so again and again and again. In 1967, in order to stake out something new for painting, the wild, latent sexuality of the Big Nude had to go, replaced by a cool, conceptual artlessness.

Well, maybe Big Nude was left out of the retrospective because its roots run too close to Rosenquist or Wesselmann. And I'm not suggesting Close should have spent the last three decades paintings nudes instead of heads (though it might have been intriguing to see all those famous artists naked, at that scale). Nudes would have put too strong an emphasis on subject matter when Close was aiming to split the difference between meaning and making. With Paul III, however, the scrutiny, the intimacy, that got lost after Big Nude may be returning, albeit in subtle ways. In front of the aged,

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slightly pixieish, sly face of Cadmus, Close loosens up. "What would happen," he seems to be saying, "if I didn't paint heads?" The face in Paul III melts at the edges into something almost abstract; the mind of the viewer, maybe even the mind of the artist, can wander a little. By moving closer to the faces he paints, by getting more intimate with skin, by meeting those eyes more than half way, Close has returned, in a sense, to something that got lost after Big Nude. In Paul III, the restrained, emotionless heads have given way to something startling--corporeal sensuality. It's a gutsy, strong finish to a retrospective that could have trailed off.

"Chuck Close" opened at the Museum of , New York [Feb. 26-May 26, 1998], before traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago [June 20-Sept. 13, 1998], and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. [Oct. 15, 1998-Jan. 10, 1999]. It goes on view this month at the [Feb. 18-May 9]. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Robert Storr, who organized the show, and Deborah Wye, as well as an interview with the artist.

Authors: Linda Nochlin is Lila Acheson Wallace professor of modern art at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts. Richard Kalina is an artist who also writes about art. Lynne Tillman's latest novel is No Lease on Life. Jerry Saltz is art critic for .

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