Chuck Close
Chuck Close
1940 - 2021
American painter and printmaker. He studied (1960–65) at the University of Washington, Seattle, at Yale University, and at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. During this period he painted biomorphic abstract works, influenced by the avant-garde American art of the previous two decades. After a brief experiment with figurative constructions, he began copying black-and-white photographs of a female nude in colour on to canvas. After abandoning this approach he used a black-and-white palette, which resulted in the 6.7 m long Big Nude (1967–8; artist’s col., see Lyons and Storr, p. 14). Finding this subject too ‘interesting’, he turned to neutral, black-and-white head-and-shoulder photographs as models, which he again reproduced in large scale on canvas, as in Self-portrait (1968; Minneapolis, MN, Walker A. Cent.). He incorporated every detail of the photograph and allowed himself no interpretative freedom. Working from photographs enabled him to realize the variations in focus due to changing depth of field, something impossible when working from life. He continued in the black-and-white style until 1970, when he began to use colour again. With a similarly limited range of model photographs, he experimented with various types of colour marking; see Self-portrait, 1997. The pencil and ink Robert/104,072 (1973–4; New York, MOMA), for example, is made from 104,072 separate colour squares. Other techniques included the use of fingerprint marks and pulp paper fragments. This concern with modes of representation links him to conceptual art as well as, more obviously, to Photorealism. For the colour paintings such as Linda (1975–6; Akron, OH, A. Mus.) he used acrylic, ink, and watercolour among other media, and built the works up using only cyan, magenta, and yellow, thus imitating mechanical reproduction techniques. Close also made occasional prints, such as the mezzotint Keith/Mezzotint (1972; see Lyons and Storr, p. 162). In the 1980s he worked with handmade papers and also produced images pieced together from huge Polaroid photographs, such as Bertrand II (1984; artist’s col., see Lyons and Storr, pp. 156–7).
In 1988 Close suffered from a collapsed spinal artery that left him paralysed. Confined to a wheelchair and with severely limited movement, he continued painting. Using a brush strapped to his hand, he painted small abstract ‘tiles’ that were assembled on a grid to create large-scale portraits such as Big Self-Portrait (2001–2; San Francisco, CA, MOMA). His fascination with printmaking continued through the 1990s and 2000s as he employed collaborative processes to create woodblock, reduction block, and other large reproductive portrait images, including many self-portraits. Continuing his photographic experimentation, in the later 1990s and early 2000s he created a series of large portrait heads using the 19th-century daguerreotype process. ["Close, Chuck." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T018251.]
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