No Cigar
The austere
installation of Chuck Close's big portraits at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York City begins where any artist wants the narrative of his career to begin:
with fully achieved art. No juvenilia, no hesitant casting about, no "finding
of the voice." You walk into the first white room, and bam! There's the Big
Self-Portrait of 1967-68 staring right at you. This unforgiving image
glories in its sheer seediness. A trickle of cigarette smoke takes a detour
around the caterpillar mustache before negotiating some nose hairs. The stubble
on Close's close-up cheeks and neck is so magnified that the hairs are an
unshavable inch long. The whole portrait is a celebration of hair--facial,
nasal, chest, eyebrow, head--the freak flag, as David Crosby called it, of the
late '60s.
But
Charles Thomas Close took a while to turn into "Chuck Close," the disheveled,
unmade bed of a man with the black glasses. Born in Monroe, Wash., in 1940, he
was the only child of a failed inventor and plumber who died when Charles was
11; Charles' mother taught piano and encouraged his interest in painting. He
attended the University of Washington and did graduate work at Yale from 1962
to '64. (His Yale classmates included such current art-world stars as the
painters Brice Marden and Jennifer Bartlett and the sculptor Richard Serra.)
After teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for a couple of
years, he returned to New York, where--with a brief interruption in 1988, when
a paralyzing seizure left him in a wheelchair--he has worked ever since.
During his early 20s, Close experimented with a variety of
provocative styles. In 1961, obviously inspired by Jasper Johns, he cut up
American flags, sewed them up in new shapes--a mushroom cloud, for example--and
painted over them. At Yale, he learned to paint de Kooning rip-offs with such
facility that he once told de Kooning that he'd painted more de Koonings than
de Kooning had. By the mid-1960s, like others of his generation, he'd left the
gestural art of Pollock and de Kooning behind (though Pollock could have
painted the swirling chest hair in Big Self-Portrait ) and begun using
photographic images as the basis for his cooler, less openly expressive
work.
In 1967,
the campus police at U. Mass dismantled Close's first solo exhibition, which
included drawings loosely based on photographs of album covers. One showed Bob
Dylan exposing himself. Close left for New York that summer, where he painted
his 21-foot-long Big Nude , an impressive black-and-white image of a
reclining woman with a bikini suntan, based on photographs he'd taken in
Amherst. In November he started his Big Self-Portrait . Three years
later, an Artforum interview referred to Close by his nickname,
"Chuck"--which an assistant had scrawled on some photographs for the piece--and
the name stuck as his professional moniker.
None of Close's in-your-face '60s shockers--the desecrated
flags, the oversize nudes, the rock stars' genitalia--is included in the MoMA
show (though Big Nude is reproduced in the exhibition catalog); nor, for
that matter, are some large-scale photographic nudes he made during the
mid-1980s. Close's career of deliberate provocation is airbrushed out. What
this means is that the Big Self-Portrait of 1967-68 seems to come out of
nowhere. One is left with the somewhat misleading impression of an
establishment figure: the artist who plays an artist in Six Degrees of
Separation (as Close did), who paints pictures of his celebrity friends,
who takes a formal photographic portrait of Bill Clinton (1996, in the
catalog).
This
interpretation of Close is reinforced by MoMA's focus on his technical and
formal innovations to the exclusion of his subject matter. The paintings and
drawings are grouped in such a way that we follow Close's progression from the
black-and-white enlargements of the late '60s to his puzzling attempts during
the '70s to reproduce in paint the chemical process by which Polaroid cameras
make color images. Instead of mixing his colors on the palette, Close built up
his images by applying thin layers of primary colors directly onto the canvas.
Many of these color portraits have a faded pallor, like old snapshots, but the
exuberant Linda (1975-76) has a dispersed energy, derived from the
spidery network of Hendrix hair, crow's-feet wrinkles, fissured lips, and eye
capillaries. While moving into color, Close found ways to engage the crisscross
grid that had always been part of his procedure for enlarging photographic
images. First, he made the grid an explicit element of his compositions. Then,
he experimented with different ways to fill that grid: pointillist colored
dots, blobs of papier-mâché, fingerprints and, finally, the colorful Symbolist
doodles he now favors.
All this focus on technique, while fascinating in itself,
is a distraction from the emotional impact of the paintings. (And the most
interesting and dramatic technical transition, from gestural de Kooningisms to
Pop cool, is missing from the show.) MoMA's coy refusal to identify the
subjects of the portraits (wall panels give title, date, and medium) suggests
that their identities don't matter, even while first-name titles imply that
they do--that intimacies are being explored and revealed. The result is that
the show has an insiderly feel. Many will recognize that Phil (1969) is
the composer Philip Glass; or that Roy II (1994), in a rare Closean
profile to show off the ponytail, is the late Roy Lichtenstein. But how many
will know, as I do, that Marge R . (1974) is a realtor in Amherst?
An example
of this coyness is the pair of paintings hanging side by side in the first
room. Nancy (1968) could be a still from a '50s film noir: She looks as
if she has just caught sight of a stalker on the stairs. The sharp-focus
treatment of certain details--light glinting on the uneven, Ali McGrawish front
teeth; the asymmetrical eyes; the squashed nose that looks as if it's been
broken at least once--give a victimized, menaced quality to the composition.
The thug with the fuck-you sneer depicted in Richard (1969), a magnified
mug shot hanging to her right, could be the guy she's just caught sight of.
But--here's where the in-group stuff kicks in-- Nancy is the late artist
Nancy Graves, and the thug is Richard Serra, whom she married in 1965. Is Close
(with MoMA's cooperation) suggesting there were violent tensions in this
marriage, which ended in divorce?
Nor are Close's experiments with filling his grids as
merely "technical" as the MoMA show makes them seem. In several unsettling
portraits, Close fills his grids with his own fingerprints inked on a stamp
pad. These works have none of the finger-painting naiveté of kids' art that you
might expect (though two of them portray Close's young daughters). Rather, with
their clearly indicated whorls, they look like police fingerprints used for
identification. Is it an accident that two of Close's favorite media are mug
shots and fingerprints? MoMA's "new-ways-to-fill-the-grid" narrative
discourages any such speculation about the buried themes of criminality and
violence beneath Close's cool images.
Close's work from the '80s
and the '90s loses something of his earlier provocativeness. Lucas II
(1987, of the painter Lucas Samaras) has a wild-man intensity--part Ezra Pound,
part Jerry Garcia--accentuated by Close's one-time experimentation with a
radiating circular grid. But most of the other recent paintings are jeweled,
engaging, user-friendly. The colorful little symbols filling the grids remind
me of Gustav Klimt (whom Close studied in Vienna in 1964), especially when
Close is luxuriating in the dark tangle of the artist Kiki Smith's hair
( Kiki , 1993). If you take a closer look, though, you notice that instead
of Klimt's erotic glamour, which hints at dangerous passions unleashed by the
unconscious, Close's doodles depict doughnuts, hot dogs, and lozenges. The
candy-store colors that Close reined in for decades return here with a
vengeance, but they seem more frivolous than emotionally charged. These
top-dollar portraits of art-world luminaries look good enough to eat.
