Close, Closer, Closest

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, a show that helps redefine the limits of portraiture

They are not, in any sense, portraits of Beautiful People. Every wrinkle, bulge and sag in their flesh is colossally magnified: a face 9 ft. high is no longer a face but a wall of imperfections that mock the convention of "good looks." The face is always seen head on, like a mug shot or a passport photo; yet it is blown up to the size of some staring mosaic Pantocrator on a Byzantine a pse. These are, of course, the portraits by Chuck Close--familiar items in the art of the 1970s--now gathered in a retrospective of Close's work, which, after its debut last fall at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, opened last week at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art.

Those who believe an artist ought to be a creature of inspiration are likely to have difficulties with Close. There is no more phlegmatic temperament in American art, or so one might think; the divine afflatus is reduced, in his paintings, to metered squirts from an air brush. His procedure for the big portraits that made his name in the 1970s never varied. First Close photographed the sitter, with a depth of field so short that there are blurs of focus in the distance from the eyeball to the tip of the nose, or from the edge of a Up to the lobe of the ear. Then he made color separations of the image and scaled it up to the giant canvas by means of a finely ruled grid. After that the image was transferred, square by square.

To get "natural" hues--as natural as those of color photography--Close applied three overlays of standard color, in effect, three monochrome portraits painted on top of each other: first red, then blue, then yellow. The illusion rises quite automatically out of the method. Seen against the plodding, laborious character of the day-to-day work, which requires up to a year for one finished painting, it has a more than hallucinatory quality. "I want the thinnest, most ethereal possible paint film, with colors built by superimposing one color over another so that there's almost nothing there--you could take your fingernail and scratch it off," says Close. "It is rather like magic. When I get to the last color, yellow, you can't see the pigment come out of the air brush--it's like waving a magic wand in front of the picture, and the purple eye becomes brown. It's really quite wonderful; there are a few kicks left in this racket after all, and that's one of them."

The observer's eye knows nothing of the sitters in advance. None of them is famous for being famous, except at the SoHo level of celebrity--some being, in fact, well-known artists, like the sculptor Richard Serra or the composer Philip Glass. Thus what Close proposes is a kind of portraiture diametrically opposite to Andy Warhol's images of Marilyn or Liz, where the painting, an icon of the Star, adapts itself to the intrusive power of repetition and generalization. With Close, there is no generalization at all. None of his faces has a role. There are no costumes, props or traces of social relationships, no evidence of the sitter's work or status; in short, none of the facts that portraiture traditionally conveys.

Above all, there is no analysis of character. We feel we learn something about Rembrandt from looking at the late self-portraits. About Close's sitters, one learns nothing--except that they have more pores than the travertine of the Colosseum. One's curiosity about who they may be is stifled by Close's relentlessly forensic approach. The images verify without interpreting; each face is as naked as a body, a piece of unveiled skin with orifices. It is neither blank nor expressive, but simply there--a topographical essay, like a fulsomely detailed map that has somehow acquired the gratuitousness of art. One is sharply reminded, after a little time in this show, that Close's real subject is not people: the heads, as Art Historian Martin Friedman points out in his catalogue essay, are "portraits of photographs," and their aggregation of detail forces us to reflect on process--how they were made, why they need to carry so much information. They are conceptual art, of a kind: Idea before Painting. What other realist painter comes near this minimalist harshness? Close's images pay absolute homage to the power of an overriding system; they might have been done on autopilot.

The applications of this system vary a good deal. Sometimes the grid of Close's preliminary studies is large in relation to the scale of the image; it turns into big programmed dots that define the face tonally, without giving much information about it at all. "On that scale," Close points out, "a dot just can't be specific, it can't stand for individual hairs, it has to be very general." In the largest studies, the face may almost vanish in the welter of information, becoming ungraspable, as the original photograph never was. In between there are many thresholds of transition, where the changes of size alter the whole relationship, within the image, of photography (the source) to painting (the product). Sometimes, more recently, Close seems to abandon the grid altogether, transforming his standard face of Philip Glass into an almost rococo swirl of repeated fingerprints impressed on the canvas from an ink pad: a literal parody, if ever there was one, of the "sense of touch" in traditional painting. But always he seems to be after a kind of minimalist nirvana where, as he puts it, "every square inch was physically the same, where there was no area of more beautiful brushing or virtuoso art marks."

In the process, Close has produced an unattractive art of striking intelligence. "If you do your job right, if you do it one bit at a time, one piece of information at a time, you can end up with something that has emotional impact without having to resort to emotional gestures," he maintains. "Human heads are things people care about. You can't mess around with them--but I'm interested in being flat-footed about it." And in this flat-footed way, Close has done more to redefine the limits of portraiture than any other painter of his generation.

--By Robert Hughes

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