CLOSING IN ON CLOSE
CHUCK CLOSE, ALEX, 1987
(Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio)
First of all, it’s an enormous head. Huge. Over eight feet high. It’s about the size of the colossal bust of the Emperor Constantine at the Conservatory in Rome. But Chuck Close’s portrait of Alex Katz doesn’t have Constantine’s blank-eyed inhumanity. Rather, it’s an ordinary, all-too-human head blown up to massive size. At a great distance, about 75 feet away from the canvas, the head looms up out of the dark background with all the realism of a gargantuan photographic image. In fact, Close works from his own photographs of sitters, and in this case he has lighted Katz strongly from both sides, giving the final painting the kind of sharp light-dark contrast we find in the works of Caravaggio.
There’s also something in the naturalism of Close’s image that brings to mind those who criticized Caravaggio for painting prostitutes and rent boys in the guise of Virgins and angels. Chuck Close doesn’t idealize, and this is not a pretty picture. The furrows in Katz’s brow stretch several feet across the canvas; the wrinkles running from his nose to the corners of his mouth form an arch wide enough to walk through; his lips are slightly parted in an expression of impatience or anger. He seems to sneer, or even snarl, at the viewer. He appears to have been caught in an unposed, unguarded moment, but Close’s photographic process is usually careful and deliberate, all but eliminating the possibility of a genuinely candid shot. One wonders how ‘posed’ this image really is. Of course, we can–and should–wonder the same about any portrait, especially those (like Rembrandt’s, for example) that appear to be miracles of immediacy. The longer we look, the problem of separating person from persona becomes as difficult as distinguishing Yeats’s dancer from the dance.
While the large paintings of Jackson Pollock encourage the viewer to move from side to side, following the rhythm of paint across the canvas, Chuck Close’s works demand a back-and-forth movement. Starting from a distance, we approach them slowly, then move back and approach again. When we stand about 40 feet from Alex, he begins to fall apart. The contours that formerly looked photographically smooth now appear jagged and handmade. The face that from 60 feet away struck us with its massive realism now begins to look blotchy and slightly blurred, like a poorly tuned TV image. The colors of the face seem to drift off into the black background like wisps of smoke. The painting’s compositional grid becomes apparent, and the whole work takes on the texture of a mosaic, each tiny tessera clearly visible. We move closer, and the modeling of that enormous head flattens into patches of lighter and darker paint. All illusionism is fading fast.
Finally, we arrive at the canvas. As close as Close can be. Now the portrait of Alex Katz is a purely abstract painting. A visible grid of horizontal and vertical lines separates the canvas into thousands of tiny cells, each about one inch square. Every individual cell is a miniature abstract painting, a creation of small dabs and short brushstrokes in a candy-colored palette that shows the influence of Willem de Kooning, a painter Close emulated in his younger days. ("When I finally met de Kooning in the early eighties," Close says, "I said it was a pleasure to meet someone who had painted a few more de Koonings than I had."1) The painting’s chin, neck and nose are all vast agglomerations of these painted cells. Standing directly in front of the mouth, we see the barely recognizable combination of multi-colored brushstrokes that blend together at a distance to create the illusion of teeth. But up here there are no illusions, just the memory of form and the truth of flatness and paint.
Move back about 20 feet and the face falls into place again; step forward and it dissolves into abstraction. This painting is both abstract and representational, linear and painterly, a flat plane and a modeled form. The magic and the power of Alex lies in its near-perfect synthesis of these mutually exclusive tendencies. It is everything at once. Small, flat, abstract cells coalesce to represent an impressively realistic form. Up close, at its loosest and most painterly, the work is also at its most rigidly linear. What, after all, could be more linear than a grid of ruled lines? The surface of the canvas is like a beautiful collision of Frank Stella’s early ‘hard edge’ paintings and Philip Guston’s delicate painterly abstractions of the 1950's. We wonder how such disparate elements could ever coexist, and then we see them brought together before our eyes. Everything comes together in Alex; it is a work of outrageous pluralism.
As such, this painting disturbs an outdated but persistent narrative of Modern Art history. The old story, turned into dogma by Clement Greenberg, sees the history of Modern Art from Manet to Morris Louis as a steady forward march into flatness and abstraction. The midcentury New York School–all of whom were, by an amazing coincidence, Greenberg’s friends or acquaintances–can thus be seen as representing a Marx-like ‘end of (art) history’ (accompanied, one assumes, by a dictatorship of the painting proletariat and the withering away of the Met). It’s easy to laugh at such silliness today, but sobering to consider that many otherwise intelligent people took this short-sighted BS seriously. Alas, history has a way of deflating theories of history, and we can now see, contra Greenberg, that midcentury abstraction was no culminating event. Rather, it was an episode in art history that, like Italian Mannerism centuries earlier, came, peaked and went, leaving echoes that resound to the present day. Philip Guston went through abstraction and came out the other side as a marvelously original representational painter. The whole London School (Bacon, Freud, Kitaj, Kossoff, Auerbach) is a grand riposte to Greenberg, and the return of figuration in 1960's Pop Art and Photorealism delivered the coup de grace. The history of art should never be seen as a band of toy soldiers lined up in a row and marching toward a single goal. Artists are just too damned individualistic and unpredictable to make such stories credible. It’s better to think of art history as a pluralistic thing, like Close’s Alex, a set that contains many different and opposing tendencies. It’s a tale out of Borges with a multitude of narrative strands and possibilities.
When Chuck Close emerged in the late Sixties and early Seventies he was pegged as a Photorealist, but as I move back and forth in front of the enormous sneering head of Alex Katz, watching it dissolve into paint and coagulate into form, I think of Close as an artist who defies and denies categorization. This painting blurs the lines that define art historical categories. It marries representation and abstraction so harmoniously that one wonders what all the ca.1950 fuss was about. It blends painterly and geometric abstraction (the cells and the grid, respectively) so seamlessly that one wonders for a minute why these were ever separate categories. Close gives us plenty of Greenberg’s tabooed ‘content’ (the angry, lined face of a real human being), and he realizes this content through adventurously abstract brushwork. Here is a painting that unites and deconstructs the very oppositions by which we might understand it. Alex leaves us without an art historical crutch; we can’t easily pigeonhole it and say, "Aha! Photorealism" or "Aha! Abstraction," because it is both and neither. We must meet the painting on its own terms and try to discover what those terms are. We must keep looking, keep thinking, keep trying to understand.
The way we act in front of Alex–this strategy of advance and retreat–is really quite similar to our behavior in front of other paintings. While studying a standard-sized work by Monet or Seurat, for example, we will step up or lean in to see the individual brushstrokes and then step back to let them mix in the eye. The superhuman scale of Close’s work simply magnifies this behavior, making it more obvious and dramatic. Viewed very closely, most painterly paintings (by Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Delacroix, etc.) contain passages that are as abstract as Alex, a fact that reminds me of Kirk Varnedoe’s argument in A Fine Disregard that art often progresses when a single artist takes a technique that heretofore existed only on the margins of art and makes it the center of his work. Just as Degas made ‘incorrect,’ flattened perspective a hallmark of his compositions and Pollock elevated pouring and dripping to a high art, Close takes the concept of loose brushwork that resolves at a distance and makes it the basis of his style. And the height of his chutzpah is to deploy this synthesis of representation and abstraction in portraiture, the genre that above all others demands likeness to nature. In Alex, Close adheres to Realist doctrine and holds a mirror (however unflattering it may be) up to Alex’s nature. But as a late twentieth-century painter he also holds up a mirror to his own process–the slow, painstaking work of creating the portrait, inch by inch, cell by cell. The beauty of it all is that for Close there’s no contradiction between showing the face and showing the work. Alex surprises us, but it does not deceive. It shows a two-fold truth.
I sit at a table in the lobby of the Toledo Museum and gaze into the large contemporary art gallery where Alex hangs on a far wall. I’m staring at the big face from way back here. Looking. Thinking. Then suddenly, without warning, a fat guy sits down at the next table, completely blocking my line of sight. Time to go.
NOTES
1. Guare, Chuck Close, 40.