Chuck Close, Up Close And Impersonal By Henry Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 22, 1998

Chuck Close's self-portrait from 1967-68. (Courtesy Walker Art Center)

After an early career as what he calls a "junior abstract expressionist," Close caught photorealism on the rise with a 9-by-7-foot black-and-white acrylic of himself in 1969.

As a portrait, it was an art school graduate's fantasy – a head shot with stubble and cigarette, the look of a Bohemian thug staring down a Fotomat machine. But it wasn't really a portrait. It was a picture of a photograph of a person – merciless in its nostril-hair detail and unsettling in its impersonality, like a TV blowup of a crash victim's passport picture. Dead? Alive?

The self-portrait opens a show of about 120 Chuck Close pictures at the Hirshhorn Museum. More gigantic heads follow from the early days, all of them linked to the art world: artist Nancy Graves with feral teeth and desperate eyes; sculptor Keith Hollingsworth's lopsided alienation; and composer Philip Glass looking wary, endangered and beautiful.

The picture of Glass, called "Phil," was the first Close I ever saw. It was 1970, and I was wandering around on an early spring day in New York. I fetched up in front of the Whitney Museum. Go see the Pollocks! The Klines! But I got off the elevator on the wrong floor.

I looked around. Where were the eruptions of existential brooding? Instead, I was standing in the middle of a show called "22 Realists," a gathering of meticulous reproductions of actual things. How bizarre, and how brain-tingling: a cityscape built on the contorted reflections in chrome and glass; a living room lit by both sunshine and a television – paintings executed with a clearness so deep that it had a sly coolness about it, a psychedelic edginess.

Then I saw the Close picture of Glass. I was appalled. What depth there was came from photographic focus. You didn't look through the clarity, you looked at the face and the paint. It was a lip-wrinkled, finger-combed head the size of a May Day poster of Mao; an alienated black-and-white nobody staring down at me like Big Brother; the human face as vacant lot littered with whiskers, a few glinting teeth and a pair of glasses. It wasn't realism like the rest of the show. On the other hand, few things short of a pistol pressed to your neck are realer than a nine-foot human face staring right at you.

Some animal instinct took over, and for a moment I found myself asking very simple questions: Friend? Foe? Huge or very close? Photograph or painting? Art? Document? Monumental or ironic? And what was with this nickname? It made me think of some guy who'd spent a lot of his youth lying under cars. (As it happens, he'd gone as Charles until a printing error made him Chuck, and he stayed with it.)

Even more unsettling, Close obviously knew what he was doing. You could always think of Pollock's drunkenness and anguish as a form of naivete. Close was not naive. After art school at the University of Washington and Yale, he knew the old rule that you never paint a portrait head bigger than life. He'd learned from pop art the aesthetic implications of painting a picture of a photograph. He'd learned from modernism – Mondrian, Malevich, the constructivists – the uses of grids.

He laid a grid over a photograph. Then he penciled on the canvas a grid with much larger squares. He numbered the grids – B5, N17 and so on. Then he copied each grid-square from photograph to canvas. Each square was its own little abstraction, equal to any of the others.

They added up to a painting of a photograph that happened to be a portrait of one of his friends. By abstracting both photographs and friends, Close made the friends incidental to the painting, and attacked the notion of photograph as reality. He made you look at photographs as objects instead of media for re-creating visual experience. He wreaked on both photography and photorealism the revenge of abstraction and the art establishment.

Though he reduced photographs to objects, he preserved their quality of time – the quality of it was like this right there, right then. And he preserved their subjects. So, against his will, he got lumped with the realists.

There was nothing abstract about the experience of seeing Close's heads. They stared at you like the billboard head of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in "The Great Gatsby." Here, though, the moral of the story was not that reality would catch up with you someday, but that art already had.

Now, at 58, he's still gridding away on heads, heads, heads. Obsession . . . or it's more like a passionate persistence: Close has kept painting the heads while raising a family, attaining a Hamptons-hideaway income, and suffering through near paralysis from a collapsed spinal artery 10 years ago – he works from a wheelchair and fits a brush to a harness on his hand.

The show is like a gigantic Chuck Close souvenir stand. Here's a lovely ink-and-pencil. Over there are heads done on paper mounted on canvas. Perhaps you'd like to see the grid turned on a diagonal so that the edges of the face look like they were cut out with gigantic pinking shears, as in "Paul," a 1994 rendering of artist Paul Cadmus. You almost look for T-shirts and beach towels.

He has done heads as small as postage stamps. He's done them in black-and-white and color. He's done them in watercolors, oils, acrylics, photographs, holograms, daguerreotypes, mezzotints, woodcuts, linoleum cuts and screen prints. He's used bristle brushes, airbrushes, pencils, Conte crayon, gouache, pastels, oil-based ink, stamp-pad ink, digital jet ink, fingerprints and pieces of wet pulp paper. Grids have gotten tighter and looser.

Close gets to keep his abstractionist credentials by making the pictures about technique rather than their subjects. There's "Robert," for instance, with a big, shaggy '70s mustache and wire-rim glasses with a brow-bar. You watch "Robert" grow from a tiny 154-dot picture through 616, 2,464, 9,856 and 104,072 dots. You see Close's grid-squares and Robert's whiskers filling them in vertical and horizontal lines.

Okay, fine, but technique and aesthetics aside, what you're looking at is faces. All the rest is criticism.

In a procession of big curving Hirshhorn galleries, the faces hang far enough apart to preserve their lonely vastness. You feel tiny, almost invisible, walking past them. You have the sense of clean, empty space, like an empty hold on a movie spaceship, a modernist Eden of vacancy. The people up there are like the blind – they can't see you, so you can stare at them all you want – except you worry you're taking advantage of them, and somehow they know it.

Take comfort in noting that Close is even more merciless: "Richard" with his asymmetry, "Fanny" with her infinite old-age wrinkles surrounding a sweet smile that doesn't understand SoHo hipness, "Linda" like a woman looking in the mirror and surrendering to time, unhappiness, something. The face of "Nat," who is Close's father-in-law, disintegrates into something as impersonal as a random fingerprint or an aerial view of a desert.

Despite – or because of – the Fotomat hokiness of their posturing or alienation, these faces are emblems of our time.

They look a little ridiculous, like one-person versions of 1950s movie audiences photographed in 3-D glasses. They have the empty patience of a model waiting for a studio full of fashion editors to make up their minds – being stared at is their job. Or they're weirdly miraculous, like a supermarket tabloid photo of the face of Jesus in a tortilla. There's American tragedy here – you see unknown faces exalted like billboard celebrities. The exaltation reminds you that they're nobodies. Fame/ obscurity, heroism/schlumpism, lifemask/deathmask.

They have a tremor of mortality that befits an age of Peter Pans who don't believe in death, and therefore don't believe in life except as a shopping trip or an ongoing, personal movie.

In the holograms toward the end of the show, pallid busts of Close press toward you like the ghost of Hamlet's father. His beard looks too well rendered, as if he were a Neanderthal in a natural history diorama and some prankster sneaked in and put a pair of eyeglasses on him. Dead? Alive? When Close was 11, the only child of a working-class couple in Seattle, he saw his father dead, slumped out of bed with his face on the floor. Maybe this sight made the terrible confusions of mortality a chronic presence in his life and work.

His recent heads are warmer than his earlier ones, but not much – it's like the difference between a wiring diagram and a color-coded circuit board. And now he paints little expressionist patterns inside the grid-squares, like something in drapery painted by Gustav Klimt – Close saw his paintings as a student in Vienna.

There are pleasant truths throughout the show, sometimes the same truths as the unpleasant ones. Beauty is truth and truth beauty, and neither one has much to do with pleasantness. As for the unpleasant truths, so what? Close is not really a portraitist and he's never accepted a commission.

Would you want a nine-foot Chuck Close picture of your wary Fotomat face in your house? Philip Glass doesn't. A lot of people don't, apparently. Close has said: "Everyone has the same dread. . . . They have a lot of trouble with their images and aren't comfortable hanging them around the house." If you can't take the cool, stay out of the museum, too.

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