Artist Chuck Close, who died Thursday, suffered from face blindness and used his condition to turn o
Strolling through modern art galleries filled with enormous abstract paintings or provocatively empty minimalist grids, it is often a relief to come upon a painting by Chuck Close. At last! A recognizable image. Better still, a human face! Something to respond to, remember, have feelings about. ¶ The irony was that Close, who died Thursday at 81, never really wanted to pander to those kinds of responses. He cherished instead an idea of machine-like neutrality. ¶ Close became famous for painting outsize, photorealistic portraits of himself or close friends. They memorialized what the art critic Morgan Falconer neatly characterized as “the spectacularly anonymous confrontation with very particular human beings.” ¶ Increasingly, as his career developed — and especially after a 1988 spinal artery collapse that left him severely disabled — Close’s paintings were composed of grids of pixel-like squares filled with colored circles, squares and blobs that coalesced into recognizable portraits (which the artist preferred to call “heads”).
Close was an important, if distinctive, member of a group of artists who, from about the mid-1960s, revolted against the idea that art should express emotion. The phenomenon is usually explained as a reaction against the romantic mythology surrounding the preceding generation of abstract expressionists — such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.
But Close, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd and Agnes Martin weren’t just reacting against their predecessors. They were also trying to fortify themselves against encroaching chaos. In an era of cultural revolution, political divisions and high emotion, they sought something cooler, steadier, more emotionally disinterested. They found it in systems, industry and the logic of mathematics. They purged their art not only of poetry and expression but also of everything that might give rise to it: subject matter, recognizable imagery, illusions of space, expressive mark-making.
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To make his enlarged, painted versions of photographic portraits, Close divided his canvases into enormous grids and painted them one square at a time. He tried to think of himself as an impartial medium — the very opposite of a drunken de Kooning (who had been an early hero) throwing paint about the canvas in an expression of inner joy or existential torment.
Inspired by LeWitt, who talked about “letting the system do the work,” Close repressed any hint of self-expression. He became like a riveter on an assembly line, or like his mother doing needlepoint (which he later — likably — claimed as a formative influence). Following LeWitt’s idea that an artwork should be the logical outcome of a given set of rules (“the idea is the machine that makes the work”), Close emphasized the importance of process over product.
He was so successful in these gambits that curators who championed minimalist abstraction, and who thought figurative art inherently passe, were willing to set aside the fact that Close was still painting faces. And that people respond emotionally to faces.
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Or most people do. “Once the idea is established in the artist’s mind,” LeWitt said, “the process is carried out blindly.” But the unexpected thing about this last notion when applied to Close — a thunderbolt, really — was that he actually suffered from face blindness.
Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, is an inability to recognize people’s faces. It can have a range of consequences, from an inability to follow the plots of movies to a fear of social situations, anxiety and depression.
“I’m sure I was driven to paint portraits by being face blind,” Close said in a taped 2010 conversation with the late Oliver Sacks (who was also face blind). Close, who also had dyslexia as a child, explained that seeing mobile faces in three dimensions made them impossible to recognize but that fixing them made them memorable.
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“If I can flatten an image out, and scan it ... I can commit it to memory,” he said.
When I heard this, it seemed like the key to understanding Close’s oeuvre, which I had struggled up until then to like.
“The way I work,” he explained in the same conversation, “is to make this kind of Brobdingnagian world in which I make the face into a landscape and I journey across that landscape like Gulliver’s Lilliputians crawling over the face of a giant, not knowing that they were on the face of a giant but knowing everything about that face. And then what I do is put all that information together ... and I can commit it to memory.”
This is absolutely fascinating.
But it’s also where I begin to rebel.
If Close gradually became more interesting as a public commentator on his art than as a producer of reliably compelling new work, it feels ungracious to fault him for it. He was articulate, his story was interesting, he had overcome so much. After his spinal artery collapse, it was almost miraculous — it was certainly a testament to his courage and determination — that he had found a way, after a prolonged and grueling period of rehabilitation, to carry on painting at all.
If the work itself, both before and after the injury, seemed short on interest compared with his early breakthroughs — his “Big Self-Portrait” of 1967-1968 or “Phil,” the 1969 portrait of his friend, the minimalist composer Philip Glass — what of it? All artists like to imagine themselves consistently improving and eventually entering a “great, late” phase. But very few actually do. And what then? Publicly expounding upon your past achievements might be the next best option.
But I don’t think Close’s interesting explanations for what motivated him always translated into compelling reasons for the rest of us to admire his work. Once I got over the fun of seeing his deliberately transparent technique, I tended to struggle to find reasons to keep looking.
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The faces themselves, mostly based on deliberately neutral photographs, had a Teflon-like quality. Nothing adhesive. Nothing to hang onto. No connection. And the application of paint, in the end, lacked beauty. You only had to think of portraitists who applied paint with feeling and style — Édouard Manet, Edvard Munch, Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon — to be made aware of how much was missing.
Close tried to convince himself that, despite his determination to maintain neutrality, his role was nonetheless crucial: Something subjective, something bearing the mark of his own distinctive personality, would always reveal itself, he believed. Trying to explain why, he speculated that by spending “so much time working on it I’m putting in a kind of nuanced inflection rather than making an absolutely direct translation.” The results, he said, “almost always end up looking more like the person.”
But all of this is debatable. Good photographs already look very much “like the person.” Close only rarely added to what photography can communicate. He more often left the photographic image depleted. In any case, why set such stringent limits on the artist’s contribution if the point is to show that subjectivity and artistic interpretation will sneak into the process anyway? Why not just let rip?
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For Close, breaking up images of faces into frictionless grids of amorphous abstractions was not only therapy for the condition of face blindness. It was also a neat way to demonstrate that we are all congregations of infinitesimal parts. We coalesce into living forms, then disperse into the infinite. But studying cell biology or simply zooming in on any pixelated digital image leads to the same insight. It is permissible to expect more from portraiture.
In the long term, deprived of the articulate commentary of the man who made it, I think Close’s work will suffer. His magnified and cleverly cropped portraits will always draw people’s attention — especially in galleries where they are surrounded by abstraction. But it’s hard to see interest in his work deepening much beyond that.
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