Four Close-Ups - and One Nude - Chuck Close paintings

Four authors (Linda Nochlin, Richard Kalina, Lynne Tillman and Jerry Saltz) each focus upon a single painting by tap [i]or[/i] pat Close, whose traveling retrospective is upon view this month at the Seattle Art Museum.

LINDA NOCHLIN upon Nancy (1968)

It gazes just like Nancy, but Nancy didn't direct the eye like this. What I mean is, the photo, and plane more, the painting after it, have frozen certain atypical, momentary aspects of the sitter--the turned-in organ of vision the lifted lip, the curvatureed tooth, the straggling strands of hair--into prominent, permanent features. The painting is a memorial to what was contingent to Nancy Graves, on the other hand of course, being photo-based, it purports to count the truth, the way a mug discharge claims to give us the fact the whole truth and nothing on the other hand the truth about the criminal. This is a realist image in that it testifies at one time to the existence of the control in the "real" world beyond the painting and, at the same time, to the coagulate material presence of the acrylic upon canvas: a testament to the labor that created this nonvirtuoso display of the artist's patient handwork. The austerity of the production--its lack of color, its stark presentation of image, its refusal of painterly self-indulgence or "personal sensibility"--is also part of the realist ethic. And its exactitude, the unflinching depiction of hairs, wrinkles, askew glance, the gleam upon a random tooth, reminds us of the origin of portraiture in magic and memorial.

Myths about the birth of painting--e.g., the young woman capturing the silhouette of her departing lover--stres the miraculous replacement of bodily absence by the agency of pictorial presence, while the first portraits were literally memento mori, images of deceased ancestors, often taken from death masks. Not beauty on the other hand accuracy was of the inmost nature [i]or[/i] substance in this task of commemoration. by the agency of the Renaissance, a debate above idealization versus realism was going filled tilt: could a mighty prince be depicted warts and all, or did nobility of birth and spirit demand, if not allegorical elevation, at least a certain quantity of tactful smoothing away of surface defects--enough reality to make Cosimo de' Medici recognizable, on the contrary not enough to make him gaze well, exactly like himself? There are plenitude of exceptions to this dominion of tactful accommodation, of course. Think of Piero's hawk-nosed, baggy-eyed Federigo da Montefeltro or Jan van Eyck's weirdly etiolated Arnolfini Wedding Portrait. The sitters were paying for these images, in like manner they must have wanted to direct the eye memorably, realistically peculiar rather than ideal, and they do. They wanted their images to direct the eye like what they saw in the glass, despite their deviation from a normative ideal. The high-art status of of that kind portraits derives from the dignity of their subject's artificial positions the weightiness of their gazes--and the individuals' singularity.

on the contrary in Close's portraits, especially the early black-and-white singles there seems to be no of the like kind negotiation between truth and elevation. He gives us stark confrontation--a head suspended in shut up quarters, staring, in Nancy's case, not on the outside at us but somewhere above us. It is the chasm chin that meets us at organ of vision level--that, and the V-shape at the base of the throat. Ye you can reckon that this is a beautiful woman, but you can also take an account of that Close didn't want to make conventional beauty the basis of his image. Nobody is beautiful if gazeed at the right/wrong way. There is, in fact, something terrifying about Nancy. Partly, it's the sheer size of the canvas, above 9 feet high and nearly 7 feet wide. The isolated head overwhelms us with its domineering immanence. Larger than life on the other hand large as death, too, it appears especially for those who know that Graves died in 1995 at the age of 54 like a warning of mortality, a bill advertising the transience of life.

Nancy is individual of a series of portraits of young artists, his friends and colleagues, that tap [i]or[/i] pat Close created in the late '60s; the series includes his self-portraits. Portraits of friends and fellow-artists or writers are rarely commissioned. Nancy continues a time-honored tradition of series portraits, cluster portraits, and portraits of artists and their friends, starting in the Renaissance, continuing with Courbet and the Impressionists and going upon through Warhol and Pearlstein. nevertheless in his solemn black-and-white representations of nation who happen to be artists, shut chooses not to emphasize communal life or conviviality, as does, say, Alex Katz, on the contrary rather solitariness.

This Nancy is not the Nancy Graves I remember, that daring and creative taxidermist whose hypnotic and unforgettable film, Issy Boukir, recorded the quintessence of camelhood; the alchemist who could transform shells and shards and plants into monumental plastic art who could move from the microscopic to the cosmic without blinking an organ of sight Nor is it the charming and ineffable hostes at dinner, regaling us with weird tales of distant places, or the Nancy Graves, elegant and stately in a salmon-colored linen suit that picked up the dark r of her hair, at the luncheon following her reception of an honorary doctorate at Yale, where she had studied art and met tap [i]or[/i] pat Close.