ARTbeat

My return from my study abroad in Firenze—which sits in my mind as a museum more than a city—marked a re-immersion into the modern world. I had not only observed and learned but also lived and breathed the Italian Renaissance. Now, ready for an art exhibit that did not involve a Madonna and Child, I moved from traditions deeply grounded in the past back to New York, a place that consistently uncovering the now and the new.

So, I got home, checked the net and went straight to the MET to see “Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration.” Known for his exploded cubic portraits, today’s take on French pointillism, Close’s works are found in shows and collections of modern art globally.

Close’s work depicts his friends and himself. He starts with his own enormous Polaroid shots and then dissects them. He begins with an end, breaks it down and then reassembles it. He takes a photo of a face, grids it out on a piece of graph paper and then fills in colors. Simple, right? No way. This ability to create a whole, not out of layering of light and shade, but instead out of placing cubes of color seems impossibly genius. It is not a normal way to see.

In this exhibition, the final product takes a backseat to the process. Close examines and re-examines multiple faces in a wide range of materials. Take, for instance, a portrait entitled “Emma.” In 2000, it was a painting; by 2002 it had been dissected a second time and made into a print. A master woodcut printer, Yasu Shibata, joined Close to separate the over 112 colors into print plates. They recreated the same final product through an entirely different series of steps. The original painting and a print hang together, and the works are virtually the same. Yet this display of talent, of reproduction, hardly held my attention.

Instead, I was taken aback by the series of blocks used to build these final prints: six pieces of maple plywood, 44 by 36 inches, each covered with various shades and colors of ink. These stages, individually numbered, made the printing process accessible to the viewer. For example, number four was in light blues and a jumble of biomorphic shapes, all almost impossible to match up on the end result. Number twenty-three looked like blobs of brown and red, that eventually became the hair, mouth and eyes. Granted, woodcut-printing techniques are hardly unusual in the world of art; in fact, it is a process taught here at Wesleyan. The Close-Shibata collaboration took woodcuts to a level of complication and sophistication virtually unimaginable. This print involved over one hundred phases to reach the end result.

Perhaps the artist represents his goals best in one of the simplest pieces on view in the gallery entrance. There hang twelve progressive scribble drawings in colored pencil from 2000. Close starts with a base—red zig-zagging lines that barely readable as a face. Each step is represented on a new piece of paper and each phase is met with an additional color; red meets with blue, showing the direction of the piece; dark brown is added, bringing the final image depth.

Looking at and reflecting upon these works, I thought about how difficult it is for an artist to cede control of his work to another artist, to allow him to touch a piece, to share his vision. This is especially and conveniently poignant when looking at Close, an artist who no longer has control over most of his body. In late 1988, Close suffered a near-fatal aneurism and is now a partial paraplegic. He has not allowed this to stop him from creating his art and although he makes his images out of many media with the help of others, he continues to paint and see his vision through on his own. Although he is not too proud to solicit help, he hardly relies on it. But Close’s disability should not be the viewers focus, because it is not his. In Chuck Close, Life and Work, by John Guare, the artist states, “Look at the last painting I did before my whatever you want to call it…This was the path I had been on, the dissolution of the image.”

Close was born in Wisconsin in 1940; he attended the University of Washington, and earned his MFA at Yale University. In 1998, a retrospective of the artist’s work was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This exhibit had been originally planned for the MET. Different visions lead to the change in locale and Chuck Close became one of the few artists to turn down an exhibit at the MET. The show on view today represents reconciliation between artist and museum, and celebration of a modern master.

A self-aware man, Close constantly recycles his own image, giving it many lives through an eclectic range of materials. The most startling piece was a self-portrait made entirely out of paper pulp in eleven shades of gray. Working with a number of people from Dieu Donne Papermill, Inc., Close separated his own face into organic shapes and than created a brass grill or a mold into which he would pour the various tones of pulp. On display next to the mold and the final product were the progressive prints, showing each of the stages. For example, in step one, Close filled each hole with color; the whole face was revealed. This first piece resembled a thermal graphing of the body in which different temperatures show up as different colors. With each subsequent print he complicated the piece by adding grays, which serve to add texture and detail to his face. Again we see an usual and methodological building of a face.

I must admit that it is not only difficult to imagine producing the majority of the work on display but it also feels virtually impossible to explain these processes. The art is found within both the stages and the final product, and they must be seen in order to truly understand.