CHUCK CLOSE
American
Although recognized primarily as a painter, Chuck
Close has also been a photographer since college.
Photography is integral to his paintings and prints;
his photographs are in turn influenced by his
approaches to painting.
Close is best known for iconic portraits that are
often more than eight feet high. They begin as
photographs that he takes with a 2024 Polaroid
camera. He overlays the photo with a penciled grid
on a sheet of acetate, which he uses to transfer the
image in a process he calls ‘‘knitting.’’ Each square
in the grid contains a mark that is subtly different
from the others and is intriguing for its pattern and
value. But when the viewer shifts perspective from
the individual mark to the entire painting, the
marks meld into a synergistic whole as they begin
to define a human face. Close’s oeuvre can be
viewed in the same way: the subject matter varies
little—always head and shoulders of a family mem-
ber, friend, or fellow artist—yet when viewed as a
whole paints a much bigger picture.
Close first studied photography in the early
1960s after attending Yale University’s summer
art program. A methodical artist who admits to
being a ‘‘control freak,’’ Close earned a B.F.A.
and an M.F.A. with highest honors from the Yale
University School of Art. There he studied with
Philip Guston and Robert Rauschenberg. His
classmates included realist painters Rackstraw
Downes and Janet Fish, and conceptual and mi-
nimalist artists Richard Serra and Nancy Graves,
who later became subjects of his portraits. ‘‘The
trouble is, if it looks like art, it must look like
someone else’s art or it wouldn’t look like art,’’ he
has said, referring to early influences that he imi-
tated briefly. ‘‘When I met De Kooning I said,
‘How do you do? My name is Chuck Close. I’m
the person who’s made almost as many De Koon-
ings as you’ve made.’’
Close says that he used photography to answer
questions such as what it means to make a repre-
sentational painting after the invention of photo-
graphy. The important distinction of post-war
American art, according to Close, was the ‘‘sense
of overallness’’ expressed in a painting by Jackson
Pollock or Frank Stella. He intended to apply that
sense to portraiture by making every feature as
important as the next—to make the mustache
hairs as important as the eyes. ‘‘The camera is not
aware of what it is looking at. It just gets it all
down,’’ he has said.
His portraits are simultaneously confrontational
and coolly distant. The large format of the Polar-
oid image and the grand scale of his prints and
paintings create tension between the artificiality of
the flat surface and what the viewer eventually
recognizes as a human face. By keeping the subject
matter consistent, he minimizes the variables,
heightening that friction between style and content.
He chooses his enormous scale to accentuate the
physical characteristics, lighting and posing his
subjects not to flatter them but to introduce inter-
esting details. ‘‘Every viewer enters the work
through the shared humanity of looking in a mir-
ror, or looking at the faces of loved ones, no matter
how much art historical baggage they bring,’’ he
explains. Ignoring the emotional aspects of the
human face, he heightens its impersonal nature by
discouraging any suggestion of expression and by
using only the first names of his models in the titles.
He refers to his portraits simply as ‘‘heads.’’
At first, he worked from found photographs; by
1966, he was making paintings based on photo-
graphs he had taken himself. In 1975, Close
moved to the 2024 Polaroid format because its
immediacy generated dialogue with his models and
allowed him to make changes as he worked. This
interaction let him ‘‘slowly sneak up on what I
wanted rather than having to predetermine what
it was.’’ The incremental process of responding to
and modifying the existing is formalized in a tech-
nique he began using in his paintings in the 1970s.
Instead of mixing his colors on the palette, Close
replicates the dye-transfer process of building
images by applying thin layers of magenta, cyan,
and yellow directly on the canvas. He then applies
‘‘corrections’’ to achieve his desired result, disco-
vering the color through the process.
He does, however, acknowledge that his por-
traits are of real people. ‘‘When someone lends
me their image ... they don’t know what I’m going
to do with it, they have no control over it, they’reCLOSE, CHUCK