Alex
Chuck Close1987
The Toledo Museum of Art
Toledo, United States
“I try to make these big, aggressive, confrontational images that you can see from clear across the room, and you have one kind of relationship with it there, and another relationship at a middle viewing distance where you can scan it and you can’t readily see the thing as a whole. And then hopefully I’ve sucked the viewer right up to the canvas where you can see the individual marks and methodology—how it got there.” —Chuck Close Chuck Close’s monumental portraits draw attention to process as well as image. Working from a 24 x 20-inch Polaroid, Close imposed a grid to enlarge and transfer the image of artist Alex Katz (American, born 1927) onto canvas. He then applied thousands of dabs of paint, allowing the grid to remain visible. Viewed from a distance, the small painted squares optically blend into an illusionistic portrait, but at close range they separate into abstract markings. Katz’s distinctive features project an intense personality. However, since Close emphasizes factual, visual information and process, the painting’s emotional power is more a byproduct of the technique, scale, and iconic frontality of the image than of any intended psychological interpretation.
- Title: Alex
- Creator: Chuck Close
- Creator Lifespan: 1940
- Creator Nationality: American
- Creator Gender: Male
- Creator Death Place: New York, United States
- Creator Birth Place: Washington, United States
- Date Created: 1987
- Physical Location: Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
- Location Created: North American
- Physical Dimensions: 88 1/2 x 149 5/8 in. (225 x 3.8 m)
- Subject Keywords: portrait; man; face; bust; abstrat; pixelated; pigment; pointilism
- Type: Painting
- Rights: https://toledomuseum.org/collection/image-resources
- External Link: Toledo Museum of Art
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Fun Fact: About Face“I try to make these big, aggressive, confrontational images that you can see from clear across the room, and you have one kind of relationship with it there, and another relationship at a middle viewing distance where you scan it and you can’t readily see the thing as a whole. And then hopefully I’ve sucked the viewer right up to the canvas where you can see the individual marks and methodology—how it got there.” Chuck Close, 1998 When confronted with this eightfoot tall painting of his face, artist Alex Katz exclaimed wryly, “I have a small beautiful nose, and it looks enormous . . . . Look at what this guy did to me!” Chuck Close creates colossal, uncomfortably matterof- fact portraits from close-up photographs of his friends and family. He often reuses the photographs to create images in a number of mediums; he made a watercolor and a large-scale silkscreen from the same picture of Katz. His images seem almost intrusively intimate. The physicality of his paintings is matched by their psychological presence. As Katz noted of Alex, it is “more like an inner statement than an outer statement. I don’t think it has much to do with the way I appear; but it has everything to do with the way I am.” A Closer Look Close uses a hand-drawn grid to scale up from a 24 x 20-inch photograph to an enormous painting. The grid is a useful tool, but also an art historical reference: the ancient Egyptians used it, and Modern artists employed it as a flattening device—a way to emphasize the surface of a painting. Close leaves his grid visible, painstakingly filling each square with marks to build a mosaic-like image that, when viewed from a distance, coalesces into a face. When seen up close, the individual squares become fields of colors and shapes. This laborious process can occupy several months of daily work to finish one painting. Inspiring first awe and then intimate scrutiny, Chuck Close's large-scale portraits draw attention to process as well as image. Working from photographs, Close imposes a grid—which is left visible—to enlarge and transfer the image onto canvas (the Museum also owns Close's original 24 by 20 inch Polaroid® for Alex, with the grid drawn on in felt-tip pen). Viewed from a distance, the thousands of small painted squares optically blend into an illusionistic portrait, but separate into abstract markings at close range. This dissolution of form is evident to Close; while painting he is not "conscious of making a nose or an eye but only of distributing pigment on a flat surface." Close not only uses photographs as the basis of his work, he replicates the camera's facsimile of reality, maintaining the distortions caused by the camera's limited depth of field. Here, the areas surrounding the eyes are most in focus, while the ears, the tip of the nose, and the top of the hair appear fuzzy.As was typical until Close's more recent work, the sitter—Close's friend, artist Alex Katz—is posed frontally and symmetrically, shown from the neck and shoulders up; the scale is monumental. By adhering to an inflexible presentation as well as a systematic technique, Close stresses the similarities between his subjects before he explores their differences. Katz's unique features project an intense, almost aggressive, personality. However, since Close emphasizes factual, visual information and process, the painting's emotional power is more a byproduct of the technique, scale, and iconic frontality of the image than of any intended psychological interpretation.
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