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After Andy Warhol and maybe Keith Haring, Chuck Close is the most recognizable artist in America.
His gigantic gridded, pixelated abstract vivisections and dissections changed the face of portraiture in art history.
In 1967, the 27-year-old Yale M.F.A.
graduate wasliving in Amherst.
Then Close jumped ship.
Bolder still, he turned his back on geometric abstraction, Pop Art,minimalism, and Conceptualism.
He created a gigantic 10-by-22-foot, almost monochrome grisaillephotorealistic painting of a reclining nude woman.
It was almost unfinished in that it could never be as surfaceless and almost immaterial as a photograph.
Then he destroyed the painting.
I can see why.
In 1967,he moved to New York, becoming one of the early artists settling in Soho.
You got little in terms of subject matter other than a male face.
It toggled between retinal thrill and mystery and ontological mystery.
Close was an artist mutineer.
Close hadnt taken the bait of the certainty of the death of painting.
Others grasped the enormous potential of what hed done.
He didnt have his first solo show until 1970 but had already sold work to a museum.
Catastrophe struck him as he was leaving Gracie Mansion on December 7, 1988.
He was struck by a pain in his neck and walked to a nearby hospital.
By the next morning, he was paralyzed from the neck down.
It would be hard to overstate how saddened and shocked the art scene was.
Closes then-wife, Leslie, walked in.
Behind her I saw Close heft himself with great difficulty out of his wheelchair.
This was his defiance, pride, will, and doggedness made flesh.
Soon he taught himself to paint again by strapping brushes to his hand and wrist.
He constructed a huge movingeasel in his studio and went back to work.
The catastrophe brought a needed change to the art that had started to turn predictable.
He started to paint in looser, less finished, more raw, abstract ways.
He made thousands of little abstract painted squares and triangles and shapes inside other little abstract shapes.
Close claimed that he had prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize peoples faces.
The new work gave form to that idea of seeing, knowing but not recognizing.
This was essential to me.
I had grown tired of Closes predictable method, touch, subject-matter, scale, framing, and surface.
Its a testament to his tenacity that he kept painting and found another way to do it.
A few years afterreceiving the National Medal, he painted Bill Clinton.
He photographed Brad Pitt and Kate Moss.
For me, however, his work ossified, turning emotionally empty, claustrophobic, untested, on autopilot.
Maybe its my own timidity as a critic, but I never wrote this.
At every opening I saw him at, he was surrounded by young artists paying homage.
He took to wearing flamboyant colored dashikis.
For a time, he was mischievously referred to as Mayor of Soho.
In 2017, Close was accused of sexually harassing several women, the first in 2005.
They reported being invited to his studio to pose, where Close treated them inappropriately.
In aninterview, Close sounded a terrible note.
I acknowledge having a dirty mouth, but were all adults.
In a way, I never went back to his work again.
I saw him argue with other artists at Pace once.
It all started to add up.)
Regardless, the art-world reaction was swift.
Overnight, Close became artist non grata.
His work disappeared from certain public collections; a major retrospective was canceled.
Then I remembered a series of panels and lectures at the Puck Building that I participated in.
I went back into the audience and watched Jennings ask my question.
Other than feeling the fool, I never thought about it again.
