Chuck Close Famous Art Size of Big Self Portrait 1907
Chuck Close's groundbreaking Big Self-Portrait is shown publicly for the starting time time on April 17, 1970.
- By Fred Poyner Iv
- Posted 7/10/2015
- HistoryLink.org Essay 11085
On Apr 17, 1970, American painter Charles "Chuck" Close (1940-2021) exhibits his breakthrough painting Big Self-Portrait (1967-1968) publicly for the offset time. The huge cocky-portrait, a painted enlargement of a shut-up photo of the creative person's face, is function of an exhibition titled Three Young Americans that opens that day at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin Higher in Ohio. The exhibition, which runs through May 12, 1970, features the piece of work of artists Neil Jenney (b. 1945) and Ron Cooper (b. 1943) in addition to Shut. This showtime public display of Large Self-Portrait comes not long after the piece of work's purchase past the Walker Art Eye in Minneapolis. The painting is both the first self-portrait of the artist's career (many volition follow) and his first artwork sold to an arts establishment.
A New Approach
Built-in in Monroe, Snohomish County, Chuck Close grew up in Everett and Tacoma, where he expert cartoon and painting from a immature age. Close studied fine art at Everett Junior College then the University of Washington, from which he graduated in 1962, earlier moving on to further study at Yale University and then in Vienna.
While influenced by the Abstract Expressionist motion underway during the years of his formal education as a painter in the early 1960s, Close began experimenting in 1967 with a new approach to combining abstraction and realism. He took a series of black-and-white photographs, then used a grid placed over one of these images to paint, grid section by grid section, the prototype on an enlarged scale. The first such painting, Big Self-Portrait, stands nearly ix feet tall and shows the artist's head and shoulders rendered in minute detail: a cigarette jutting from the right corner of the mouth, the musculature of the neck where it meets the bare shoulders, the pilus framing the face in a tangle. In 1969, painting was purchased by the Walker Art Center at a cost of $1,300 for its permanent collection. Martin Friedman (b. 1925), an early advocate of Close who was managing director of the Walker from 1961 until 1990, recalled that "the price was correct" and that it remained a point of friendly rivalry between the two men over the years (Friedman, eleven).
Motivations and Techniques
Close offered a new way of looking at portraits through this arroyo, noting "people think that if you have a photographic epitome, there is pretty much only one matter you tin do with information technology, that because of its iconography, it is fixed ... but changing the medium, the method of mark-making, and the scale transforms the experience of that prototype into something new" ("Tacoma Art Museum Presents ...").
Not simply was Large Self-Portrait a milestone for Chuck Close in its adoption of the portrait every bit a consistent, principal theme in his work, but it was besides significant as the first artwork he achieved using a new approach to painting technique, with non-traditional tools, such as an airbrush, a razor blade, and an eraser on a ability drill. The process was one of conservation and reduction, where paint was thinned down, scraped, erased, and reapplied sparingly. Ane tube of blackness paint alone was used to produce seven more portrait paintings.
Close explained this was a conscious choice he fabricated in 1967, and that he was convinced that doing so would assistance propel him in a new and positive direction as an artist: "If you impose a limit to non practice something y'all've done before, it volition push you lot to where you've never gone earlier" (Norman).
Many Portraits Follow
In the decades that followed Big Cocky-Portrait, Chuck Shut continued to paint both self-portraits (31 according to the Artifex Press catalogue raisonné) and portraits of many others, even following a debilitating stroke in 1988 that left him partially paralyzed. His subjects ranged from friends and acquaintances to young man artists, poets, performers, actors, and musicians. Notable as well are several collaborations with others -- such as a series of portraits paired with poems by Bob Holman (b. 1948) featured in 2008 at the Tacoma Art Museum -- which served to continue the creative person's vision of the portrait every bit an expressive subject field both on the individual level and through a growing body of his work. While continuing to focus on the human face up equally inspiration, Close adapted different technical styles and media to his liking, producing work ranging from daguerreotypes and tapestries to digital paint prints, finger paintings, collages, and acrylics on canvas. In the 45 years since his first self-portrait went on public exhibition in 1970, Close participated in nigh 800 group exhibitions.
In 1997 Shut was honored by the University of Washington's College of Fine Arts as Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus. The artist had come far since earning his bachelor of arts caste from the university in 1962, with specific mention made in the 1997 offset program of his achievements in portraiture: "these portraits, whose subjects seem to deliquesce and reform every bit the viewer moves nearer or farther away, hang in museums and private collections effectually the world, including the National Gallery in Washington, DC and the Tate Gallery in London" (Program of Exercises, 11). In the same year, another self-portrait done in oil on canvas showed the artist in 3-quarter profile view, with this version destined for the Museum of Modernistic Art's collection in New York.
About his portraits and art in general, Shut expounded on his before motivations which had their genesis in his first self-portrait: "'Why make art? Because I think at that place's a child's voice in every artist proverb, I am here. I am somebody. I made this. Won't you wait?'" (Kimmelman). In 1967, the twelvemonth he took the kickoff serial of photos for his cocky-portrait, Shut moved to New York, where as of 2015 he connected to piece of work out of his studio.
Sources:
Martin Friedman, Close Reading -- Chuck Close and the Art of the Self-Portrait (New York: Harry North. Abrams, 2005), 11; "Tacoma Art Museum Presents Chuck Shut," December 12, 2007, Artdaily.org website accessed June eleven, 2015 (http://artdaily.com/news/22591/Tacoma-Art-Museum-Presents-Chuck-Shut-Portraits#.VWCX8UZRIhk); Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, Chuck Close upward Close (New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 1998), 18; Michael Norman, "Contemporary Fine art Legend Chuck Shut Talks About Painting, Creativity and a New Exhibition at the Akron Fine art Museum," September 1, 2009, cleveland.com website accessed June 4, 2015 (http://www.cleveland.com/arts/alphabetize.ssf/2009/09/contemporary_art_legend_chuck.html); "Chuck Close Named 2009 Harman Eisner Creative person in Residence," May 27, 2009, The Aspen Plant website accessed June 5, 2015 (http://www.aspeninstitute.org/news/2009/05/27/chuck-close-named-2009-harman-eisner-artist-residence); Program of Exercises -- One Hundred Twenty-2d Commencement, June 13, 1997 (Seattle: University of Washington, 1997), eleven; Michael Kimmelman, "Sought or Imposed, Limits Tin Take Flight," The New York Times, July 25, 1997 (http://world wide web.nytimes.com); "Chuck Shut Catalogue Raisonné," Artifex Printing website accessed June 7, 2015 (https://artifexpress.com/catalogues/chuck-close); HistoryLink.org Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, "Shut, Charles T. 'Chuck' (b. 1940)" (by Fred Poyner Iv), http://www.historylink.org/ (accessed July 10, 2015).
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