Finch Chuck Close: Life

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-3-641-08341-0
Verlag: Prestel
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 350 Seiten

This is the first book to tell the inspiring story of near tragedy and ultimate triumph behind the dazzling work of one of today's most respected and best-loved artists. Chuck Close is one of the most acclaimed American artists to emerge since Andy Warhol. His larger-than-life portraits look out from the walls of museums and galleries around the globe. His virtuosity and variety of technique, combined with the ambition and accessibility of his chosen subject matter the portrait re-invented on a heroic scale has made him a great favorite with the public and has won him the respect of his peers. Chuck Close has achieved fame, yet his full story has never been told until now. Author Christopher Finch has known Close since the late 1960s when the artist was creating his first masterpieces in an unheated SoHo loft. Finch chronicles Close's childhood battles with illness and dyslexia and his rise to the pinnacle of the art world. At the age of 48 he was struck down by an occluded spinal artery that left him a partial quadriplegic. With extraordinary determination, Close overcame this potentially career-ending disability, not only learning to paint again but producing work of extraordinary richness that equals or surpasses his previous achievements. With style and authority, Finch reveals the human reality behind Close's visually eloquent but eternally silent portraits.

Christopher Finch ist Autor zahlreicher Bücher. Bei Prestel erschien von ihm Chuck Close: Work.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Finch, Christopher

Weitere Mitwirkende

Close, Chuck

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Born on the Fifth of July

It is unusual, to say the least, for a living artist’s face to be featured on billboards, but not long ago commuters from Long Island, and travelers en route into Manhattan from Kennedy and La Guardia airports, were greeted at the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel by a towering black-and-white likeness of Chuck Close dressed in a black leather jacket and a white tee-shirt adorned with a facsimile of one of his many portraits of the composer Philip Glass. Had it not been for his unsmiling expression, it might have seemed that he had been appointed the city’s official greeter, an adjunct to the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. Nor did it stop there—a companion billboard was the first thing you saw as you emerged from the IRT subway station at Sheridan Square and, 2,500 miles away in LA, another overlooked the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, while a Godzilla-scaled photomural climbed the side of an office building on the Sunset Strip. Sponsored by the Gap to promote the Whitney Museum Biennial Exhibition, the image used at all these sites was also featured on the back cover of The New Yorker and prominently in other periodicals; but then it’s not unusual to find Chuck Close’s likeness on the pages of publications ranging from New York Magazine to Interview to W, and he has produced enough self-portraits—around one hundred so far, including paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs—to have merited a full-scale traveling retrospective that consisted of nothing else. To those who follow the American art scene, Chuck Close’s face is as familiar as any since Andy Warhol’s.

Faces are the artist’s business, and a biographer must contend with the fact that this subject has already accumulated and presented an extensive visual autobiography which commenced in 1967 when he conceived the iconic Big Self-Portrait now hanging in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis—a painting nine feet tall, severely black-and-white like those recent billboards, a vision of the young artist as outsider, cigarette smoldering between lips parted into the hint of a sneer, the cumulative effect proto-punk and confrontational. That at least was the impact the painting had until, with the passage of time, reverence crept into the artist-viewer relationship, as it inevitably does, altering the experience as it alters that of reading a Kerouac novel half a century on or watching a nouvelle vague movie at some revival house. The experience is still powerful, but has undergone a sea change.

The image most associated with Close’s likeness today is that of the New York sophisticate, the insiders’ insider. He seems to know everyone and to be at every major opening, every A-list party, feted and showered with awards and honorary degrees. He was the first artist to be appointed a trustee of the Whitney Museum (and is one of very few to have had retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum). He is active in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a member of the New York City Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, and sits on the boards of a number of organizations concerned with the well-being of education and the arts. He is, in fact, the consummate New York cultural establishment figure, to the extent that it has become difficult to understand just how shocking—transgressive even—paintings like Big Self-Portrait seemed when they were first shown. (The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer characterized Close’s debut exhibition as, “The kind of garbage washed up on shore after the tide of Pop Art went out.”)

Given his present eminence, and his current identification with New York, it may come as a surprise to some that Chuck Close was born a continent away from Manhattan. He did not, in fact, set foot in the Big Apple till a few weeks before his twenty-first birthday nor take up residence there till he was twenty-seven. That was when, in a downtown loft as bare of luxuries as any Trilby era Montmartre garret, he began Big Self-Portrait. From his student days, when he first encountered the work of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, making it in New York had been his goal, but—like Pollock, like Robert Rauschenberg, like Jasper Johns and so many other major American artists whose names have come to be associated with the Big Apple—Chuck was in fact a product of what would appear to be an unpromising provincial backwater, in his case the industrial fringes of Puget Sound.

Thus, there are almost three decades for a biographer to explore before the artist’s visual autobiography was definitively launched. Chuck Close is a self-made New Yorker, and a master of the New York School of painting, but beyond that he is an American artist, in the sense that Vermeer is Dutch, and Cézanne French—representative of an entire culture.

Chuck Close can point to forebears from Ireland, Denmark, Quebec, and elsewhere, but from the mid-nineteenth century on his family was the product of the rural Midwest, of farms, floods, droughts, and modest railroad towns where livestock was loaded for transport to stockyards in Omaha and Chicago. Like other families that had had enough of tornadoes, blizzards, and backbreaking dawn-to-dusk work harvesting sweet corn or sugar beets, the Closes, Wagners, and Albros who are Close’s antecedents migrated westward, finding their way to the Pacific Northwest and the burgeoning cities and towns clustered around Seattle.

Chuck was cheated by a few hours of having the archetypal birth date for an American artist. On Independence Day, 1940, in Monroe, Washington, a small mill town on the Snohomish-Skykomish river system, Mildred Emma Close, age 27, was full-term with a child who—uncharacteristically in light of later developments—seemed in no great hurry to make an entrance onto the world’s stage. The baby’s arrival had been predicted for the middle of the previous month, but the evening of the 4th arrived with no sign of an impending birth. As darkness fell, Mildred’s husband, Leslie Durward Close, set off a barrage of fireworks and firecrackers. According to family legend, this was the trigger. Early on the fifth, Mildred went into labor. A local physician—Dr. Cooley—was summoned, and in the bedroom of his parents’ tiny clapboard cottage at 134 South Madison Street—which had been scrubbed and sterilized daily for weeks in anticipation of his arrival—Charles Thomas was delivered, his weight at birth a healthy nine pounds.

Fig. 2:
The house in which Chuck Close was born, 134 South Madison Street, Monroe, Washington

His father immediately phoned Mildred’s parents in Everett, fourteen miles downstream, and within a few hours her mother, Blanche Ethel Wagner—who had been frantic with worry because of the extended pregnancy and the thought of her daughter giving birth without her—arrived at the cottage in a black Ford sedan driven by her sister, Bina Almyra Albro. (Much of the information in this chapter derives from a detailed typewritten account of Chuck Close’s antecedents prepared at his request, in the early 1980s, by his Great Aunt Bina Albro.) Many years later, Bina reported that she would never forget her first impression of Charles Thomas, “still red and such a big lump of a baby that no one would mistake for a girl …”

This last observation was prompted by the fact that, in anticipation of the imminent arrival, both Mildred and Blanche had spent a multitude of hours sewing and embroidering baby clothes. It seems, however, that they had been expecting—perhaps even hoping for—a girl since Bina would recall that many of these garments were hardly appropriate for a boy. She remembered in particular the spectacular, long christening gown, trimmed with yards of lace. Despite protests from his father that this garment (though in fact traditional) was highly inappropriate for a boy, the baby wore it for his October 6 christening, at Monroe First Methodist Church, through which he slept soundly. Afterward there was time for a single snapshot before his father insisted that the infant be changed into something deemed more appropriately masculine.

Bina was asked to become the baby’s godmother. Her contribution to the layette was a white reed basinet, hooded and lined with shirred Japanese silk and furnished with a matching lace-edged coverlet. The shirring had been done by women at the factory where Bina kept the books, a business devoted to the manufacture of funeral caskets.

Both of Chuck’s parents were migrants to the Pacific Northwest from the American heartland. An only child, his mother, Mildred Emma Wagner, was born in October 1913, to Blanche Wagner, at the Birdwood ranch a dozen miles northwest of North Platte, Nebraska.

Birdwood was the home of Blanche’s parents, Benjamin and Emma Albro. Aunt Bina—born in a sod homestead in 1902—lived there at the time of Mildred’s birth, as did Theodore—“Teddy”—Bina’s younger brother, born in 1910 when his mother was forty-two years old. Emma had believed herself to be past menopause and did not realize she was pregnant until a week or two before giving premature birth to a baby weighing less than two pounds. Incubators were such a novelty in those days they were a popular feature of the midways at spectaculars such as the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and even entertained gawkers at Coney Island’s Luna Park. The Albro clan had no access to one so they made do with a washbowl full of olive oil placed on the hot water reservoir of the kitchen range to keep it warm....

Über Autor(innen)

Finch, Christopher
Christopher Finch ist Autor zahlreicher Bücher. Bei Prestel erschien von ihm Chuck Close: Work.