Pioneer of Photorealism Painting passes away

 CHUCK CLOSE

Dies at 81

One of the founding fathers of art movement Photorealism (though he never used the term) has died after prolonged bouts of ill health. Close caused much controversy in his life and not least in his later years when accused by several women of 'sexual abuse' though not physical in anyway numbers of women used as models sued him for "sexual harassment" between 2005 and 2013 admitting he spoke candidly Close responded

“If I embarrassed anyone or made them feel uncomfortable, I am truly sorry, I didn’t mean to,” he told The New York Times at the time. “I acknowledge having a dirty mouth, but we’re all adults.”

His using inappropriate language which given his diagnosis of a very specific kind of frontal lobe dementia seems a tad unforgiving and harsh. Use of such foul language and unnecessary references to parts of the body in anglo-salon terms is now a crime in which it seems we can sue the disabled!

I first came across Close in the real, as it were, whilst working at MOMA in Oxford and saw a work in London and his later show at the Ashmolean Museum here too. The whole ethos and point of photorealism was not that they looked like photographs as such but their very scale and painterly execution. It took seeing one after showing scant regard for picture books and magazine references to Richard Estes, Cottingham or Bechtle and others of the school and their ilk which struck me as mere virtuoso technique for its own sake wherein you ironically see the painted surface again reduced to photographs which did the entire over a disservice and given the final stage of actually seeing one in the painted surface where some, including Close, use scalpels and razor blades as the last stage of painting the surface proved to be simply breathtaking, literally! I only 'got it' from see in the art! (So true of so much modern art, The Tate Bricks for example! Where I asked all the outraged members of the public who had been made so enraged by the gutter press and yellow journalism that they felt the need to come to MOMAO and tell someone how cross they were I would ask whether they had seen the Carl Andre artwork or not! Even economically now it seems sills we [paid a mere £4,000 for what is commonly accepted now as a pioneering masterpiece worth millions.)

Lou Reed, in front of a portrait of himself, with Chuck Close 

at Close’s exhibition at Guild Hall Center for the Visual & Performing Arts in East Hampton, N.Y. 

in 2013.

Credit: Doug Kuntz for The New York Times

An astonishing conceptual artist ( as he preferred to be referred to) the technical skill alone was stunning and that his later life illness should rob him of his motor skills is especially cruelly ironic. That he should be diminished by the accusations of 'verbal abuse' is a contentious and demeaning coda to his standing in the art world in my opinion

More here

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/arts/design/chuck-close-artist-of-outsized-reality-dies-at-81.html