Frank

The model for this painting was not Frank himself but rather an 8-by-10-inch photograph of him. Since the late 1960s, Chuck Close’s method has been to start with a photographic print that he enlarges and overlays with a grid. He then systematically transposes each gridded block directly onto the canvas or paper, meticulously refining and finishing the image. The result is a technically masterful and ironically monumental portrait. By his painstaking technique, he preserves the objectivity of photography. A work of such grand scope—typical of American painting after 1950—is unsettling, particularly when it features a colossal human head. “The large scale, ” Close said, “forces the viewer to read the surface of the painting differently . . . [to] look at it piece by piece.” The details, then, can be perceived either as facial pores and hairs or as an abstract pattern of black, gray, and white.