The latest chapter of pop art is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and it looks more and more like a case of the fine arts climbing aboard the media express. Only in this case it’s a slowdown. What a camera can do in an instant click of the shutter, Chuck Close can achieve in three months of painstaking labor with an air brush. His innovation is to have blown up passport photos to such a colossal scale – 9 by 7 feet – that wrinkles at close view look like ravines and pores like shell holes.
What a blow! Modern painters have been telling us for the past 100 years that the photograph has relieved the painter of the necessity of slavishly imitating nature for recording purposes. What are we to make of painters who slavishly imitate the camera, who imitate it so well that the inevitable first reaction is one of amazement?”How on earth did they do that by hand?”
It’s the mechanics of the process that fascinate Close rather than the realism of the final product. In the colored portraits (which he attempted only after mastering black and white) he has approximated the use of filters by putting a thin wash of each basic color over the entire surface of the painting with an air brush. Varying combinations of red, blue, and yellow are present in every square inch of the canvas exactly as they are in colored photography.
The show in its dependence on mechanical methods and mechanical finishes reminds us of the final words of an old Chinese proverb.”He who does all his work like a machine, grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense.”
