Floor 4: Chuck Close: Southwest entrance from Richter
Overview
Interpretive Text
Objects
6 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Label Text
1994
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2000
Close had admired the subject of this painting, the artist Roy Lichtenstein, since his student days. Here he transforms Lichtenstein’s signature style into his own visual vocabulary. Like Lichtenstein’s benday dot paintings (on view nearby), the individual gridded units that form Close’s work can be appreciated in their own right and also make up a larger image.
Visual Description
Large oil-on-linen painting (8.5 × 7 ft) showing a centered, head-and-shoulders portrait of a light-skinned, bald man constructed from a mosaic-like grid of small units. The entire surface is organized into tightly packed squares, each containing ringed circles, ovals, or short rounded rectangles, producing a pixelated image that resolves into facial features at a distance. The man faces forward with a calm, neutral expression; pale blue-gray eyes look straight ahead beneath softly arched brows, with pinkish shading around the eyelids. His nose and lips are modeled with warm peach, coral, and rose tones, and faint smile lines and subtle cheek contours are suggested by the varying colors within the grid. The ear on the left side of the painting is clearly delineated in pale tones, while the right side of the head fades into the patterned field. He wears a dark jacket over a dark blue collared shirt, the clothing also broken into the same grid language with deep blues, teals, and muted purples. The background is a continuous field of darker navy and cobalt squares filled with circular shapes.
Label Text
1994
Dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid), ink, graphite, and masking tape on foamboard
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2001
Close had admired the subject of this painting, the artist Roy Lichtenstein, since his student days. Here he transforms Lichtenstein’s signature style into his own visual vocabulary. Like Lichtenstein’s benday dot paintings (on view nearby), the individual gridded units that form Close’s work can be appreciated in their own right and also make up a larger image.
Visual Description
A roughly 3 × 2 ft mixed-media work on foamcore combines a color Polaroid portrait with ink, graphite, and masking tape, presenting a large head-and-shoulders image of an older white man beneath a measuring grid. The man, centered against a deep navy background, has pale skin, a high forehead with thinning gray hair, light-colored eyes, and a slightly open mouth; his face is turned a little toward our right. He wears a collared shirt under a darker outer layer, with the collar and upper chest visible at the bottom of the frame. Over the entire portrait lies a fine square grid, and along the top and bottom edges of the image runs a ruler-like band marked with letters; the top band shows a sequence beginning “A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S,” while a matching lettered band continues along the bottom. Down the left side, a numbered scale runs vertically, marked “1” through “24". Masking tape frames the image on all sides, with additional pieces securing corners and edges; the tape has aged to a warm beige, with slight curling and wear. Above the portrait, handwritten graphite text reads “Boy I” in quotation marks; below, a cursive inscription shows**the artist's signature and the year 1994.**The foamcore support shows creases, scuffs, and slight tearing.
Label Text
1998
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
“Superhuman” is how artist Agnes Martin—whose work is on view nearby—described this portrait of her when she first encountered it at an exhibition in Taos, New Mexico. Close’s giant, colorful painting of his friend is also an homage to Martin’s use of the grid, a form that was essential to both artists’ work. Here, the cells form individual paintings that spread, mosaic-like, across the canvas. Together, the individual abstract units gather force to present Martin in a way that is both sensitive and monumental.
Visual Description
Large oil painting on canvas, about 8 x 7 ft, depicting a front-facing head-and-shoulders portrait rendered as a dense grid of small, colorful, tightly packed square and rectangular tiles, each containing ringed circles, ovals, or rounded inner rectangles. The face fills most of the composition and is constructed from hundreds of these repeated tiles. Each tile is filled with layered strokes in peach, cream, pink, tan, and muted orange, creating a mosaic effect. Darker tiles in deep teal, green, and blue form the surrounding background and the mass of hair, which frames the head and descends along both sides. The facial features emerge through concentrated clusters of darker shapes: to the right side of the image, one eye is clearly defined with a pale lid and a vivid blue iris; the other eye on the left is partially obscured and fragmented into darker blocks. A narrow nose and closed mouth appear through aligned bands of lighter tiles, with subtle blush tones and shadowy maroons around the lips and cheeks. The overall surface reflects pattern and repetition as well as smooth modeling, so the portrait shows both an abstract grid and a recognizable human face. The brightest highlights are concentrated across the forehead, bridge of the nose, and upper cheeks.
Label Text
1998
126-color screenprint, ed. 2/80
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
This work depicts the sculptor John Chamberlain, whom Close met in New York in the late 1960s and whose work is on view nearby. Close translated his own earlier painting of the artist into this 126-color screenprint with the aid of a master printer (a professional who helps artists create their fine-art prints). In a painstaking two-year process, each color was forced through its own unique stencil, made by painting emulsion onto a fine mesh screen.
Visual Description
A roughly 5.5 × 4.5 ft, 126-color screenprint presents a close-up portrait of an older light-skinned man built from tightly packed and repeating dot-and-diamond marks~~.~~ The man’s head fills most of the composition, turned slightly to the right, with gray hair combed back from a high forehead and a full, dark mustache. His expression is neutral and direct, with pale blue-gray eyes aimed outward; the left side of his face is brighter, while the right side falls into deeper shadow. Reds, oranges, pinks, yellows, greens, blues, and purples interlace in small units so that skin tones, hair, and shadows are layered fields rather than smooth gradients. He wears a dark jacket or coat over a red-orange shirt collar that peeks up at the base of the neck, the clothing also broken into the same lattice of marks. Behind him, a dark blue-black ground is similarly textured with the repeated motif. Along the wide, off-white margin at the bottom, faint pencil markings include a fraction of “1/30” at the lower left and a lightly written signature-like line across the center.
Label Text
1993
Dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid)
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
Visual Description
A large, vertically oriented black-and-white Polaroid dye diffusion transfer print (33 × 22 × 2 inches) presents a tightly framed head-and-shoulders portrait centered within a white Polaroid border. In the photograph, a Black woman faces forward in a symmetrical, passport-like pose, looking directly at the camera with a calm, neutral expression and relaxed mouth. Her hair is long, dark, and tightly curled, falling in thick ringlets on both sides of her face and down past her shoulders; a few strands curl outward along the right side. Soft, even lighting emphasizes skin texture across her forehead, cheeks, and nose, with gentle shadows defining the eye sockets and the line of the jaw. She wears a dark ribbed knit top or cardigan with a low neckline. The background is a smooth mid-gray, and the photographic area shows the characteristic Polaroid material edges, with a slightly uneven black band along the top of the image area and subtle rippling or irregular borders at the sides. Handwritten in cursive graphite or ink on the white border, centered above the image area, is the word: “Lorna”. Along the bottom white border, larger cursive handwriting reads “Church Clan”, followed by the date “1953” on the lower right. A small solid red dot sticker sits near the bottom-right corner of the white border.
Label Text
1995
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1996
In addition to older artists and members of his own generation, Close also depicted younger artists whose work he admired, such as Lorna Simpson. Simpson first emerged in the early 1990s with works that combine photography and text to explore representations of gender, race, and identity. With its highly diagonal grid and irregular blobs of paint, Close’s painting calls attention to how it was made and reminds us that all representations, regardless of medium, are constructed—never purely objective.
Visual Description
A large oil-on-canvas portrait (8.5 × 7 ft) shows a Black woman’s head and shoulders in grayscale, her face front-facing and centered, with a neutral, slightly closed-lip expression. The entire surface is built from a tight, repeating grid of small diamond shapes and each cell is filled with rounded strokes. The woman has medium-to-dark skin tones translated into silvers and charcoals, large dark eyes, a straight nose, and softly modeled cheeks; her dark, thick hair frames her face in loose waves and curls, filling much of the upper left and right areas. A pale highlight runs down the center of her forehead and nose, while darker tones pool around the eye sockets, under the cheekbones, and beneath the chin. She wears a dark outer garment over a lighter, V-shaped neckline, with the clothing and background similarly broken into the same lattice of diamonds. The background is an even field of cool gray tones, and the facial features emerge primarily through contrast within the repeating pattern.