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Painter Chuck Close and curator Robert Storr in conversation
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For world-renowned painter and printmaker Chuck Close,longtime friend and arts writer Robert Storr has played a critical rolein determining the artistic value and meaning of Close’s work over his40-year career. Storr cowrote the first book on the artist’s work, haswritten countless essays on him, and has curated many exhibitions ofhis work; on a personal level, Storr helped Close define his styleafter a 1988 illness that left him paralyzed. When the two speak, Closesays, “I’ll say things that I don’t normally say and think about stuffin a different way.”
Storr and Close demonstrate that creativegive-and-take in Chuck Close and Robert Storr in Conversation, thefourth in the annual Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Lecture Series at the College of Fine Arts.Close discusses his early influences as a photographer and painter andhis motivations for creating large-scale portraits that dominateexhibition spaces. “I wanted to make the face almost a kind oflandscape,” he says. “They simultaneously keep you at arm’s lengthacross the room, and hopefully suck you right up to the surface.”
Closealso speaks about how the art world has changed, presenting newchallenges for young artists. When he was starting out in New York inthe 1970s, he says, there were 14 art galleries, and every artist sawevery other artist’s work, but today there are hundreds of galleries inthe Chelsea neighborhood alone. “It’s so hard to get anybody to seeyour work; it’s hard to get the attention,” he says. “The pressures onan artist today are much greater. The sacrifices are much greater.”
TheTim Hamill Visiting Artist Lecture Series, named in honor of alum TimHamill (CFA’65,’68), brings to campus artists whose work crossesboundaries among artistic disciplines and people who are connected tothe art world in various ways.
November 1, 2007, 6 p.m.
Morse Auditorium
Video length is 01:33:52.
About the speaker:
ChuckClose is an American photorealist painter best known for large-scaleportraits created from gridded photographs, often using small abstractcell paintings to create the larger portrait. He received a B.A. fromthe University of Washington, in Seattle, and an MFA from YaleUniversity. His work was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1969, andfirst exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. In 1988, Closesuffered a spinal artery collapse, which left him paralyzed; hecontinued his painting career by working with a brush held between histeeth.
Robert Storr is the dean of the Yale School of Art and the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.He has curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, including majorexhibitions on the work of Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, MaxBeckmann, Tony Smith, and Robert Ryman, and is the author of thecritical works Philip Guston (Abbeville, 1986), Chuck Close (with Lisa Lyons, Rizzoli, 1987), and the forthcoming Intimate Geometries: The Work and Life of Louise Bourgeois (Timken/Rizzoli).
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