Chuck Close.

Marion Cajori's documentary Chuck Close is playing at Film Forum in Manhattan for another week. It's an informative film about the painter, now 67, who first became known for his enormous photo-realist portraits, mostly head shots of Close and art world friends like Philip Glass, Richard Serra and Alex Katz. We watch Close's evolution from a painter of colossal faces with a tactility that seems to push right up against you into a practitioner of deconstructive and reconstructive portraiture, often of himself. The film is built around more than 80 days of creating a self-portrait, in which Close begins with a photograph and then recreates the light and form of the image with modules of paint.

Close works from a wheelchair. Since 1988, his lower body has been paralyzed, yet he makes every stroke on the canvas. And the paintings sell.

In the 1960s, when Close was in art school, figurative painting (for any purpose besides satire) was about as popular among artists as Barry Goldwater. Close talks about growing up outside Seattle and having a flair for magic and drawing as a kid (he was no good at sports). He had lots of technique, and we see evidence of it from the last 40 years in archival pictures that Cajori intercuts with footage from Close's studio. She always takes you back to the art.

But nothing is as simple as it looks, not even a portrait, especially when you get artists talking about Close's work, or when critics like the late MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe and former MoMA curator Robert Storr join the conversation. We hear that Close's work isn't realistic, despite its verisimilitude, because photos and photorealism are as artificial as any other art medium, and because close (not a pun) examination of any of his paintings can take us right into abstraction. Close and others even reduce paintings to science, in which light is reproduced or applied piece by piece, the way bricks assemble a building. Given his modular approach to painting from photographs, there is a point here, and filmmakers and cinematographers would do well to listen to Close's thoughts about light on the human face, however you may feel about his art. His images can have the scale of a close-up on a large screen, yet their stillness, like that of colossal Egyptian heads, is the antithesis of the moving image.

We also hear all sorts of arguments that the portraits are, in fact, conceptual art.

Close has a chorus of friends - Katz, Glass, Brice Marden, Kiki Smith, Elizabeth Murray, his dealer Arne Glimcher (who has made more money from Close than Close has) - and they all sing his praises. Close himself can be eloquent when he talks about his parents, and honest as he tells how he would pick and choose from artists who inspired him. De Kooning was a major influence - not an easy affinity to see in Close's work, but Cajori tries.

And the celebration turns into a pile-on that begins to sound like an infomercial, particularly when Close's dealer chimes in. We run into the same problem in other documentaries about artists that you find in museum exhibitions. It's all praise. There's nothing critical. If you want the artist's cooperation - and his or her art - you have to stroke, and stroke hard. Not that Close's friends and admirers don't value his work; I don't doubt that they're telling the truth. Yet this film is so much of a Close-fest, that we don't hear from any doubters. The "critics" who are filmed only express skepticism in order to demolish these arguments with praise. Close may work with paint and photographs, but this film is made of marble, complete with a homily delivered by Robert Storr in the documentary's epilogue.

In spite of its clubby art-world circle-jerk, Chuck Close is anything but the martyrology that has now become the boiler-plate dramatic approach in films about artists - Basquiat, Pollock, Frida, Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, and anything about Mapplethorpe, Haring, and the man who carved the template, Vincent van Gogh.

There isn't much from Close on his misfortunes and the frustrations he must have from his paralysis, although he and his wife and children do talk about his condition. Fortunately, we don't get to that until some 90 minutes into the film, so we see Close first as an artist, albeit an artist in a wheelchair.

Sadly, Marion Cajori died of cancer in August 2006 before the release of this documentary, her second on Close. Her other films include documentaries about the painter Joan Mitchell and the sculptor Louis Bourgeois, which was finished by the art critic Amei Wallach. The International Festival of Film on Art will present a tribute to Cajori in March.

Posted by dwhudson at January 3, 2008 4:14 AM