From the December 2005 issue of ART + AUCTION

By Jonathon Keats

Flanked by Minimalism on one side and Pop art on the other, a painter coming of age in the late 1960s was hard-pressed not to imitate either. Chuck Close made no attempt at dodgy evasion. On the contrary, he found his own distinctive vision by ingeniously combining both approaches, mixing painting with photography to render his subjects as flatly as Jasper Johns yet as systematically as Sol LeWitt.

Curator Martin Friedmans first encounter with Close was in 1968, when a studio visit put him face-to-face with Big Self-Portrait, a nine-foot-tall, black-and-white painting made by placing a grid on a photograph and then copying it, preserving even the blurriness. Friedman admits in Close Reading: Chuck Close and the Artist Portrait (Abrams, $45), I was far from ready for what was before me, a painting that not only seemed to break the rules for what then passed as modernism, but one that was defiantly descriptive. So he decided to buy it for his museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, paying the full asking price of $1,300. It was the first picture Close ever sold.

Thirty-seven years later, Friedman knows Closes work as well as anyone, and his absorbing, amply illustrated monograph is essential reading for anyone with more than a cursory interest in the artist. Constantly rebalancing the two poles of his 60s artistic heritage, Close continues to confound expectations, and Friedman, combining the roles of biographer, curator and critic, remains admirably open to all the permutations.

A decade and a half ago, Northern California landscape photographer Richard Misrach proposed that a former nuclear testing site in the Nevada desert be renamed Bravo 20 National Park and outfitted with the requisite picnic tables and visitor center. His proposalwhich has yet to obtain approval from the Department of the Interiorincluded not only maps and a budget but also C-prints, taken with his large-format camera, that revealed the broken terrains strange beauty, as stunning as Yellowstone or Yosemite. What could otherwise be set aside as progressive environmental satire was made into a deeply ambivalent meditation on mans place in nature.

Political engagement, if honest, can embrace ambiguities, and for this reason, art can be a particularly effective political medium. In Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (University of California, $60), an important survey of socially conscious expression throughout California from the mid-20th century to the present, veteran curator and critic Peter Selz captures the potential for art to be profoundly political. My contention is that not only can artists comment significantly on politics in their work, he writes, but political engagement in specific situations can produce significant art.

As a countercultural epicenter, California has undeniably been such a place, and the number of California-connected artists who have had a symbiotic relationship with causes from pacifism to feminism to environmentalism is impressiveTheresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bruce Conner and Peter Erskine, to name but a few Selz considers.

On the other hand, the state has been as polemical as it has been political, and its art has all too often served good causes badly, as propaganda. The ceramic sculpture of Robert Arneson, for example, is as unnuanced as a stump speech. Selzs failure to distinguish between these contrasting approaches is, likewise, a disservice to the art of engagement he champions.

Never in excellent health, the great Norwegian artist Edvard Munch suffered the worst injury a painter can endure when, at the age of 66, a blood clot blinded his right eye. His left eye had already been damaged, and he considered this new misfortune more horrific than having both arms amputated. Nonetheless, he responded by making it a new painting subject, depicting his broken vision in both watercolor and oil.

As Sue Prideaux argues in her new biography, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (Yale, $35), the artists driving ambition was that by looking inside himself he would be capable of building an image of eternal truth from the transitory and particular laboratory of his own lifes experiences. In the blind paintings, this aspiration is manifest. Objective and subjective reality become one and the same.

But where does the biographer fit into such an equation? For Prideaux, biography is a natural complement to Munchs life-led pictures, and her straightforward chronological account dutifully reports on what the artist was doing outside his painting, practically day by day. None of this information, however, brings us any closer to The Kisss eros, or The Screams angst. Prideaux cannot be faulted for fulfilling her mandate, which she does with able scholarship. The trouble lies in her misunderstanding of the relationship between Munchs experiences and his art. He called the work his souls diary, and for those drawn to it, those true aficionados of his art, there is little to be learned from taking the measure of his body.

John Updikes achievement as a novelist is neither philosophical nor experimental. Rather, he is a singularly keen observer. As an art critic, he is likewise endowed with the patience and sympathy to perceive the content of paintings and to describe what is happening in them with remarkable nuance.

The several dozen American artists taken up in Still Looking (Knopf, $40)which collects 18 previously published essays enhanced by copious color illustrationsare mostly well suited to such treatment. Consider, for instance, Updikes description of Edward Hoppers lighting: The chronic solar arc overhead, which makes of each angular object a sundial, is not just the context of our human adventure but, to an extent, its content. Again and again in Hopper his figures, usually female, seem to be doing nothing but observing the day, and opening themselvessunlight on skinto times inexorable, faithful, fatal passage.

Updike is also, for similarly novelistic reasons, skilled at seeing the artist through his work, which redeems his essays devoted to more formally inclined painters, such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Discussing Whistlers Nocturnes, he astutely writes that the mists and ambiguity of night were his pictorial element, in which his etchers skills and aesthetes minimalism combined to bring something truly new onto canvas. As might be expected, Updikes limitations as a critic are all too obvious in his flatly literal assessment of Andy Warhols fundamentally conceptual art. No overarching theories emerge from these occasional essays. But it would be as unfair to criticize Updike for not
being say, Arthur Danto, as to criticize Danto for not being John Updike.

As a contemporary art dealer in Chicago during the Depression, Katharine Kuh was unabashedly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her roster of artists, including Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró and Isamu Noguchi, attracted scarcely a sale, drawing instead the ire of wealthy housewives morally opposed to cosmopolitan modernism in their backyard. However, over the next couple of decades, corresponding roughly to Kuhs tenure as the first curator of contemporary paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, the publics attitude changed so radically that the trustees of the Institute ultimately refused to purchase a Tintoretto because, Kuh notes in her memoirs, My Love Affair with Modern Art (Arcade, $27.50), they found it old-fashioned and out of step with contemporary life.

Because she appreciated modernism before it was fashionable, Kuh retained an admirable freedom from trendiness throughout her career as dealer and curatoran aloofness from the widely held 20th-century view that art advances, like technology, on the premise of novelty. These reminiscences, assembled posthumously by art historian Avis Berman, retain their freshness, more than a decade after Kuhs death, on account of her tendency to take in each new experience as it came, uninfluenced by prior expectations. She encountered practically everyone, from Marcel Duchamp to Buckminster Fuller to Alfred Barr, but held nobody in aweleast of all herself. Shes quick to admit that her memoirs serve no purpose other than to offer firsthand observations which with my death would otherwise pass into oblivion. While the lack of a larger argument makes for much meandering, Kuhs informality and candor are welcome antidotes to a century overloaded with manifesto and dogma.
 
For more holiday-gift suggestions, check out ArtInfo's Holiday Gift Guide and read more book recommendations from ART + AUCTION.

From the DECEMBER 2005 issue of ART + AUCTION.

For more information or to subscribe, click here to visit ART + AUCTION online.




All Photographs by Dan Bibb