Chuck Close and Robert Storr in Conversation

Hosted by College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts

For world-renowned painter and printmaker Chuck Close, longtime friend and arts writer Robert Storr has played a critical role in determining the artistic value and meaning of Close’s work over his 40-year career. Storr cowrote the first book on the artist’s work, has written countless essays on him, and has curated many exhibitions of his work; on a personal level, Storr helped Close define his style after a 1988 illness that left him paralyzed. When the two speak, Close says, “I’ll say things that I don’t normally say and think about stuff in a different way.”

Storr and Close demonstrate that creative give-and-take in Chuck Close and Robert Storr in Conversation, the fourth 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 and his motivations for creating large-scale portraits that dominate exhibition spaces. “I wanted to make the face almost a kind of landscape,” he says. “They simultaneously keep you at arm’s length across the room, and hopefully suck you right up to the surface.”

Close also speaks about how the art world has changed, presenting new challenges for young artists. When he was starting out in New York in the 1970s, he says, there were 14 art galleries, and every artist saw every other artist’s work, but today there are hundreds of galleries in the Chelsea neighborhood alone. “It’s so hard to get anybody to see your work; it’s hard to get the attention,” he says. “The pressures on an artist today are much greater. The sacrifices are much greater.”

The Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Lecture Series, named in honor of alum Tim Hamill (CFA’65,’68), brings to campus artists whose work crosses boundaries among artistic disciplines and people who are connected to the art world in various ways.

November 1, 2007, 6 p.m.
Morse Auditorium

Video length is 01:33:52.

About the speaker:
Chuck Close is an American photorealist painter best known for large-scale portraits created from gridded photographs, often using small abstract cell paintings to create the larger portrait. He received a B.A. from the University of Washington, in Seattle, and an MFA from Yale University. His work was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1969, and first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. In 1988, Close suffered a spinal artery collapse, which left him a paralyzed; he continued his painting career by working with a brush held between his teeth.

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 major exhibitions on the work of Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, Max Beckmann, Tony Smith, and Robert Ryman, and is the author of the critical 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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