Chuck Close Photographs
University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center
From figures to flowers to faces, Chuck Close Photographs can be summed up in one word: intimate. Museum-goers get a feel for both Close’s subjects and the painter/photographer himself. Upon entrance you’ll notice Bertrand II and Laura I. The bare, larger than life male and female figures are sprawled like rolling landscapes across opposite walls, seeming to interact with one another. On the opposite walls, two photographs of flowers stand out as the only inanimate objects in the exhibit. But in this context they take on human attributes. Chrysanthemum 1987 shows “the bee’s point of view.” The flower’s bright pink petals seem to purposely splay open, as if welcoming pollination. The opposite flower, titled Anthurium 1987, bursts with male energy. It’s red, wrinkling flesh surrounds a phallic spadix, which hangs nearly to the flower’s stem.
These gigantic nude figures — along with the sign warning patrons of nudity upon entry — are almost humorous in the irony. Art, after all, has a lot do with context. And the context for this display includes nearly 50 years of enmity between UMass and Close finally laid to rest. Close was propelled into contemporary art history when, in 1967 — as a faculty member in the UMass arts department — he displayed some of his nude work on campus, and the university squashed the exhibit, calling the male nudity in Close’s work obscene. A lawsuit ensued and eventually a state Supreme Court judge ruled the exhibit should stay up, but by then it was too late and Close was moving on from Amherst to New York City.
Now we see the artist’s early work in all its glory. With hand-scrawled notes in some of the images’ corners and masking tape on sections of others, the exhibit is like a look into Close’s notebook — a behind the scenes view of his career. This is the first time we’ve seen Close this up-close, and after the work leaves Amherst it will grace gallery walls across the U.S. The exhibit will be at UMass through Dec. 6.•
