Sunday, May 30, 2010

Books | 'Chuck Close: Life': The Northwest native painter who brought the portrait back to modern art | Seattle Times Newspaper

Books | 'Chuck Close: Life': The Northwest native painter who brought the portrait back to modern art | Seattle Times Newspaper
Prestel Publishing, 368 pp., $34.95

Painter Chuck Close's early works are still his most well-known: startling close-ups of human faces on immense nine-foot canvases. Created in the 1960s and '70s, the black and white paintings — many of them self-portraits — are harsh and discomfiting, and helped establish Close as one of the preeminent artists of his generation.

In "Chuck Close: Life," longtime friend of the artist and former museum curator Christopher Finch has written a comprehensive biography that blends an exquisite rendering of Close's unique genius with details of his personal life.

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Read the review, and the book.