Frank

Chuck Close

1969

Acrylic on canvas

Minneapolis Institute of Art

A black and white, close-up portrait of a man with curly hair and glasses, looking directly at the viewer. He has a beard and is wearing a collared shirt. A black and white, close-up portrait of a man with curly hair and glasses, looking directly at the viewer. He has a beard and is wearing a collared shirt. The model for this painting was not Frank himself but rather an 8-by-10-inch photograph of him. Since the late 1960s, Chuck Close’s method has been to start with a photographic print that he enlarges and overlays with a grid. He then systematically transposes each gridded block directly onto the canvas or paper, meticulously refining and finishing the image. The result is a technically masterful and ironically monumental portrait. By his painstaking technique, he preserves the obj