"'The Larry Project,' neurotic and tender by turns, evolved into a much more emotional, all-encompassing undertaking — in which the absent Larry, whom Ms. Upson never met..."

"... expanded into the artist’s muse, her lover, her persecutor and, ultimately, her doppelgänger. By the end, no clean distinction was left between artist and subject; the two had become doubles. One drawing in the Hammer Museum show bore the words 'I am more he than he is.' The project ended in 2011 with a performance at a Los Angeles gallery at which she dragged a charcoal-and-wax mannequin of Larry on the walls and floor inside a plywood cube until the effigy disintegrated, symbolically turning Larry’s body into dust."

 
"Kaari Upson, California Artist of Desire and Disturbance, Dies at 51/Known for her resin sculptures and her disquieting videos, she was one of the most significant artists to emerge from the vibrant 21st-century Los Angeles art scene" (NYT). (Upson died of breast cancer.)

A contemporaneous artist obituary: "Chuck Close, Artist of Outsized Reality, Dies at 81/He found success with his large-scale Photorealist portraits, becoming one of the leading artists of his generation. Late in life he faced allegations of sexual harassment" (NYT):

In the 1970s, he began to translate his photographic sources into pixelated images, filling in the individual cells of a grid with distinct marks, colors and tones that would cohere into photographic images when viewed from a distance....  His pragmatic, problem-solving approach would serve Mr. Close well in the second half of his career. In New York, on Dec. 7, 1988, he was felled by what turned out to be a collapsed spinal artery, which initially left him paralyzed from the neck down. In the ensuing months of rehabilitation, he began to regain movement in his arms, and he was able to sit up and paint using brushes strapped to his hand. He not only returned to painting with unimpaired ambition but also began producing what many would view as the best work of his career.... Up close, the new paintings seemed to swarm with woozy, almost psychedelic energy, while from a distance the image would emerge in all its photographic exactness.

As for the allegations of sexual harassment, a doctor is quoted attributing his actions to Alzheimer's disease: "He was very disinhibited and did inappropriate things, which were part of his underlying medical condition. Frontotemporal dementia affects executive function. It’s like a patient having a lobotomy — it destroys that part of the brain that governs behavior and inhibits base instincts."

"Modeling nude for artists is an age-old tradition. But there is an unofficial code of conduct associated with painting someone nude..."

"... that includes informing models in advance that they would be expected to undress; making sure the subject is comfortable posing unclothed; refraining from commenting on a model’s body; keeping the atmosphere professional and avoiding personal questions. According to the women who spoke to The Times and HuffPost, Mr. Close violated this code, making inappropriate comments about their bodies, probing into their private lives and holding out the prospect of their being painted by a venerated artist to lure them to his studio, with what seemed to them no real artistic intent or result."

From "Chuck Close Apologizes After Accusations of Sexual Harassment/Several women complained that the celebrated artist, known for his outsize portraits, asked them to pose naked and made inappropriate sexual comments" by Robin Pogrebin in the NYT.

You should be aware that Close is a quadriplegic.

The artist Chuck Close "used to love all-white minimalist spaces," which were "perfect for my black-and-white Sol LeWitt paintings and other contemporary pieces."

"Then I started collecting portraits by old masters from the 1300s to the 1600s."

It didn’t take long to realize I couldn’t hang those paintings on white walls. They looked stupid. Visually, white was too harsh a backdrop.

Based on the colors on the walls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he picked a "totally dead" — no sheen — red that his girlfriend-now-wife Sienna compared to "dried blood." She agreed to it on the condition that she could paint the bedroom black — a "greenish black."

When the two rooms were done, I actually loved the bedroom and she loved the living room. In the green-black bedroom, the wall-mounted flat-screen TV seems to disappear and our tall green mother-in-law-tongue plants look lifelike. Sienna put up one of her green paintings and it looks so vivid, almost fluorescent. The room even seems larger now, and the dark color puts me to sleep instantly at night.

In the living room, the seven old masters on the walls look at home. The red doesn’t make the space seem like a European drawing room. There’s no crown molding and our furniture is modern... We also have a minimalist gas fireplace made of polished gray cement. So the room’s design is still pretty severe....

Before I painted the living room red, we never went in there. I used to roll through it traveling from the kitchen to the den or the bedroom. Now we eat only in there.... Now I notice the reds in the portraits that I hadn't seen before, as though they had been hiding until the red walls brought them out.

First the art, then the wall color, then the effect of the wall color on the color in the art and on the way you sleep and eat.

High and low color.

Somber neutral tones dominate the austere -- and quite excellent -- exhibit on the printmaking techniques of Chuck Close at the ultra-tasteful Madison Museum of Contemporary Art:



At the other end of State Street, we encounter a baby sporting an orange romper in the vicinity of a pop art-style box of licorice from Iceland: