Print lovers and museumgoers partial to representative art will want to visit two outstanding fine art print exhibits at Greenwich’s Bruce Museum: early 20th-century prints by nine important American artists (through December 1), and a survey of the graphic art of Chuck Close (through January 5).

 

By Arthur Stampleman

 

Print lovers and museumgoers partial to representative art will want to visit two outstanding fine art print exhibits at Greenwich’s Bruce Museum: early 20th-century prints by nine important American artists (through December 1), and a survey of the graphic art of Chuck Close (through January 5).  

 

“Telling American History: Realism from the Print Collection of Dr. Dorrance T. Kelly” features over 40 prints covering a 62-year span from 1905 through 1967. Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, John Sloan, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Martin Lewis, Benton Murdoch Spruance, and Stow Wengenroth are the artists represented.  

 

All the artists were born in the late 19th century and worked to realistically depict everyday scenes in the world developing around them early in the 20th century. They capture the change in the scale of society from pre-1900 small town America to post-1900 urbanization.

 

Hopper, Marsh, and Sloan produced etchings while Bellows, Wood, and Benton favored lithography. Martin Lewis worked in various methods, including drypoint, etching, and aquatint. Several art movements are represented, including the Ash Can, American Scene, and Regionalist schools.

 

The exhibit is organized along four different themes: Urbanization, Leisure Time, Transportation, and Rural Life. Among the highlights are:

 

Hopper’s Night Shadows aerial viewpoint shows two long shadows of a lone figure and a streetlamp on a street corner. It is so typical of Hopper’s work, depicting the isolation of individuals and the representation of light and shadow. The essence of etchings is line, well suited to Hopper’s style.

 

Bellows’ Dempsey Through the Ropes captures an exciting moment in the 1923 Firpo/Dempsey fight. Like many artists, Bellows worked as an illustrator and was asked to record the event for a newspaper. His illustration later resulted in this lithograph and finally the famous Whitney Museum painting.

 

Subway Stairs by Sloan playfully depicts a woman descending a stairway with her undergarments revealed by an updraft. We can’t see the eyes of the man walking up the stairs, but what do you suppose he is looking at?

 

“Closer: The Graphic Art of Chuck Close” presents fine and intriguing examples of two dozen of his graphic works, most of them borrowed from local collectors, but some from Pace Prints and the Museum of Modern Art. Chuck Close (1940-) is renowned for his highly inventive techniques in painting the human face, and is best known for his large-scale, photo-based portraits.

 

He works in a wide range of print media, including woodcut, etching, silkscreen, linocut, spit bite aquatint, pulp-paper multiple, transfer photographs, mezzotint, lithographs, pochoir, and tapestry. All of these media are represented in this exhibit, illustrating the artist’s skill in working their aesthetic possibilities.

 

The portrait is Close’s chosen motif or subject, which is just one of the interesting things about him because portraiture and representation were out of favor when he embarked on his career. A photograph (generally by him) is the starting point for all his work; he is fundamentally a photorealist painter creating portraits. Faces and heads are the sole motifs, always those of family or friends such as fellow artist Alex Katz. His portraits can be tiny or very large, such as the 9-foot Jacquard tapestry self-portrait on exhibit.

 

The portrait is always in the front of the picture plane, but otherwise Close is not interested in composition. Rather, he is more interested in technique, mastering the possibilities in a broad range of areas, as is evident in the exhibit. They include unusual drawing and painting methods such as finger painting and stamp-pad ink, unusual surfaces such as handmade three-dimensional pulp paper and tapestry, and different photography techniques such as daguerreotypes.

 

The grid is a central aspect of his work. Working from a gridded photograph, he builds his images by painting one careful stroke after another in multi-colors or gray scale. Sometimes he paints little motifs in his grids that are wholly abstract but, when put together and looked at from a far, create a recognizable face or head. Remarkably, Close has achieved outstanding artistic and technical success despite handicaps such as a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 that left him severely paralyzed and a difficulty in recognizing faces.

 

Museum hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 1-5 p.m. For information, call 203-869-0376 or visit www.brucemuseum.org.  Docent tours are offered most Fridays at 12:30 p.m. A number of special programs are planned in connection with these exhibits.