SFMOMA, Part 32: Floor 4, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.
Pop is painting Pop, and the dots have learned a new trick.
Roy Lichtenstein's face fills the canvas — eight and a half feet of it, frontal, unsmiling, the white hair and heavy features you know from a hundred photographs — but the surface is all wrong for a Lichtenstein. Instead of the flat Benday dots and hard comic outlines, the face is built from thousands of small, separate marks: dabs and lozenges of pink, turquoise, ochre, green, each one sitting in its own cell of an invisible grid. Step back and the marks vote Lichtenstein. Step close and the man dissolves into confetti. It is a portrait of the most mechanical painter of the 1960s, made by the most systematic painter of the 1990s, and the two systems are having a conversation across the canvas.
Chuck Close, Roy I, 1994 — oil on linen, 102 1/8 × 84 in. (259.3 × 213.4 cm). The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at SFMOMA. On view on Floor 4 in Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists, part of Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10. Entry included with general admission (SFMOMA, 151 Third Street; Mon–Tue 10–5, Wed closed, Thu 12–8, Fri–Sun 10–5). A related working study, Roy/maquette (1994) — Polaroid, ink, graphite, and masking tape on foamcore — hangs nearby.
The easy reading is: photorealist portrait, technical stunt, the grid as a party trick. But the subject is sharper than that. Roy I is a portrait of one Pop master by the man who spent his career proving that Pop's methods could carry a human face — and it was painted in the style Close invented after his body broke, when the grid stopped being a technique and became the only way he could still make a painting.
1940–1988: The system
Chuck Close was born in 1940 in Monroe, Washington, took his MFA at Yale in 1964 alongside Richard Serra and Nancy Graves, and by the late 1960s had invented his method: photograph a face, lay a grid over the photograph, transfer it square by square onto a gridded canvas, and paint each cell as its own small abstract problem. "Using a grid to blow something up goes back, you know, at least to the Egyptians," he liked to say. And: "I found that if I break things down into small bite sized pieces, this big overwhelming problem becomes much more solvable."
The early heads — Big Self-Portrait (1967–68), the black-and-white airbrushed faces — hid the system. The grid was scaffolding, removed after the building stood. Then, in December 1988, Close's anterior spinal artery collapsed during a public ceremony, leaving him almost completely paralyzed. He rebuilt his practice from a wheelchair, a brush strapped to his wrist, an assistant moving the canvas. And the paintings changed: the grid came out of hiding. The late portraits — Roy I among the great ones — are mosaics of visible, colorful marks, each cell a separate decision, the face emerging only at distance. The system didn't just survive the injury. The injury revealed what the system had been all along: a way of seeing built from the admission that you can't take the whole thing in at once.
1994: Dots versus cells
Which makes Lichtenstein the perfect sitter. Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) built his fame on the Benday dot — the printer's halftone dot, enlarged until it became the subject, the comic strip blown up until the mechanics of reproduction were all you could see. His dots were about mass production: identical, regular, impersonal.
Close's cells are the opposite of Benday dots, and Roy I is the proof. Every mark is handmade, every color invented — Lichtenstein's skin was not actually turquoise and coral — and no two cells behave the same way. Where Lichtenstein's dots flatten the image into print, Close's cells shatter it into painting. It is as if Close took his friend's signature device and ran it through the one machine Lichtenstein never used: the human hand, working slowly, cell by cell, with a brush strapped to a wrist that barely moved.
The two men were not an obvious pair. Lichtenstein was Pop's cool ironist, the man who painted cartoons at mural scale to ask what an image was. Close was the figure painter who refused to choose between abstraction and likeness, building faces out of the very marks abstraction had claimed. But they were friends, and fellow travelers, and New Yorkers of the same generation — and Close painted his circle the way Renaissance courts painted theirs: the whole downtown pantheon, one giant head at a time. Roy I was painted in 1994, three years before Lichtenstein's death in 1997. It has the feeling of a tribute made while there was still time.
The Fisher room
The Fishers collected Close in depth — one of the collection's great strengths — and the Ways of Seeing installation gives him a proper showing: Roy I and its maquette, the Agnes portrait and its maquette, Lorna, a screenprint John. Walk the cluster and you can watch the late style think out loud: the Polaroid studies with their taped grids and tested colors, then the eight-foot paintings where the tests become the work. The maquettes demystify nothing. If anything, seeing the small messy study makes the big painting more impossible: how do you get from a taped-together Polaroid to this?
The show, again
Stand in front of Roy I and do the Close ritual: walk in until the face falls apart, walk back until it returns. Up close it is pure abstraction — a field of colored marks with no center, no edge, no meaning. At fifteen feet it is unmistakably Roy Lichtenstein, looking at you with the mild, appraising expression of a man who spent his career looking at pictures of pictures.
Somewhere between those two distances, the painting happens. Not at either pole — in the transit. That is Close's real subject, and it was Lichtenstein's too: the image exists in the space between the dot and the eye, between the system and the person. Pop painting Pop, and both of them smiling — barely — at the joke.
Lichtenstein died in 1997. Close died in 2021. The dots and the cells are still here, still arguing, still refusing to resolve. Stand still and they win. Move, and so do you. 🌁
Timeline — Chuck Close
1923 — Roy Lichtenstein born, New York City
1940 — Chuck Close born, Monroe, Washington
1964 — Close takes his MFA at Yale; studies alongside Richard Serra and Nancy Graves
1967–68 — Big Self-Portrait; the airbrushed black-and-white heads establish the grid method
1988 — A collapsed spinal artery leaves Close almost completely paralyzed; he re-learns painting from a wheelchair, brush strapped to his wrist
1990s — The late style: visible grids of small colorful marks; portraits of the downtown pantheon
1994 — Paints Roy I (oil on linen) and the Roy/maquette (Polaroid, ink, graphite, tape)
1997 — Roy Lichtenstein dies, New York, age 73
2021 — Chuck Close dies, Oceanside, New York, age 81
Today — Roy I on view, 151 Third Street