Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration

Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration was the first full survey of Close's printmaking, and it made the case that the prints, not the paintings, are where his method is most visible.

Organised technique by technique, the book follows three decades of work in mezzotint, etching, woodcut, linocut, silkscreen, pulp-paper multiples and the Japanese and European traditions Close revived, showing progressive and state proofs beside the editioned image so that the decisions can be read. Terrie Sultan's introduction and an essay by Richard Shiff frame interviews with Close and the printers he worked with. Published by Princeton University Press in 2003 for the exhibition at Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, which then travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other venues; a softcover of 160 pages with 110 colour plates, 38 black-and-white illustrations and a double gatefold.

Close (1940–2021) built his career on the gridded, enormously enlarged portrait head, and printmaking gave him a way to make the grid and its incremental labour the subject. The exhibition kept touring for a decade, and Prestel issued an expanded edition in 2014.