Please quote this article as follows:

Richard Shiff, "The Physicality of Picturing", in: Sonderforschungsbereich 626, ed.,

Between Thing and Sign, Berlin 2010,
http://www.sfb626.de/en/veroeffentlichungen/shiff.pdf
For the Index of Contents see:
http://www.sfb626.de/en/veroeffentlichungen/thingandsign/

The Physicality of Picturing

Richard Shiff
For at least the past century and a half and continuing into the present visual artists
have shown acute sensitivity to the play of the material medium. They regard the medium
as if it were responsible for inventing the image, as opposed to tracing, graphing, or
otherwise reproducing forms already available elsewhere, whether outside in the physical
world or inside the imagination. When the play of the medium dominates pictorial
practices, abstraction in art acquires its modernist meaning.
One of the most obvious examples of medium-based art is the New York School painting
of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the so-called abstract expressionists. The
stylistic label fits Pollock far better than it does de Kooning, who was never comfortable
with twentieth-century theories of expressive abstraction.1 He often spoke of his
picture-making as if it were a mimetic act of representing a specific human figure,
whether a person he was actively observing or, more likely, a body in a particular
posture, deftly remembered in strokes of paint (or ink or graphite). Following the
implications of de Koonings sense of his situation, we might agree that he was
representing a body someones body yet doing it through the sensations he felt in his
1

See Willem de Kooning, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin (issue
18/ Spring 1951), 4-8.

body. Depositing his mimetic marks, he left a double indexical trace: on the one hand, an
index of his movement; on the other hand, an index of the physical properities of paint.
Would it be fair to call de Koonings trace a form of self-expression, not so different from
what critics tend to attribute to Pollock? The answer depends on how we identify the
bodily representation de Kooning was creating whether that body was primarily
anothers or his. Was he showing aspects of how a body might look, an appearance to be
perceived visually from both physical and emotional distance? Or was he presenting a
condition experienced more intimately, corresponding to a degree of materiality properly
appreciated only by direct contact? Without much evidence, we often assume that an
artists emotional response to a body is adequately transmitted through whatever forms
happen to be rendered at the precise moment of feeling. Such forms signify engagement
with the represented object and a concurrent contact with the materials of representation,
while at the same time expressing or channeling the associated state of emotion. Marks,
colors, shapes, and linear directions that reproduce the look or effect of a body do so by
condensing, contracting, or otherwise reducing it to abstraction. Base and material by
nature, reductive abstraction intensifies those aspects of the body that it features; and, as a
result, such abstraction conveys correspondingly strong emotion. Under the conditions of
modernist, medium-based representation, it can be difficult to distinguish mimesis from
abstraction. Perhaps we have no need to establish any firm distinction, except when
investigating the ideological connotations of these two contrasting notions.
In 1966 de Kooning did a series of drawings made with his eyes closed (fig. 1). He
imagined the active bodies of others by stretching, compressing, and twisting his own
body. Using a motion-oriented procedure of this type, he gave a privileged centrality to
all points of contact between his hand and the paper. As a result of his working blindly,
the heads of represented figures would often strike the edges of the paper, causing the
artist to compress that part of the body and render the hair to the side, wherever there was
room, as if a real body were accommodating its volume to an overly confining space. In
effect, de Kooning was representing how a body looks to the sense of touch, his touch.
Wherever there was no figure on the paper that is, no drawing, just blankness there

was neither expressive nor representational signification, if only because de Kooning

neither saw nor touched these surrounding spaces. Instead of drawing within a preexisting
field, he was discovering the enframing rectangle as a material limitation only when he
reached its physical boundaries, the edges of the paper sensed through his hand. This
condition virtually eliminated the significance of the pictorial rectangle with respect to
any initial conception of the image. It severely reduced the degree to which an idealized
orthogonal grid might guide the composition.2
In certain ways, the difference to be perceived between de Kooning and Pollock de
Kooning as the more mimetic, Pollock as the more cognizant of a gridlike pictorial field
parallels the difference between Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, as understood at the
end of the nineteenth century in terms of an emerging theory of abstraction.3 Pictorial
abstraction could be substituted not only for the mimetic representation of nature, but also
for the expression of personalized emotional states, whether that expression came through
dramatic imagery or accentuated brushwork. Both forms of expression were subject to
charges of exaggeration and affectation. As a byproduct of the new, depersonalized kind
of abstraction, the constitutive figurational marks of a painting came to be identified
with their limited, physical materiality. Brushmarks ceased to perform metaphorically (by
dematerialized factors of resemblance) and began to perform metonymically (by adapting
to the material conditions of the pictorial environment). The elements of the pictorial
surface became abstract in the sense of being distilled from more complicated systems as
a purification of the means or medium. Whatever else a mark of paint represented, it
should behave like, and look like, paint. Artists striving to eliminate affectation made
certain that their marks would never pretend to be what they were not.

De Koonings violation of the implicit field of orthogonals had a certain parallel in Pollocks work (as
well as in Franz Klines), for Pollock sometimes determined the outer boundaries of paintings by cropping,
just as a photographer might crop a print to improve its thematic focus, pictorial dynamism, or general
expressiveness.
3
On other aspects of the new abstraction, see Richard Shiff, The Primitive of Everyone Elses Way, in
Guillermo Solana, ed., Gauguin and the Origins of Symbolism (Madrid, 2004), 64-79.

With an allusion to technical, material factors, the catalogue of a recent Seurat exhibition
establishes in a single sentence the divide between an earlier nineteenth-century mimetic
naturalism and a later nineteenth-century abstraction. Seurats art lies on our side of this
historical break. Contrasting the effect of typical impressionist paintings to Seurats use
of a pointillist mark, the catalogue author Robert Herbert observes: Pissarros broken
brushwork, like Monets, incessantly changes direction and thickness, whereas Seurats
has a regularity that later appealed to modern artists penchant for the abstract and for
all-over textures.4 Herbert puts the descriptive term all-over within quotation marks
because it amounts to technical jargon. All-over refers to the effect of uniformity,
integration, and wholeness that characterizes not only paintings by Pollock but also the
odd materiality of photographs, with their relatively uniform distribution of photographic
emulsion. In Pollocks case, as in 1949: Tiger (1949, fig. 2), the surface may be textured
and agitated but its aggressive character is present to about the same degree throughout. It
exhibits no coherent hierarchy of thick and thin, near and far, as a viewer might sense, for
example, in a painting by Delacroix.
Sharing this loss of hierarchical order (in fact, anticipating it), most nineteenth-century
photographs lie at the end of the spectrum of uniformity or all-overness opposite to that
of Pollocks painting: photographic images are all-over but not material. The surface
of Gustave Le Grays view of a picturesque oak in the Forest of Fontainebleau (1852, fig.
3) is thoroughly un-articulated in any material sense; or at least it gives that impression,
because it is (as we might say) untouched. Despite various kinds of re-touching that
may occur, the fundamental photographic image results from a regulated chemical
reaction, not the groping activity of hands with brushes. Painters hands are limited with
regard to precise detailing; problematically, artists often disguise their limitations by
developing flourishes, stylishness, and other forms of affectation. At the beginning of
photographys history, one of the great advantages attributed to this new technology was
its removal of the hand and elimination of the distracting variation that would appear
4

Robert L. Herbert, Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte (Chicago, 2004), 58.

whenever a scene was rendered by more than one artist. In this respect, photography
could claim a welcome objectivity, neutrality, and science of observation.5 Yet this
medium did have a peculiar materiality of its own, determined by the emulsion that
covered the surface of conventional photographic paper. Look too closely at an analog
photograph or enlarge it beyond a certain limit: it becomes coarse and irregular like a
painting.
One of the most suggestive statements about Seurats technique refers in an oblique
way to the possibility that painting, like photography, could be untouched. The idea
comes through Flix Fnon, Seurats appreciative critic. Having viewed La Grande Jatte
(1884-86, fig. 4) and other works, Fnon observed that no matter what Seurat was
painting, he knew that expressive accidents of the brush were of no use to him and that
his handling of the brush should remain the same throughout. This is certainly untrue in
the most literal sense, but we need to consider that the immediate context for comparison
was defined by the romantic emotionalism of Delacroix on one side and the impressionist
naturalism of Pissarro and Monet on the other side. Both romantic and impressionist
styles of painting featured accentuated brushwork.
In contradistinction, Fnon concluded that Seurats new pointillist style caused "manual
facility [to become] a negligible matter."6 Seurats painting appeared devoid of
flourishes, fancy handling, and finesse. There was something methodical (even
mechanical) about what Seurat was doing: hence the term "pointillism", referring to the
point or stitch in weaving, a methodical and anonymous practice of the hand. In weaving,
if the initial worker becomes fatigued, another worker can assume the task. Personal style
is not a factor. Seurat seems to have largely accepted Fnons representation of his
ideas. Yet he warned of the danger he perceived in having others join in this pointillism.7
If it were to become a recognized method, it would soon become its own style and next a
5

See George Butler, letter to William Henry Fox Talbot, 25 March 1841, quoted in Larry J. Schaaf, The
Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton, 2000), 150.
6
Flix Fnon, Les impressionnistes en 1886 (Paris, 1887), reprinted as "L'Impressionnisme", in Joan U.
Halperin, ed., Flix Fnon: Oeuvres plus que compltes, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1970), 1, 36-67.

mannerism, losing all material integrity. Seurat insisted on two facts, somewhat
contradictory: first, the technique he used was personal to him; second, it was merely a
method or tool and nothing mysterious, nothing beyond common understanding. When
certain admirers discerned a fanciful, ineffable poetry in this work (its presumed
emotional content), Seurat was quick to deny it: I apply my method, and thats all.8
To the impressionist generation of Monet, a flourish of the brush could signal the
freedom of the individual an individual who responded sensually and emotionally to the
immediate experience of things seen an individual unfettered by the methods and
systems of the art academies and the social hierarchies reflected by their teachings. From
Monets cultural perspective, there was nothing mystifying or pretentious in
incorporating an inexplicable flourish of the brush within a naturalistic painting, such as
the vertical zigzag that runs along the upper right edge of A Stormy Sea (c. 1884, fig. 5).
Along with his eye, if Monet had a great hand and enjoyed showing it off, what might be
said about Seurat? Fnon may have believed that Seurats manual anonymity mattered
more than his manual personality, but such a distinction does not remove all skill from
the hand. To the contrary, one skill is replacing another skill. And the new skill holds a
very special place in the thinking of late twentieth-century artists.
Consider again the notion of all-overness, the surface that seems devoid of hierarchical
articulation. Things that lack this type of regulated articulation leave viewers to their own
devices. If there is a path to experiencing the painted image and deriving knowledge from
7

Georges Seurat, letter to Paul Signac, 26 August 1888, in John Rewald, Georges Seurat (Paris, 1948),
115. Seurat did not make an issue of others failing to acknowledge pointillism as his invention.
8
Ibid. Allusions of a poetic sort appeared in literary interpretations by Seurats Symbolist supporters,
such as Paul Adam and Jean Moras; see John Rewald, La vie et loeuvre de Georges Seurat, in Henri
Dorra and John Rewald, Seurat: loeuvre peint, biographie et catalogue critique (Paris, 1959), lV. Later
comments by Seurats fellow pointillist, Paul Signac, suggest that the deceased painter had pursued to its
material extreme the impressionist method of using discrete, divided brushstrokes; see Paul Signac,
D'Eugne Delacroix au no-impressionnisme, Franoise Cachin, ed. (Paris, 1978 [1899]), 122: La touche
divise, changeante, vivante, lumire, nest donc pas le point, uniforme, mort, matire. Here Signac
contrasts light (as concentrated and active) with matter (as distended and passive). Because Seurats
neutralized point is pure matter, whatever animation it manifests cannot stem from mimesis, personal
style, or manual facility. It must be animated by its own color-light, the abstract or pure element in the
material world as the painter experiences it. Yet the effect of light (its own light) never dematerializes
Seurats mark, which projects its specific size and density.

it, this path is not obvious it has to be discovered, perhaps against a certain cultural
resistance. The image may have to be considered in relation to the medium in which it
appears, for the medium, having become resistant to providing an easy message, can no
longer be taken for granted. To some extent, this is what Seuart has come to signify to
later artists: in his pointillist style, he created images that induce viewers to understand
how the image has been made. This becomes just as important as the identity of the
image (its naturalistic feature) and how the artist revealed his personality through a
specific view (its expressionistic feature). In the process of this dual seeing (seeing the
medium as much as what the medium seems to be conveying), a viewer realizes that
every image or message is rhetorical, that is, every image or message is conditioned by
the nature of the medium that delivers the message.
Imagine viewing Seurats La Grande Jatte in terms of dots arranged according to a
relatively fine and precise raster, like that of a television screen. This cannot be the same
as viewing La Grande Jatte in terms of dashes, the elongated marks that Seurat used as
directional vectors to establish the contours and volumes of his human figures, tree
trunks, and similarly rigid objects. In any given area of La Grande Jatte, we are likely to
observe the result of Seurats having combined these two methods, which probably
correspond to two different campaigns in the studio. In 1908, his pointillist follower
Henri-Edmond Cross wrote the following: "The materials allow a certain thought and not
others ... Consciousness is limited to what the material allows."9 Seurats two methods
allowed him to think his way through an act of picturing in two opposing ways. In neither
instance was his touch particularly personal. It was part of a method, as he said, not a
poetic affectation.
Although Pollock has been admired for personalized, expressive gestures, a kind of
poetic rhetoric of the self, this is not the way certain artists have seen him. Donald Judd,
for example, viewed Pollock as a painter who caused the medium to be regarded for what
it was in any given instance, as if it were representing itself, its own physical workings. In

Pollocks art, "The dripped paint ... is dripped paint ... It's not something else that alludes
to dripped paint."10 Judd shifted his interpretive attention from what Pollocks mark of
paint might represent either a referential object or, more directly, an artists feelings
to what the mark actually did or was in its materiality. The advantage to seeing so-called
abstract expressionist paintings in this manner is that the viewer escapes the habit of
applying familiar emotional states to an understanding of the work at hand. One has to
see the painting for what it is and make something of that seeing analytically,
emotionally, or however.
Bridget Riley is another artist who has resisted the conventional understanding of abstract
expressionist technique: With his tin [of paint] and splatter stick [Pollock] most
explicitly avoids any direct physical touch.11 Riley sets the word "touch" within
quotation marks just as Herbert, in the Seurat catalogue, does with all-over; touch,
too, is a bit of technical jargon. Here touch refers to the type of handling that Fnon
believed Seurat had eliminated the sensitive, personal, yet potentially affected kind of
touch. According to Riley, Pollock also removed it, for the sake of a new artistic
physicality and a renewed acuteness of vision.
It should not be surprising that Riley stresses this aspect of Pollock. She withdraws her
hand from the execution of her paintings, an execution to be accomplished by assistants
who follow the artists cumulative understanding, as derived through her many studies
specific to each work (fig. 6). Riley regards any "expression" of authorial identity or
"exercise [of] taste" as a distracting element in the viewer's perceptual experience.12 She
wants the actual [visual] content of the paintings to come through unchecked by any
kind of touch."13 This sounds like the bits we know about Seurats attitude, his element of

Henri-Edmond Cross, "Le dernier carnet d'Henri-Edmond Cross -- II" (1908-09), in Flix Fnon, ed., Le
bulletin de la vie artistique (issue 3/ 1 June 1922), 255.
10
Donald Judd, "Jackson Pollock" (1967), in idem, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax, 1975), 195.
11
Bridget Riley, "Bridget Riley in Conversation with Isabel Carlisle" (1998), in Bridget Riley: Works 19611998 (Abbot Hall Art Gallery), (Kendal, 1998), 8.
12
Bridget Riley, statement to the author, 15 October 2002.
13
Bridget Riley, "Practising Abstraction: Talking to Michael Craig-Martin" (1992), in Robert Kudielka,
ed., Bridget Riley: Dialogues on Art (London, 1995), 60.

expressive anonymity. With authorship moving to the background, materiality and

physical properties of all sorts move to the foreground. But this is not the kind of
materiality and physicality associated with conventional expressionism.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chuck Close made unusually large portrait
paintings, such as Phil (1969, fig. 7), which he derived from gridded photographs. He
transferred what could be seen in the form of dematerialized photographic emulsion to a
type of painting from which he eliminated his personal hand. He accomplished this by
using an airbrush, waving it in front of the canvas like, as he often says, a magic wand.
As a viewer approaches near to these large airbrush paintings, the image disintegrates
into granularity rather like a photograph, yet curiously coherent in an abstract way,
because every little droplet has been controlled by an organic movement of the artist.
Making these paintings, Close was operating at a certain distance, just as Pollock had
when he dripped paint. He nevertheless remained very near to the canvas surface, also as
Pollock had near to it in bodily terms, near in relation to the scale of human action.
Close describes his result as if to recall the effect of Seurats drawings: he says that it
looks as if "an image moved in on a fog and fell into the painting."14 When asked to
comment on Seurat in 1991, he stressed the artists drawings: While you're aware of the
making, the artist's hand has almost disappeared. You're not quite sure where the edge
is."15 According to Close, Seurat drew figures just by using the texture of the paper and
growing with it."16 It seems then that Seurats elusive edge grows into or out of the grain
or weave of the paper, as if the hand hardly had a role to play. The two primary elements
of the drawing medium, the crayon and the paper, become remarkably integrated, so that,
rhetorically, the medium contains, rather than conveys or transports, the image. The

14

Chuck Close, statement to the author, 1997.

Chuck Close in Patrick Pacheco, "Point Counterpoint," in Art & Antiques (issue 8/ October 1991), 73.
16
Chuck Close in Ann Temkin, ed., Chuck Close/Paul Cadmus: In Dialogue (Philadephia Museum of Art)
(Philadelphia, 1997), n.p.
15

fading or blurred edges of Seurats Seated Monkey (1884, fig. 8) indicate the nature of
laid paper as much as the fuzziness of the animals hair.
Eventually, Close abandoned the use of his airbrush, and transferred images by hand from
the gridded photographic surface to an overtly gridded painting surface. His grids became
ever more apparent as he increased their size relative to the dimensions of the format,
often setting them on the diagonal to create further tension between the developing image
and the structure of its ground. Close fills these grids with relatively large, anonymous
dots, dabs, and dashes. Even at a distance, a viewer notices the individual constituent
marks, certain to see not only the image they produce but also, as Close says, "the stuff
that makes it."17 The image seems to fall into or grow out of its supportive medium. The
serrated edge at the right side of the face of Maggie (1998-99, fig. 9) reflects the nature of
the diagonal grid as much as it traces out the contour of the cheek, just as Seurats
monkey was reflecting the gridded weave of its paper.
In Seurats small wood panels, such as his study for Le Bec du Hoc (1885, fig. 10), there
are many instances of an utter collapse of the distinction between image and medium. No
doubt the small scale of these works encourages this type of effect, but analogous
conditions arise in Seurats larger paintings, and his later admirers, such as Close and
Riley, also generate such effects at a large scale, in both representational and abstract
work. In the Seurat panel, there is a single, tiny stroke of white just below the horizon
line and to the left of the rocky outcropping. The stroke amounts to a vertical within an
environment of horizontals. Below it is a much slighter bit of red, which appears to be
pigment, not a sliver of exposed wood panel, although the two can easily be confused. I
assume that this combination represents a sailboat, almost lost within the metaphorical
and literal sea of marks that surrounds it. And those marks, even though constituting a
larger representational field, are just marks like Pollocks. They are the all-over marks
that Herbert mentions if we wish to see them that way not because they resolutely fail
17

Chuck Close, interview by Brooks Adams, "Close Encountered," in Artforum (issue 36/ April 1998),
135.

10

to signify something larger than themselves, but because many twentieth-century viewers
have seen them in this alternative manner (at once material and abstract). Why? Perhaps
because the medium has become a problem. Again, why? Perhaps because of the shock
of a succession of new representational technologies, some analog, some digital:
lithography, photography, the telephone, sound recording, cinema, television, computer
imaging.
In Seurat, as with Closes gridded paintings, we see the image but we also, quite
naturally, see the stuff. The stuff, the material factor, creates the image but evidently
resists letting it entirely loose in the world. It remains in its specific material form. The
surface of Seurats Le Bec du Hoc has been activated not only by the artists incipient
pointillism, but also by a vertical scoring into the wood panel, a cross-graining that may
have been applied by a toothing plane. At the upper left corner, cross-graining is
particularly discernible, exposed in the way that the horizontal strokes of paint appear
punctuated by tiny, darker verticals. As a result, the surface acquires a visual texture
similar to that of Seurats drawings. It can enhance the representational image, as when it
suggests the choppiness or turbulence of the sea. But because the artists panels typically
also have a distinct grain in the horizontal dimension, which produces a subtle pattern of
ridges, the vertical scoring or cross-graining creates an abstract pattern of interference, a
supplemental sign of the resistance of the medium. Seurats full-scale, canvas version of
Le Bec du Hoc exhibits many little vertical strokes of paint within the predominantly
horizontal strokes used to represent the open sea.18 It seems that the painted verticals
substitute for the interference provided by the material graining built into the study on
panel.
Seurats method of applying dots of pigment often reaches its material failure point. In a
small panel study of the channel at Gravelines (1890, fig. 11), a single string of red and
blue marks defines the form of a lamppost. Given the scale of the rendering, this
18

Seurat adjusted this painting in 1888 or 1889, adding its fully developed pointillist elements, which
include a number of dots of color, slightly elongated in the vertical direction.

11

representational feature is too thin to accommodate a double string of marks. At several

points Seurat broke his marking sequence, perhaps to maintain a unifying effect of
luminous atmosphere created by differentiated hues that define not only the foreground
lamp but also the channel of water, the far shore, and the sky all pictorially behind the
lamp, yet just as much on the surface plane of the painting. As a result of the breaks, the
background of water and sky occupies some of the surface space where one would have
expected a linear continuation of segments of the lamppost. This is an absurdity if the
structure of Seurat's marking is to be correlated with the physical integrity and ordinary
visual appearance of a real lamppost. He seems to have respected a different reality, the
materiality of his medium: paint applied by hand, stroke by stroke, touch by touch. Do
the bright red spots that sit between the dark blues signify spots of light? Do they signify
a decorative pattern on the lamppost? Are they shifting the local color from blue toward
violet by means of optical mixture? The weave or grain of the marks themselves may
make it impossible to answer these questions definitively. Such is the nature of
perception: we perceive an image, but we also perceive stuff along with it; and the two
need not combine seamlessly. For clarity and convenience, we usually try to ignore either
one or the other of the two conflicting aspects.
Such ambiguity occurs also with Close, who is fascinated by it. Faced with the task of
rendering the frame of his eyeglasses in Self Portrait II (1995, fig. 12), he breaks both the
continuity and straightness of his line. This is how the situation appears to a viewer who
traces the details of the marking pattern. Yet, taken as a whole, the marks average out to
the all-over, continous representational effect for which, along with the stuff, Close
was aiming. His painting projects both the analog image and the digital stuff. When a
viewer stands back from this self-portrait, the analog effect may dominate; yet the digital
elements remain apparent as interacting fragments. Stand near and conditions may
reverse, with the digital elements now dominant. The sense of near and far, digital
fragmentation and analog integration, will vary among individuals. Every viewer,
however, will find it difficult to resist moving back and forth in front of Closes art,
having been induced to play with effects of focus and blur. To encounter this painting is

12

to become involved not only in the artists own temporal process of making, but even
more so in ones personal time and space. Perhaps Closes central contribution is to have
shown how embedded the viewers body must be, even in ordinary acts of perception.
Closes process of painting is neither a trick nor a game. In retrospect, it makes us
conscious of the physical nature of the photograph with which he begins, and of the more
fundamental fact that any medium possesses its proper physicality. Both painting and
photography have resolution factors; and both must therefore have points of failure,
conditions under which consciousness of the medium will supplant consciousness of
either the representational identity of the image or its abstract formal composition. The
discipline we call art history need not be confined to the study of either the medium or the
representational image, each regarded in isolation. It can investigate the changing
interpretive conditions under which these forces interact. Closes art does what Seurats
did much earlier: it probes the relation of medium to image in forms relevant to the visual
technologies of its era.

Fig. 1: Willem de Kooning,

untitled (1966)

13

Fig. 2: Jackson Pollock,

Number 3, 1949: Tiger (1949)

Fig. 3: Gustave Le Gray,

Gnarled Oak (1852)

14

Fig. 4: Georges Seurat,

La grande Jatte
(1884-1886)

Fig. 5.: Claude Monet,

A Stormy Sea (ca. 1884)

15

Fig. 6: Bridget Riley,

Painting with two Verticals
(2004)

Fig. 7: Chuck Close,

Phil (1969)

16

Fig. 8: Georges Seurat,

Seated Monkey (1884)

Fig. 9: Chuck Close,

Maggie (1998-1999)

Fig. 12: Chuck Close,

Self-Portrait II (1995)

17

Fig. 10: Georges Seurat,

tudes pour "Le Bec du
Hoc" (1885)

Fig. 11: Georges Seurat,

tudes pour "Gravelines"
(1890)

18