Artist Chuck Close sold Big Self-Portrait (196768) to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for $1,300. The year was 1969, and it was his first work to hang in a museum. This prescient purchase is displayed beside nearly 100 likenesses in pencil, print, and paint in the museum's "Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 19672005" (612/375-7600; www.walkerart.org; July 24Oct. 16). The show—bookended by that first black-and-white painting, of a young, bespectacled Close nursing a cigarette, and the oversized Self-Portrait (200001) from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art collection—follows the trajectory of Close's portraiture, whether rendered with his early precision or his more gestural strokes of recent years. A sequel of sorts to the center's 1980 retrospective on Close, this debut show of the Walker's new Herzog & de Meurondesigned galleries is a tribute not to be missed.
—BRIDGET MORIARITY
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