KCET Exhibits Portraits of Picasso, Close

The intersection of art and life is the premise of “Picasso Paints Picasso” and “Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress,” two intelligent and absorbing documentaries airing back-to-back tonight on KCET. Each program profiles a major 20th century artist whose life is reflected in portraits of other people.

Up first is “Picasso Paints Picasso,” produced, written and narrated by Emmy Award-winning documentarian Perry Wolff (“The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America”), which quite persuasively demonstrates that Pablo Picasso’s body of work is also his autobiography. Selections from a lifetime’s worth of portraits tell of Picasso’s ambivalent relationship to his father; his volatile marriages and long string of mistresses; the four children he adored and (once they reached the age of 8) emotionally abandoned; and, in a series of stark self-portraits executed during his last years, Picasso’s fear of aging, sterility and death.

Like detectives dusting for fingerprints, we examine many of Picasso’s works for cryptic autobiographical imprints. Particular scrutiny is directed at the portraits of the women in Picasso’s life, whose sometimes lovely, sometimes grotesquely distorted features reflect the power they held over the artist at various points in the relationships. Family photographs, along with examples of Picasso’s earliest paintings, provide fascinating glimpses into the artist’s formative years.

The inclusion of archival film footage of a mischievous Picasso painting flowers, women, bulls and doves on a transparent plate-glass wall is a particularly charming treat. The program also places masterpieces by Rembrandt and Velazquez alongside Picasso’s inspired reinterpretations of them. This reminds us of Picasso’s debt to earlier masters, while at the same time illustrating the creative inspiration and sheer, uninhibited joy with which this century’s most celebrated artist approached his own canvases.

“Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress” takes an altogether different approach to similar themes. Filmed in the months just prior to Close’s 1997 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, our encounter with American portrait artist Close (who also narrates the film) feels at once casual and intimate, as if Close were chatting with us during a private studio visit. We follow, step by painstaking step, as Close “builds” one of his latest paintings, which is, appropriately enough, a self-portrait.

By his own description, Close makes “big, confrontational” images that appear to be seamless but are in fact made from thousands of individual pieces. From up close, each unit looks like a tiny abstract painting; viewed from a distance, they coalesce into gigantic and utterly mesmerizing portraits (he calls them “heads”) of his family, friends and fellow artists.

Producer-writer-director Marion Cajori’s approach mirrors Close’s own, mosaic-like method, with spectacular results. A melange of interviews with several of Close’s subjects, all of them prominent artists or curators in their own right, provide different ways of looking at the art-making process. Composer Philip Glass discusses the concept of reduction in contemporary art; artist Kiki Smith reflects on the “enormous vulnerability” she felt as the subject of one of Close’s monumental portraits. These comments offer a fascinating mini-lecture on post-abstract art and are also highly personal musings about the role art plays in these artists’ own lives.

The program’s matter-of-fact treatment of Close’s disability is particularly noteworthy. At age 48, a collapsed spinal artery left Close paralyzed. (He relearned to paint using a specially designed glove that “holsters” the paintbrush to his hand.) Obviously, this painful and deeply frightening event had an immeasurable impact on Close and his family, and it forever altered his approach to painting. Yet it’s also clear that there’s simply no room for self-pity, nor for self-aggrandizement, in this remarkable artist’s extremely busy life.

* “Picasso Paints Picasso” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV (Channel 28). “Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress” airs at 10 tonight on KCET.