A Portrait of the Artist as Curator : Art: Chuck Close was overwhelmed at first by the responsibility to do right by his fellow artists, but now ‘Head-On’ has made him a curating star.

“I was never more worried about anything in my life than this,” said artist Chuck Close of “Head-On/The Modern Portrait,” an exhibition that he selected from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.

It opened Tuesday at the Lannan Foundation, which is in an industrial zone near Marina del Rey.

“I’m used to laying my neck on the line for my own work. But this responsibility to other artists I find really scary. I was very concerned about doing something that the artists wouldn’t want, not showing the proper respect by leaning their works on shelves and overlapping them. But also I thought, ‘Oh my God, how are they going to feel about hanging next to this person, someone they might hate or whose work seems antithetical to theirs?’ ”

He needn’t have worried.

The exhibition, which takes the highly unorthodox approach of cramming about 140 portraits into one small gallery, met a chorus of praise from artists, curators and critics last winter in New York. Close, who was already well known for enormously enlarged portraits that have the hard-bitten edge of mug shots and the shimmering beauty of Impressionist landscapes, suddenly became a star curator.

“Head-On/The Modern Portrait” is the third in MOMA’s “Artist’s Choice” series of artist-curated exhibitions. Following painter Ellsworth Kelly and the late sculptor Scott Burton, Close designed the show for a particular gallery at the museum, with no thought of travel. But he jumped at the Lannan Foundation’s surprise invitation to bring it to Los Angeles. With a few exceptions--including a Van Gogh painting that is too valuable to insure and a particularly fragile piece by Salvador Dali--all the works shown in New York were sent West.

“The gallery at the Modern is a real urban space, small with a high ceiling. Here, with these low ceilings and rambling spaces, it’s sort of the California ranch house version of the show,” Close said in an interview during the exhibition’s installation. “I think it’s going to feel different, but I think the works are going to press on each other in the same way. You sort of fall into this room and everyone’s staring at you. I want it to be discomfiting and somewhat oppressive, pushing against the ceiling and the walls.”

In short, he intends the show to have the impact of his paintings. “We don’t invade each other’s body space when we talk; we keep a distance. I try to make my portraits more aggressive than that, more confrontational and more intimate. We see more (in my work) than we normally see: more detail, more wrinkles, more zits, whatever. I wanted this show to have some of that intimacy and some of that feeling of being pushed up against (the art), where you really have to see it differently than you did before,” he said.

Like his paintings, which take months to create from thousands of repetitive brush strokes, “Head-On” was a long-term effort. Upon being invited to participate in the “Artist’s Choice” series, Close’s first thought was to display all the museum’s works by Willem de Kooning. But he decided to do something more challenging with his curatorial opportunity than tell the world that De Kooning is his hero.

Close--who has been severely disabled for 2 1/2 years, since a collapsed spinal artery paralyzed him--was soon foraging through MOMA’s vast collection. He put in 24 eight-hour days, looking at virtually every portrait. “It’s the Chinese restaurant school of exhibitions,” he said, describing a process of going from department to department while assembling a tasty menu.

To pare down the quantity and figure out placement, he pinned up photographs and Xerox copies of candidates in his studio, then had an assistant make scale model drawings of all the pieces and a model of the Modern’s exhibition space. The purposefully crowded arrangement that he settled on is not the result of a reluctance to edit, however.

“All the time we were working in the museum, we were leaning things up against the wall and stacking them up, which is also how I live with art at home,” he said. “I always have trouble deciding where to pound a nail. . . . It’s such a permanent decision.”

Close also moves art around at home because he hates to put art in a fixed position where he will cease to see it, he said. “That white wall that we normally love in the museum world erases the memory of the piece just seen and clears the palate, like sherbet between the courses. That is one way of having an experience, but it isn’t the only way. I thought this was an opportunity, coming from outside the museum, to be mildly subversive. What could I do that they can’t get away with? In fact, the curators almostly uniformly have said, ‘We love what you have done, but if we had tried to do it, they would never have let us,’ ” he said.

Displaying a floor-to-ceiling overload of artworks encourages viewers to make comparative judgments and discover differences as well as similarities. “Artists have particularly enjoyed looking at the show because it makes obvious how the works are built and just how different they are from one another in technique, process or the artist’s hand,” he said.

In New York, the show turned out to be an audience participation piece. Some people raced back and forth across the gallery making their own connections, others praised him for brilliant comparisons that he hadn’t intended, and artists confessed an urge to rearrange the pieces, Close said.

“There are things hanging next to each other that have never been next to each other and will never be next to each other again--probably for good reason. But for this one time, it’s instructive, I think, to have pieces that you couldn’t imagine next to each other,” he said.

Pablo Picasso and Ivan Albright, for example are hardly kindred aesthetic spirits, but Close discovered striking formal similarities in the way they have punched up light areas in a pair of lithographs. Juan Gris’ and Jean Dubuffet’s stern portrayals of their mothers make a humorous duo that Close has dubbed “the dueling mothers.” Among Close’s discoveries was a lithograph of Picasso’s young children done with the artist’s fingerprints, which provides a counterpoint to Close’s fingerprint portrait of his daughter, Georgia.

“Raiding the cultural icebox” of the museum was “a great treat” in itself, he said, but it also allowed him to broaden his horizons and empathize with curators.

“I loved putting people into my show who I knew wouldn’t put me in their show if they were curating,” he said, gleefully pointing out a painting by the late Alice Neel, a beloved, crusty character who once told him that she had always hated his work.

He also got a kick out of resurrecting works that hadn’t been shown in decades, pulling Ray Johnson’s mail art out of MOMA’s library and including artists whose work he generally doesn’t admire. “I absolutely hate (British painter Francis) Bacon. I think he’s just the most overrated artist. I find his work absolutely formulaic and I don’t buy the Angst ; I never have. But I must say that, within this context, I loved being able to put Bacon in and take another look at him,” Close said.

“And yet, I thought if I’m a curator and I’m putting in someone I don’t like, there’s something wrong with that. I should be making quality judgments. But I realize now it’s not as simple as that. It’s not just putting in work you like best. Otherwise, I would have hung the De Koonings and gone home. I have a whole new respect for the profession.”

New York response to “Head-On” bowled him over. “The reaction was so positive, I almost thought maybe I’d quit being an artist and become a curator. But it doesn’t pay very well and I may have shot my wad. Maybe this is my one idea, so I’d better get out of town fast before anyone asks me to do something I can’t do,” he joked.

His curatorial venture hasn’t had any measurable effect on his painting, Close said, but it has tightened his “connectedness with artists of other generations and other stylistic points of view . . . I originally liked to think that I sort of sprung from nowhere. Now I have to recognize the fact that all these people have been making portraits for all these centuries and that it’s obviously had far more impact on me than I wanted to admit, even to myself.”

His recent work, including two portraits in this year’s “Biennial Exhibition” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, has loosened up notably. Close has lost the grip in his hands and now paints with a mechanical device strapped to his wrist, so some observers have speculated that the shift was dictated by his physical condition.

Not so, Close said, noting that his last show before he was paralyzed was already moving in that direction. “In the first pieces I made while I was still in the hospital, I went back and made them tighter, I guess just to prove to myself that I could. Then I went back to doing what I wanted to do,” he said. “I’m sure that there will be things I want to do that I won’t be able to do, or they’ll be extremely difficult. I can’t just pick up a pencil or hold chalk the way I used to. But if you want to do something badly enough and you already know how to do it, you can figure out another way to do it.”