Growing up, Chuck Close wanted to be a magician. Gangly and somewhat physically uncoordinated, he was not inclined to sports, so he taught himself a lot of great magic tricks as a way to impress his friends. Not long after, he learned that there was magic to be made in mark-making. As he told Cindy Sherman in an interview originally commissioned by the Brooklyn Rail and printed for the first time in the exhibition catalogue, “I’ve never forgotten the thrilling experience around when I was eight years old of putting different colored paint on a flat surface, which instantly created an image and created space.”

With the passing of Bernice Berend Rose (1935–2023), the art world has suffered a true loss: an art world of curators, dealers, gallerists, scholars, connoisseurs, collectors, artists, art historians, students, and the art-loving public in general—all of those who made up the fabric of Bernice’s life and whom she best loved spending her life with.