Air: 24 Hours/Jennifer Bartlett.

Although typically seen in rather different critical lights, the subjects of these two new books have a lot in common. If Jennifer Bartlett has been taken to task, on occasion, for what can appear to be a certain wantonness, a luxuriance of reference and emotion in her work, it would seem that Chuck Close can do no wrong. Yet these two artists are not only of comparable stature and renown, they are both figurative painters whose abiding ties to abstraction, or more precisely to conceptualism, remain plainly evident in their similar uses of the grid as infrastructure, and of serialism as an organizing principle, in everything they make.

Bartlett and Close also both get to write their own tickets here, art historically speaking, which was no doubt one of advantages in getting Deborah Eisenberg, the short-story writer, and John Guare, the playwright, to devise texts for these neurotic and fascinating books. Although worldly and well-connected, they were presumed innocent of insider vices and the use of art-world jargon, and yet these chosen (virgin) authors would surely seek distinction on foreign turf, a distinction their subjects might in turn share. We can certainly all take pleasure in the fluency and absence of cant in these otherwise dissimilar accounts, but to peruse these books is to be given the impression, at least subliminally, that these leonine creatures, now in their 50s, have against odds survived free of the taints of commerce and fashionability that so colored the careers of their slightly younger contemporaries.

Eisenberg is the more disciplined, more exquisitely insightful writer, and she has wound up with the more maniacal but ultimately entertaining book - pretty, too, with its plumpish, deepcerise cover and see-through jacket. Leafing through it, however, I moaned. The book is relentless. First comes Eisenberg's essay proper, a work of moderate length and formidable intelligence that is, perhaps, a little rough going early on as the author, a precisionist, sets about the business of pacing us through the complex logistics and taxonomies that filter through Air: 24 depicting aspects Bartlett's big Hours (1991-92), a cycle of 24 paintings depicting aspects of Bartlett's big (new) house in New York City at every hour on the hour of a hypothetical day. Eisenberg does pick up steam as she goes along, and is particularly good at distillation, as when she writes that in looking at the pictures one is often struck by the force of an event without being tempted to search for an event as such." But the essay ends in disorientation: it is "as though one were looking with the artist's puzzled and brooding stare at a scene that one had just oneself stepped out of, or had awakened suddenly in front of the canvas, paintbrush in hand studying the maps and compasses of a stranger."

The uncertainty of this conclusion is soon justified, for the thoroughgoing thing turns out this be but an introduction. Immediately following are 24 responsive readings of the 24 full-color plates representing Bartlett's flamboyantly systematized yet elusive magnus opus. Since Eisenberg has already addressed each picture, it shouldn't surprise that a few of these pithy responses show signs of giddiness, among other symptoms of depth rapture. We are definitely not seeing the forest for the trees: next, we find a series of graphs of the grids underlying each painting, including the grids within grids, with sections labeled according to infrastructural descriptions (the "six-minute plaid" is a favorite) in the main essay. Actually, the diagrams are reassuring - contemplative, too, like little Agnes Martins without God - and most readers will want to put the book down at this point, serene in their newfound confidence at having finally gotten the hang of these big, complicated pictures. (The color plates, at so reduced a scale, indeed go just so far.)

But we are only at the halfway mark! The book proceeds defiantly, now taking the form of an interview that is also divided into 24 segments, each keyed to a black and white reproduction of the same paintings i Could Eisenberg, who is not journalistically inclined, possibly have wanted to do this? Readers, however, will be rewarded at this stage for their perseverance. A sort of mad yin fest ensues, complete with odd biographical nuggets gingerly placed (a sister who is a former men's swimming champion turns up on the very last page); a fractured Gothic tale childhood horror rape and possible murder, involving mysterious caretakers, at the age of "nine or ten,"); a near-immaculate Caribbean conception (Bartlett saw the sea swell and so did she); a champagne whiff of Kay Thompson (in the artist's picaresque and busily serviced home life). Finally, there's the play of artist and author@two opposite, comicomically complementary personalities.

They really make a classic pair, these two, like Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory in My Dinner with Andre, which is weirdly germane since Eisenberg is, I believe, Shawn's girlfriend, and must have noticed this bit of osmotic parallelism herself. Where Bartlett is all exalted bluster and embroidered detail, Eisenberg is recessive and quizzical, sputtering forth occasionally with a "Gosh Jennifer!" Yet a polite but healthy, writer's ego reveals itself now and then, as when Bartlett quixotically projects herself into one of Eisenberg,s subtle stories - to, no avail. So Bravo! - to authorial resistance, and to this most enjoyably infuriating volume, as well.

The Chuck Close book might have been a more routine project, were it not for the spectacle of male-bonding-make that back-scratching - that awaits us. Close's recent portraits, most made after the acute neurological event, of December 1988 that left the, artist largely paralyzed, are the raison d'etre for this book. they are well served by excellent full-accompanied by editor's notes rock music playing in the background, Chuck begins the session. . . . I that documents the sitting for Guare's own portrait, from all sides of the giant Polaroid machine Close uses for his work. Finally - ta - dah! - the Portrait of the Playwright. It is August: Guare, in Playwright shirt and bowtie, occupies most of a two-page spread as a heraldic first among equals, alongside an all-star list of artists whose portraits soon follow.

Then Guare's-verbal portrait, of Close - a text that flows smoothly for some 30 pages, over and under and through images of earlier work and of the artist, then and now, with and without his family, taken by such photographers as Tina Barney and the late Hans Namuth. There are reproductions, as well, of works by Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, whose names, because uttered by the artist, along with those of Philip Glass and (surprisingly) Anselm Kiefer, are printed big so that they jump off the page like red passages in scripture. Indeed, we always seem to be on Calvary or Parnassus in this book - almost literally at times, as when we read that author and subject cemented their friendship at the American Academy in Rome, whose director, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, is Guare's wife.

The narrative itself is a page-turner. Devoid of insight and longueurs alike, it reads like a Vanity Fair article. Guare begins by salting that the portraits remind him of he statues on Easter island, then he compares them to passport photos but passports to what countries?", then he marvels at how Close finds "Monet's dazzling garden in Giverny" in April Gornick face. And that's about it for esthetics. Most of the story - and it is gripping - concerns the onset of Close's illness and his gradual rehabilitation, and Guare's approach suggest a screenwriter doing research: retracing Close's itinerary around town on the day of his collapse, touring the facilities ar Rusk with the artist's therapists. He even conjures up a meeting with a Hollywood cliche to whom he pitches the "Chuck Close Story." My Left Foot comes up, and so does the artist's upcoming retrospective at the "Met," actually planned for 1997, which appeals to the imaginary mogul as a Rocky-like climax.

Guare is shameless, really. Disingenuous, too - for instance when telling a peculiarly meanspirited anecdote about a 1988 reception at Gracie Mansion: Close, minutes befores he is hospitalized, is rude to Agnes Gund, the collector and MoMA trustee, who had approached him for a commission. Guare's stated purpose is to propagate the rather specious notion that Close only paints his intimates - that all-star list. Guare shouldn't peddle such pieties, when what he clearly relishes is offenses. Some sophisticated comedy about hobnobbing culturati in the e'90s would have been more to the point.