Chuck Close

Chuck Close grew up in Monroe, Washington, an only child in a family that could not afford art lessons but encouraged the drawing he did anyway. He was severely dyslexic before any school around him used that word, unable to retain dates or facts, and lived with an undiagnosed neuromuscular condition that made his legs give out and left him too weak for the sports other boys played. He also had prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces even of people he knew well, a condition doctors would not properly describe for decades. He studied at the University of Washington and then Yale, earning a master of fine arts in 1964, and arrived in New York in 1967 already committed to an unusual answer to his own condition: painting faces so large, and built from such a rigid grid, that he could take them in one square at a time.

Big Self Portrait, a nine-foot black-and-white painting of his own unshaven face finished in 1968, established the method he worked in for the rest of his career: a photograph broken into a grid, then rebuilt square by square in paint until an enormous, unsparingly detailed face emerged — closer, he insisted, to "mark-making" than to the photorealism critics filed him under. The Walker Art Center bought that painting within a year. He portrayed fellow artists and friends, most famously composer Philip Glass in 1969, and worked steadily through the 1970s and 1980s until an anterior spinal artery collapsed on December 7, 1988, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. He kept painting anyway, a brush strapped to his wrist and a motorized easel moving the canvas to him, producing lower-resolution portraits that still read as faces from across a room.

In December 2017 two women, and within weeks four more, accused Close of inviting them to his studio under the pretext of a portrait sitting and then making unwanted sexual comments and requests, allegations spanning roughly 2001 to 2013. Close said only that he was sorry if he had made anyone uncomfortable. Yale removed him from its School of Art Dean's Council, and the National Gallery of Art canceled a 2018 exhibition it had already scheduled. He had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2015, and after his death his neurologist said the disease attacks the part of the brain that inhibits impulsive behavior — a medical explanation that reframes, without erasing, the record, since the conduct described mostly predates by years any documented diagnosis.

Close died of congestive heart failure on August 19, 2021, in Oceanside, New York, at eighty-one, having produced more than 150 solo exhibitions and works that hang in nearly every major American museum, including the mosaic portraits installed in Manhattan's 86th Street subway station in 2010. His reputation has not settled into one shape since. Museums that spent decades building around his self-portraits have had to decide, gallery by gallery, whether and how to keep showing an artist several institutions publicly distanced themselves from before his death, while historians of American painting continue to treat the grid technique itself — dyslexia-born and endlessly imitated — as one of the more genuinely original formal inventions of American art in the 1960s and 1970s.

Chuck Close's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Big Self Portrait artwork
  Nine-foot painting that established his grid method, acquired by the Walker Art Center 1968
• Phil artwork
  Portrait of composer Philip Glass 1969
• Keith artwork 1970
• Self-Portrait artwork
  Painted after his 1988 paralysis, with a brush strapped to his wrist 2000
• 86th Street subway station mosaics artwork
  Commissioned by the MTA for the Second Avenue Subway 2010

• July 5, 1940 aged 0 Born in Monroe, Washington
• 1962 aged ~22 Earns a B.A. from the University of Washington
• 1964 aged ~24 Earns an M.F.A. from Yale University
• 1967 aged ~27 Moves to New York City and settles in SoHo
• 1968 aged ~28 Completes Big Self Portrait, his breakthrough grid painting
• December 7, 1988 aged 48 Paralyzed from the neck down by a spinal artery collapse
• 2000 aged ~60 Receives the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton
• December 2017 aged 77 First sexual harassment allegations become public
• August 19, 2021 aged 81 Dies in Oceanside, New York, at eighty-one

• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. contemporary of
• Jasper Johns b. 1930
  Painter and printmaker whose Flag and Target paintings bridged Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. peer in the New York art world of
• Robert Rauschenberg 1925–2008
  Mixed-media artist whose Combines broke down boundaries between painting and sculpture. peer in the New York art world of
• Willem de Kooning 1904–1997
  Abstract expressionist whose gestural paintings helped define the New York School. reacted against the gestural style of