Chuck Close Biography Quotes 17 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Charles Thomas Close, known as Chuck Close, was born in 1940 in the state of Washington and grew up to become one of the most recognizable American artists of his generation. From an early age he confronted learning challenges, including dyslexia, and later spoke about lifelong face blindness, or prosopagnosia, which made it difficult for him to recognize people. Art became a way to organize perception and memory. He studied at the University of Washington in Seattle and went on to complete an MFA at the Yale School of Art in 1964. After Yale, he received a Fulbright grant to study in Vienna, an experience that broadened his exposure to European art before he settled in New York City at the end of the 1960s.

Arrival in New York and Breakthrough
Close entered the New York art world as abstract painting still loomed large, yet he turned decisively toward the human face. Using large-scale photographic source images, he made monumental portraits by mapping them onto a grid and building the image cell by cell. His breakthrough work, Big Self-Portrait (1967-68), signaled a new kind of portraiture: confrontational, process-driven, and disarmingly detailed. He became associated with fellow artists and contemporaries who were reshaping American art, including Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Nancy Graves, and composer Philip Glass, whom Close also famously portrayed. His art found an early and lasting home in New York galleries and museums, notably through long relationships with the Pace Gallery and major collecting institutions.

Method and Media
Close is often linked to Photorealism, but he was more precisely an artist of method, translating photographs into paint through a systematic procedure. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he used airbrush and acrylic to create seemingly seamless images. He also made portraits built entirely from fingerprints, allowing the touch of the hand to generate tone and form. Over time, his gridded units became larger and more autonomous; from up close, each cell reads as a small abstract painting, yet at a distance the mosaic resolves into a face. He embraced photography not only as source material but as an art in its own right, producing Polaroids with the 20x24 camera and later daguerreotypes. Printmaking was central: through collaborations with master printers at Crown Point Press and Pace Editions, and with figures such as Kathan Brown and Richard Benson, he explored etching, woodcut, screenprint, and paper pulp, often using the press to make the process visible.

Paralysis and Reinvention
In 1988 Close suffered a collapse of a spinal artery that left him largely paralyzed. After intensive rehabilitation he recovered limited movement in his arms and continued to work from a wheelchair with a motorized easel and custom tools. He relied on a team of studio assistants yet remained the author of each decision, planning and executing paintings cell by cell. The crisis altered his mark-making: the cells became more chromatically complex, layered with lozenges, commas, and ovals that fuse into an image at a viewing distance. The persistence with which he rebuilt his practice became a defining aspect of his public image and inspired other artists navigating disability.

Circles, Portraits, and Collaborations
Close's sitters formed a map of his artistic world. He returned repeatedly to the faces of friends and peers, including Philip Glass and Richard Serra, among others from the New York cultural scene. He also worked closely with curators and critics who helped contextualize his art, notably Robert Storr, who organized a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in the late 1990s. As a printmaker and photographer he collaborated with studios across the United States and abroad, and with dealers like Arne Glimcher at the Pace Gallery who championed his work. Close's family life intersected with his studio: he married Leslie Rose in the late 1960s, with whom he had two daughters, and later married the artist Sienna Shields in 2013.

Public Commissions, Exhibitions, and Honors
Close exhibited widely from the 1970s onward, and his works entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Walker Art Center, and many others. The exhibition Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration traveled extensively, underscoring his belief that a print's making is inseparable from its meaning. His public commissions expanded the reach of his portraiture; among the most visible is his suite of mosaic portraits for New York City's Second Avenue Subway, where faces of artists and cultural figures appear across station walls. His contributions were recognized with numerous honors, including the National Medal of Arts in 2000. He also served on the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, participating alongside other prominent cultural figures.

Controversies
In 2017 several women accused Close of inappropriate comments during studio visits related to his portrait practice. He issued public apologies, and one planned exhibition was postponed by a major museum as institutions debated how to respond. The allegations prompted broader discussions about power dynamics in the art world. Around the same time, Close's health challenges were increasingly public; he had been diagnosed with a form of dementia, which acquaintances and representatives cited when discussing changes in his behavior. The discourse around his legacy has since included both his artistic innovation and these late-career controversies.

Later Years and Death
Despite health setbacks, Close continued to produce paintings, prints, tapestries woven on Jacquard looms, and photographs, often with the assistance of a close-knit studio. He remained an active presence in New York's art community, his studio a site of constant production and collaboration. Chuck Close died in 2021 at age 81 in Oceanside, New York. Reports noted congestive heart failure as a cause. His passing prompted tributes from artists, printers, curators, and dealers who had worked with him across decades, including colleagues like Philip Glass and Richard Serra who understood how his discipline and method transformed the portrait.

Legacy
Close's legacy rests on the reinvention of portraiture through process. By turning the grid into both a conceptual tool and a visual language, he showed how mechanical systems and human touch can coexist to produce intimacy and scale. His approach allowed viewers to inhabit two images at once: abstraction up close, likeness at a distance. The consistency of that idea across painting, photography, printmaking, tapestry, and monumental mosaic made his oeuvre unusually coherent. His perseverance after paralysis set a standard for creative adaptation, while his collaborations with printers, assistants, gallerists, and museum professionals demonstrate how many hands and minds contribute to a singular vision. His life and work remain a touchstone for artists who treat method as meaning, and for audiences who find the human face newly strange and newly legible through art.

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