Chuck Close, an artist who had a long history with the Walker Art Center, passed away this week at the age of 81. Considered one of contemporary art’s most influential figurative painters, Close was committed to rigorous experimentation within his rigidly defined practice, remaining a vital presence through his decades-long career by focusing exclusively on portraiture. Using his inimitable style of representational painting—which ranged from hyperreal, almost photographic veracity to watery, stippled constellations of colorful marks—he anchored his practice by portraying friends, family, fellow artists, and himself, often creating multiple portraits of the same subject over time. In all the media in which he worked, whether painting, drawing, photography, collage, or printmaking, Close began with the photograph as a point of departure. He then chose, as he often remarked, to consistently “alter the variables” in the way he transposed his photographic sources, in the process creating a remarkable pictorial language that continued to become richer and to expand through the decades.
By 1967 Close had completed graduate work at Yale University, moved to New York City, and abandoned the abstract work of his school years to begin painting from photographs. “I decided to just use whatever happened in the photograph,” he remarked in a 2003 interview. “By limiting myself to black paint on white canvas, I would have to make decisions early and live with them.” At the same time, he sought to eliminate any brushes or tools with which he was comfortable working: “I was constructing a series of self-imposed limitations that would guarantee that I could no longer make what I had been making and push me somewhere else.”
Setting these parameters led Close to paint his first self-portrait in 1967; Big Self-Portrait (1967–1968) (seen at the top of this post) was acquired by the Walker Art Center by then-director Martin Friedman directly from Close’s studio. It would be the artist’s first sale to a museum, and inaugurated a decades-long relationship between Close and the Walker that included many more acquisitions as well as two comprehensive solo exhibitions. “The day that I photographed myself … there wasn’t anyone to look through the viewfinder, so I focused on the wall. … I didn’t realize that I was going to get so much out of focus. Then I realized the minute I started to make the painting that it was far more interesting because there was a range of focus. The tip of the nose blurred and the ears and everything else went out of focus, so I began to engineer that.”
Big Self-Portrait was a watershed image for Close. It defined his basic working method, which he continued to use in various permutations throughout his career. Using a technique employed by both Renaissance painters and 20th-century billboard artists, he overlaid a grid on his source photograph and, over the course of four months, transposed his subject square by square to the new 9-by-7-foot canvas. The artist’s rumpled, mug-shotlike visage looms from the canvas, cigarette dangling from his lips. The finished painting is as iconic as it is arresting.
He went on to paint a related group of eight black-and-white “heads,” as he referred to them, which included portraits of fellow artists Nancy Graves, Richard Serra, and Frank Stella as well as composer Philip Glass. In the years that followed, Close reintroduced color into his work and began to fully explore his formula in unique works on paper and prints. He also embraced Polaroid photography as another means of building an image.
In time, Close began to explore new means of creating his images—ranging from “dot” drawings to collages of pressed and dyed paper pulp to paintings and drawings such as Frank (1980; a portrait of artist Frank Stella in the Walker’s collection) composed from Close’s inked fingerprints—that began to shake up the smooth surface sheen and photographic veracity of his earlier work. Beginning in the mid-1980s, he had embraced a brilliant color palette. His grids became more apparent, and he had introduced marks into his system that were self-contained, allowing each square to emerge as a miniature abstraction in itself.
Beginning in 1988, Close faced new personal and artistic challenges after suffering a collapsed spinal artery that initially left him paralyzed from the neck down. Through his remarkable tenacity, his condition improved; he used a wheelchair and began painting again with a customized brace. The paintings made following this event became looser and more gestural than ever before. In canvases such as Kiki (1993), also in the Walker’s collection, the candy-hued pinks and greens, delicate lavender, acid yellow, and other unexpected combinations reveal Close as a highly intuitive colorist. The blocks of color in the painting amass across the canvas as watery pixels—resolutely abstract at close range and joltingly real as the whole is absorbed and the artificial hues begin to reveal flesh, hair, and features.
Operating on a continuum independent of art movements and “isms,” Close’s work continued to evolve until his death in surprising ways, incorporating techniques ranging from 19th-century daguerreotypes to 21st-century computer-generated Iris prints. In his later images, Close’s constellation of portrait subjects continued to expand to include celebrities such as Kate Moss and Willem Dafoe, and prominent political figures including Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
In 2017, several women came forward alleging sexual harassment by Close. The women described encounters in which Close asked them to audition as potential nude models and spoke to them in ways they found demeaning and exploitive. Close first denied the claims and then apologized for making anyone uncomfortable with his crude language. The allegations, made during the reckoning of the MeToo movement, prompted intense discussion within the art world regarding gender and power dynamics.
Close died of congestive heart failure at a hospital in Oceanside, New York; survivors include his daughters, Georgia and Maggie, and several grandchildren. His Walker exhibitions, Close Portraits and Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967–2005 (the latter co-organized with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) were presented in 1980 and 2005, respectively.
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