San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Chuck Close: Artist acclaimed for photorealist portraits
Tension between opposites like realism and abstraction, surface and depth, reality and illusion remained central to Close’s art.
Chuck Close, who rose to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s with colossal photorealist portraits of himself, family members and fellow artists, but who late in his career faced accusations of sexual harassment, died Thursday in a hospital in Oceanside, N.Y. He was 81.
His death was confirmed by his lawyer, John Silberman.
At the end of the 1960s, a period when formalist abstraction and pop art dominated the contemporary scene, Close began using an airbrush and diluted black paint to create highly detailed 9-foottall grisaille paintings based on mug-shot-like photographs of himself and his friends.
His first, and still one of his best known, is a self-portrait in which he stares impassively back at the camera through plastic black-rimmed glasses. He has messy, stringy hair, his face is unshaved and a cigarette with smoke rising from it juts from the corner of his mouth — a rebel with a new artistic cause.
This and his other paintings from about the same time — including portraits of painter Joe Zucker, sculptor Richard Serra and composer Philip Glass — were indistinguishable from photographs when seen in reproduction. When seen in person, they had a monumental, uncannily imposing presence. The giant expressionless faces gaze back at viewers with vaguely discomfiting inscrutability. At a close distance, the paintings turn into landscape-like fields of facial details, with every hair, pore, wrinkle and blemish greatly magnified.
Four years ago, several women, a number of whom had come to his studio to pose, accused Close of sexually harassing them at various times between 2005 and 2013 and when they came to his studio to pose. He acknowledged that he had spoken candidly — and even crudely — to women about their body parts, but he said he had done so in the interest of evaluating them as possible subjects.
“If I embarrassed anyone or made them feel uncomfortable, I am truly sorry, I didn’t mean to,” he told the Times at the time. “I acknowledge having a dirty mouth, but we’re all adults.”
In December 2013, Close received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, which was amended to frontotemporal dementia in 2015, according to his neurologist, Dr. Thomas Wisniewski, the director of New York University’s Center for Cognitive Neurology. In a telephone interview, Wisniewski said the conduct of which Close was accused could be attributed to the disease.
The allegations prompted a larger reckoning around whether art can be separated from the conduct of the artist. The National Gallery of Art in Washington decided to indefinitely postpone an exhibition of Close’s work in the wake of the accusations.
Close was not the first to make photorealist paintings. Artists like Richard Estes and Robert Bechtle were painting careful copies of photographs in the mid-1960s. But no one else had transformed photographs into paintings of such aggressive visual and psychological impact.
In the 1970s, Close refined his technique and added color. He devised a process by which he would airbrush separate layers of red, yellow and blue to create full-color pictures of striking photographic verisimilitude. He achieved his most extreme realism in “Mark” (1979), a portrait of his friend painter Mark Greenwold, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Close did not like to think of himself as a realist, photo or otherwise. In many ways he was closer to a conceptualist like Sol LeWitt, whose sculptures and murals were made according to preconceived rules and instructions. Tension between opposites like realism and abstraction, surface and depth, reality and illusion remained central to Close’s art throughout his career.
Increasingly, Close’s paintings, drawings and prints emphasized the systems, processes and materials by which they were conceived and made. In the 1970s, he began to translate his photographic sources into pixelated images, filling in the individual cells of a grid with distinct marks, colors and tones that would cohere into photographic images when viewed from a distance. Using techniques and materials as various as watercolor, pastel, etching, handmade paper pulp and his own fingerprints, he continued to explore the dialogue between the physical facts and the photographic illusion.
Close’s pragmatic, problem-solving approach would serve him well in the second half of his career. In New York on Dec. 7, 1988, he was felled by what turned out to be a collapsed spinal artery, which initially left him paralyzed from the neck down. In the ensuing months of rehabilitation, he began to regain movement in his arms, and he was able to sit up and paint using brushes strapped to his hand.
He not only returned to painting with unimpaired ambition but also began producing what many would view as the best work of his career. And he resumed his busy social life, attending gallery openings, giving talks around the country, and attending exhibitions of his own works in Europe and elsewhere.
Charles Thomas Close was born July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Wash. His mother, Mildred (Wagner) Close, was a classically trained pianist who gave piano lessons at home. His father, Leslie Close, who died when Close was 11, was a plumber, sheet metal worker, store window decorator and amateur inventor. Dyslexic and not athletic, Close focused on making art from an early age.
Despite an unpromising high school record, Close went on to junior college and then transferred to the University of Washington, Seattle, graduating as an art major with high honors in 1962. He then entered the master of fine arts program at Yale University, where his classmates included Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Jennifer Bartlett and several others who would later become well-known artists in New York.
While in college and graduate school, Close made abstract expressionist-style paintings under the influence of Willem de Kooning. (Years later he recalled meeting de Kooning and telling him, “It’s nice to meet someone who has painted more de Koonings than I have.”)
After earning his MFA in 1964 and studying in Vienna on a Fulbright grant, Close took a teaching job at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. There he met Leslie Rose, a student in his first drawing class. They would marry on Dec. 24, 1967.
During his time in Amherst, Close radically rethought his approach to painting. Turning his back on abstraction, he created a giant blackand-white photorealist painting of a reclining nude woman. He destroyed that painting before finishing it, but he created another version of it, called “Big Nude,” after he and his wife-to-be moved to Manhattan in the summer of 1967.
The next year, Close completed the self-portrait with the cigarette, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis bought it out of his studio for $1,300 in 1969. He created seven more black-and-white portraits over the next two years, including one of Serra, “Richard” (1969), which was included in the Whitney Annual (later the Whitney Biennial) of 1969.
In 1970, Close had his first New York solo exhibition, at Bykert Gallery. He chose that gallery partly because it did not specialize in realism, from which he wanted to dissociate his work. After Bykert closed in 1975, he exhibited his paintings regularly at Pace in New York for the duration of his career.
After he began making his large portraits, Close abandoned painting nudes. But in subsequent decades, he regularly produced photographs of naked subjects, male and female, including supermodel Kate Moss. In 2014, Pace presented a survey of his nude photographs along with his 1967 painting “Big Nude.”
Close was supportive of many artists and cut a prominent figure in Soho during the years when the neighborhood was New York’s center for contemporary art. But his reputation suffered a serious blow in December 2017, when several women Close had invited to pose for photographs publicly accused him of sexually inappropriate verbal behavior while they were alone with him in his studio. (No one accused him of physical assault.)
In response to the allegations, the National Gallery of Art postponed an exhibition of Close’s works it had planned to open in May 2018.
Close was divorced from his first wife. His marriage to artist Sienna Shields in 2013 also ended in divorce.
His survivors include his daughters, Georgia and Maggie, and four grandchildren.
In many interviews, Close spoke with extraordinary eloquence about his art, communicating an unwavering clarity of purpose and a disarming humility. In a conversation in the catalog for his 1998 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he told the show’s curator, Robert Storr:
“I’m either dumber than the average painter, which is a pretty scary thought, or maybe there’s something about my learning disabilities or whatever that I am really of the moment. I don’t think much about the past, and I really don’t think about the future. I am surprised often that I’m still painting portraits at all, to tell you the truth.
“I don’t predict what I’m going to do. I don’t plan ahead that much. It doesn’t matter where the whole art world is going. I’ve got my own little trajectory.”