Chuck Close was an American painter, born in Monroe, Washington, in 1940, who died in 2021 at 81. He is known for portraits the size of billboards, built square by square from photographs, and for painting faces despite prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize them. A spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him paralyzed from the neck down, and he kept painting for three more decades.
He took no commissions. He painted himself and his friends, and the day his body failed him, 7 December 1988, he called the Event.
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Close could not hold a face in memory. He spent his career painting faces nine feet tall. In 1968 he finished Big Self-Portrait, a black-and-white head that looms over the viewer, and in 1969 the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis bought it for $1,300, the first museum sale of his life.
He explained the link himself. "Once I change the face into a two-dimensional object," he said, "I can commit it to memory." So he flattened faces: a photograph, ruled into squares, copied onto a canvas one square at a time.
Many tellings put that grid after the accident, as if paralysis had forced the method on him. The order is the other way round. He had been copying photographs square by square since 1967, more than twenty years before his spinal artery collapsed. The accident changed how the squares got painted, not why they existed.
What You'll Discover
What he could never remember about faces.
What a museum bought in 1969.
How a photograph becomes a grid.
How he held a brush again.
Why museums pulled his shows.
Where his faces hang today.