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0 Chuck Close, a Photorealist painter who earned acclaim for his incisive portraits and more recently faced criticism after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment, has died at 81. Pace Gallery, which represents him, said on Thursday that he had died after a congestive heart failure resulting from a long illness.
“I am saddened by the loss of one of my dearest friends and greatest artists of our time,” said Pace chairman Arne Glimcher. “His contributions are inextricable from the achievements of 20th- and 21st-century art.”
Close’s large-scale painting of his artist colleagues, celebrities, politicians and others in his orbit have been widely exhibited. They are considered key examples of Photorealism, a style associated with the late 1960s and early ’70s that involves the incorporation of photography into the painting process to create a more precise image. Close initially eschewed a connection to the movement, however, and even declined an invitation to participate in “Realism Now,” art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1968 exhibition at Vassar College’s museum in Poughkeepsie, New York.
For Close, photography initially offered him the ability to remove his own subjectivity from the painterly process. “The camera is not aware of what it is looking at. It just gets it all down,” he told Artforum in 1970. “I want to deal with the image it has recorded which is black and white, two-dimensional, and loaded with surface detail.” But he was quick to point out that he was “not trying to make facsimiles of photographs.”
In Close’s most famous works, featuring figures like the composer Philip Glass and the artist Alex Katz, gigantic likenesses are rendered with almost unparalleled precision. His paintings from the ’70s were often black-and-white and made by overlaying a grid on a photograph. Close then labored over the image to translate each square to a canvas, allowing viewers the chance to scrutinize every blemish visible on each of his subjects. Although these paintings may have appeared quite unlike most works coming out of New York at the time, Close considered his works to be in line with Conceptualism and Minimalism for their reliance on grids, systems of rules, and repetition. His later works would make those grids more visible, with the portraits becoming pixelated as time went by.
Close’s trailblazing paintings initially failed to find him an audience. The conservative-minded New York Times critic Hilton Kramer famously dismissed them, writing that they were “the kind of garbage washed up on shore after the tide of Pop Art went out,” and galleries were at one point loathe to sell his work. The general opinion of Close’s work has turned since then, however, and some have called him one of the most important artists of the 20th century.
In 2017, amid a larger reckoning that impacted every cultural sector, Close was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. In reports by the New York Times, HuffPost, and Hyperallergic, women who had visited his studio or come into contact with him described being made uncomfortable by requests that they model nude and sexually inappropriate remarks.
In a Times interview, Close acknowledged having a “dirty mouth,” but denied having offended anyone. “Last time I looked, the discomfort was not a major offense,” he said. After the Times report was published, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. indefinitely postponed a planned Close show.
