Chuck Close, artist celebrated for his large-scale portraits that fused minimalism with photorealism – obituary

Chuck Close, who has died aged 81, was an artist whose lifelong devotion to huge, hyperrealist portraits ensured that his work was as distinctive as it was impervious to fashion.

Arriving in Manhattan in the mid-1960s, Close found that although the influence of Abstract Expressionism was waning, it continued to dominate artistic discourse. But his difficulty with becoming an Abstract Expressionist, he recalled, was simply that “I didn’t have any angst.”

Instead he sought to define himself in opposition to the prevailing trends. With New York in thrall to Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism, Close alighted upon “the bankrupt form” of portraiture. His first exhibited work, the vast, monochrome Big Self-Portrait melded minimalist elements with hyperrealism to create a unique – almost Pop – image that left critics struggling to reconcile its assimilation of theoretically contradictory styles.

Working from photographs, Close created full-frontal, mural-sized portraits of himself, friends and fellow artists that juxtaposed the formal elements of abstract art with the earthy engagement of photorealism. From close-up they looked like a blown-up photograph; from a distance they towered over the viewer like Mount Rushmore. 

In constructing his portraits from highly coloured shapes swimming in the grids he superimposed on to his polaroids, the artist considered that he was “translating a poem from one language to another”. One critic observed that he had “reinvented portraiture through the medium of paint, but also abstracted it”.

But at 48 he suffered a near-terminal stroke that initially left him paralysed from the neck down, though he ultimately recovered the use of his arms and hands, if not his fingers. Undeterred, using an electric wheelchair and brushes strapped to his forearms, he returned to work and, defying medical expectation, continued to paint the expansive – and increasingly expensive – portraits for which he was famous.

Charles Thomas Close was born on July 5 1940 in Monroe, Washington. His father was a metal worker for the US Air Force and amateur inventor, while his mother was a piano teacher. He was raised in Everett, a blue-collar town north of Seattle, and educated at the Everett Community College. As a child he was overweight, non-sporty and dyslexic – or “dumb and lazy”, as he said his teachers preferred – but by the age of five he knew he wanted to be an artist.

His mother took him to Seattle to see exhibitions and his father constructed an easel and bought him some paints. Sixty years later he could still “smell the cheap linseed oil in the tubes, fat tubes, not skinny ones. I knew, even then, that the skinny tubes were for dilettantes.”

When he was eight his father died, at the same age that Chuck would have his stroke, and the impoverished family moved in with his grandmother. The boy spent hours watching her crochet, small pools of colour becoming a large cloth, and was impressed by her techniques and her perfectionism.

Despite a mediocre academic record his painting won him a place at the University of Washington in Seattle. He graduated to the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where fellow students included Richard Serra, Brice Marden and the “godfather” of BritArt, Michael Craig-Martin.

At Yale he was taught by Philip Guston, who was still to make his dramatic break with Abstract Expressionism. “AbEx”, though, remained the lingua franca, and despite his lack of angst Close tunnelled away within its precepts.

After graduating he studied for a year at the Akademie de Bildenden Kunste in Vienna before taking a teaching post at the University of Massachusetts. There he began to depart from standardised Abstract Expressionism and cast around for a more personal style. He was conscious, he recalled, that he “mimicked the surface of other people’s art”. When he moved to New York in 1967 and met Willem de Kooning, Close told him, he recalled, that “it was great to meet a man who has done more de Koonings than I have.”

In New York he was caught up, he said, in “a time of theoretical ferment. Everyone was trying to figure out what they were doing. America was on fire. We did not attempt to make directly political work. It seeped in. The Sixties to me was one big question.”

Close’s response was dramatic. Purging his work of colour, brushwork and previous influences, he painted the 22-foot, hyperrealist Big Nude. Worked from a photograph, it was a conscious attempt to “make forward-looking, modernist, representational paintings that were just as rigorous and tough and unlikeable as abstraction”. Nor was its size any accident: “The longer it takes to walk by, the harder it is to ignore.”

Big Self Portrait was an immensely detailed, 9ft by 6ft, ultra-realist work that became a celebrated image. Portraying himself as both cool and nerdy, Close gazed impassively through geeky spectacles with unkempt hair and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. It was, he explained, “an effort to put mileage between me and what portrait had become”.

Using photographs of friends and fellow artists, including such luminaries of the downtown scene as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Richard Serra and the avant-garde composer Philip Glass, Close created a series of “heads” – vast, close-up portrayals that distorted perspective and left nothing to the imagination. When exhibited they caused a sensation, not only on account of their size and realism but because, as the artist put it, “I was the only guy doing it.”

He also used himself as a model, turning out self-portraits until the balding artist with the Lennon specs and goatee became as famous as any of his subjects, creating a signature style that was instantly recognisable.

Although he reintroduced colour into his work, his modus operandi remained unchanged. The sitter would be photographed extensively and Close would select an image from the photos stuck to his studio wall. The photograph would then be broken down into grids of squares and diamonds and each filled with myriad shapes and colours and over-painted up to nine times. 

It was a laborious approach which often consumed four months for a single painting. But the effect was startling: a near-photographic portrait from a distance, but one in which the colours dissolved and collapsed into almost pointillist abstraction as the viewer approached.

But in 1988, at an awards ceremony Close suffered convulsions; he became paralysed from the waist down and left without the use of his fingers. But his determination ensured his return to the studio. Befitting an artist whose education had coincided with Abstract Expressionism, he declared that he would “spit the paint at the canvas if I had to”. So, after toying with the possibility of becoming a conceptualist – an anathema to such a physical artist – and a gruelling rehabilitation programme, he defied his doctors and returned to the studio in an electric wheelchair.

The first painting he completed after his return was Alex II, a portrait of a friend, the artist Alex Katz. Profoundly sad, the work eloquently conveyed the hardship and frustration of his new existence. Yet the physical necessities of his new technique expanded the possibilities of colour. If his daubs now had a childlike crudeness, they were also softer, cohered tonally, and retained an acute pictorial effectiveness.

Realising that to work on a monumental scale required the building up of hundreds of small areas of colour, Close employed assistants. New works such as Elizabeth and Leslie revealed that his art, like his fame, had emerged from his illness not only intact but, somehow, enlarged. One critic wrote in The New Yorker: “A ravaged artist has become, in a miracle, one of the great colourists and brush wielders of his time.”

Having always considered painting “a performing art where no one watches the performance”, the artist, who confessed he had wanted to be a magician as a child, explained that his intention was “to pull a rabbit out of the hat, and then show how it was done”. That he achieved this was illustrated by his refusal of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for which he blamed broken promises; instead he opted for one at MoMA.

Chuck Close’s art stands testament not only to an exceptional talent and unique vision, but to the single-mindedness with which he confronted his debilitating illness. Such determination reflected the tribulations of his youth: “I couldn’t draw that much better than some of the other kids,” he recalled, “but I cared more. I have always distinguished myself by being hungrier and being totally committed in an absolutely straight line.”

Close divided his time between lower Manhattan and Bridgehampton on Long Island, and sat on so many boards that he was nicknamed “the Mayor of SoHo”.

In 2017 and 2018 several women made allegations of sexual harassment against Close, dating from the period between 2005 and 2013. Close apologised, but a planned retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, was cancelled.

Chuck Close married, firstly, Leslie Rose. They had two daughters but divorced in 2011, and two years later he married the artist Sienna Shields; they also divorced. He is survived by his daughters.

Chuck Close, born July 5 1940, died August 19 2021