Chuck Close, Photorealist Pioneer with Connections to East End, is Dead at 81

Chuck Close, famous for his captivating larger-than-live portraits and a leading figure in contemporary art, died of congestive heart failure on August 19 in an Oceanside hospital. He was 81.

Late in his career, Mr. Close faced numerous accusations of sexual harassment, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington canceled one of his 2018 exhibitions as a result.

In the 1970s and ’80s, he rose to national prominence through his outsized self-portraits, and portraits of his friends and family.

His “Big Self-Portrait,” a late 1960s piece that is perhaps one of his most famous works, depicts the artist, cigar in mouth, starring straight-faced and stony into a camera. Mr. Close would take photographs to canvas, using numbered and lettered grids to reproduce the image.

In his paintings, drawings and prints, Mr. Close employed a variety of techniques and styles, from printmaking to Polaroid photographs. He said he suffered from prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and that painting portraits aided him.

Mr. Close also had deep connections to the East End — Guild Hall and the Parrish Art Museum both held multiple exhibitions of his work over the years.

Christina Strassfield, Guild Hall’s curator, described her the first show she organized for the museum, a Chuck Close exhibition in 1991 of his large scale photographs.

“I was a young curator, and I must admit that it really felt like I was shaking hands with art history,” Ms. Strassfield said. “He was so open and so accessible, and was willing to listen to the ideas of a young curator of what to show.”

In 1995, Guild Hall named Mr. Close its Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award winner in the Visual Arts.

Ms. Strassfield recalled the kindness and candor of Mr. Close she experienced in curating both exhibitions.

“I remember at the opening he talked to everyone who went up to him, and was really gracious,” she said.

Mr. Close was a part-time resident of the East End since the early 1970s. A large exhibition of his photographs was also shown by the Parrish Art Museum in 2015, following one in 2008.

“He’s a terrific human being,” said Alicia G. Longwell, the Parrish’s curator. “After his spinal blood clot in ’88 [he] certainly persevered.”

Mr. Close’s life was forever altered after a December 1988 spinal artery collapse left him partially paralyzed from the neck down, but also able to use his arms. After the incident, his art form advanced and survived — wheelchair bound with a brush strapped to his hand, his art famous for its grid structure, evolved to more open brushwork.

“The work has this incredible immediacy,” Ms. Longwell said. “The sort of intricacy of these methods is just astonishing — certainly, quite an innovator in the field of prints.”

Mr. Close attended the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle for undergrad, and received his BFA and MFA from the Yale University School of Art. He received a Fulbright scholarship after graduating Yale to study in Vienna, Austria.

He received the National Medal of Arts, and was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

In 2013, Mr. Close was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, updated as a frontotemporal dementia diagnosis in 2015. Dr. Thomas M. Wissneiwski, Mr. Close’s neurologists and the director of New York University’s Center for Cognitive Neurology, told The New York Times that this could have been the a factor in Mr. Close’s misconduct.

In 2017, Mr. Close faced several accusations of sexual harassment from several women, who said he made them feel uncomfortable with disparaging and sexually explicit comments about their bodies.

Mr. Close apologized at the time: “If I embarrassed anyone or made them feel uncomfortable, I am truly sorry, I didn’t mean to,” he told The Times.

He is survived by his two daughters, Georgia and Maggie.