Chuck Close, an artist whose photorealist portraits of a generation of his contemporaries, musicians, actors, patrons and politicians made him one of America’s best-known and most-acclaimed painters, died Thursday at Mount Sinai South Nassau in Oceanside, New York. He was 81. The cause of death was complications from a long illness resulting in congestive heart failure.
His death was first announced by his lawyer, John Silberman, and confirmed to Vanity Fair by Pace Gallery, which has represented the artist since the 1970s.
“I am saddened by the loss of one of my dearest friends and greatest artists of our time,” Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace, told Vanity Fair in a comment. “His contributions are inextricable from the achievements of 20th and 21st-century art.”
By the last decade of his life, Close had been entered into the highest echelon of American arts and letters. Touring retrospectives were planned by the country’s leading museums every few years; the Whitney lists at least 40 works by Close in its collection. In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton—Close’s portrait of Clinton is currently hanging in the National Portrait Gallery—and in 2012 was named to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities by Barack Obama.
In 2017, The New York Times published a story in which several woman accused Close of sexually harassing them and acting inappropriately sometimes while in his studio: asking them to take off their clothes without prior acknowledgment that it would be a nude sitting, and making lewd and sexual comments about their bodies.
Close apologized for the comments, saying “I never reduced anyone to tears, no one ever ran out of the place. If I embarrassed anyone or made them feel uncomfortable, I am truly sorry, I didn’t mean to. I acknowledge having a dirty mouth, but we’re all adults.”
He also cited his disability—he suffered a rare spinal collapse in the late 1980s and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life—as an excuse for his behavior.
“As a quadriplegic, I try to live a complete, full life to the extent possible,” he said. “But given my extreme physical limitations, I have found that utter frankness is the only way to have a personal life.”
Upon his death, the gallery said that he suffered from frontotemporal dementia, a diagnosis he received in 2015. The incidents described in the Times story dated between 2005 and 2013. Close’s neurologist, Dr. Thomas M. Wisniewski, who is the director of New York University’s Center for Cognitive Neurology, suggested to the Times that this could have possibly influenced his behavior toward the women who accused him of sexual mistreatment.
“Sexual inappropriateness and disastrous financial decisions are common presenting symptoms,” Wisniewski said. “I’ve had a few patients who ended up in jail.”
In the years after the accusations became public, Close tended to shy away from the spotlight. Usually a staple of flashy gallery dinners and museum galas, zipping past patrons and celebrities in his wheelchair, he retreated to his beachfront home in Long Beach, on Long Island.
In September 2019, he showed up at the grand opening of Pace’s new global headquarters on 25th Street to hear a performance by The Who; in December of that year, he swung by the annual bash thrown by his London gallery, White Cube, at Soho Beach House during Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2020, Pace and White Cube teamed up for a two-location show of Close’s work in Hong Kong, and this year Pace teamed with Gary Tatintsian Gallery on a show in Moscow which runs through September 25.
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