Chuck Close's Life and Book Review

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Chuck Close was born on July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Washington, and grew up in the blue-collar town of Everett. He earned his B.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1962, and two years later his M.F.A. from Yale University, and taught art classes at the University of Massachusetts. Close was married to Leslie Rose for more than four decades and together have two daughters. The couple first daughter, Georgia Molly, was born in 1973, and Maggie Sarah in 1984. He has lived with Prosopagnosia, a disorder that impaired the ability to recognize faces, but not objects. It would be this disorder that would shape his career as a photorealist, doing close-up as a way to remember and recognize his subjects including his friends. Chuck Close creates his painting from photograph by locating a grid on the image and coping cell by cell.

In 1988, he suffered a spinal stroke that left him paralyzed from the neck down, affecting his spinal artery almost ended his career, but instead of putting down his brush and his canvas away instead he came back stronger than ever producing such creation that continues to delight and intrigue both spectators and curious till this day. He's importance to the American art can’t be disputed. There is nothing more than we as Americans admire most than an individual making it on is own. He represents the true American ideals and has achieved fame both as a portrait painter and photographer through photorealism overcoming his many disabilities. He’s one of the most celebrated living artists in America and abroad.

As an undergraduate majoring in art history, I never stop learning the history of art and everyday I discover or rediscovered something that I thought that a new. Throughout the years, my pr...

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...the exhibition or for those want to know more the artist’s exhibition.

These authors present Chuck Close from different perspectives, from the biographical, psychoanalytical, to the formal, but what they share in common is the dedication in paying tribute to one of America’s celebrated living artists. While these books do not introduced any new groundbreaking material it does make worthwhile in looking into the variety opinions of Close.

Works Cited

Enberg, Siri and Madeleine Grynstejn. Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005. Minneapolis; San Francisco: Walker Art Center/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2005.

Finch, Christopher. Chuck Close: Work. Munich; New York: Prestel, 2010.

—. Chuck Close: Life. Munich; New York: Prestel, 2010.

Friedman, Martin. Close Reading: Chuck Close and the Art of Self-Portrait. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2005.

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