Chuck Close Net Worth At The Time Of His Death

Chuck Close net worth in 2021

Chuck Close net worth: This is one of the questions that people ask the most about Chuck Close, and although they always end up answering it on other pages with an “I don’t know, you know” or “it depends” if there are some estimates that various web portals mention.




Chuck Close is an American artist known for his large-scale Photorealist portraits. As of 2021, Chuck Close’s net worth is estimated to be around $25 million at the time of his death



How much is a Chuck Close painting worth?

His works have been sold at impressive prices, including Phil, who sold for $ 3.2 million, and John for $ 4.8 million, both at Sotheby’s.

Full Name
Chuck Thomas Close
Date of Birth July 5, 1940
Place of birth Monroe, WA
Profession Photorealistic painter, photographer
Net Worth $25 million
Died  19 August 2021 (aged 81)
Nationality American

Chuck Close Death

Chuck Close, the photorealist portrait artist, dies at age 81. At the end of his career, Chuck was accused by several women of sexually harassing them.

Chuck Close, an artist who became famous in the 70s and 80s with his large-scale photorealistic portraits of himself, family, and friends, passed away today, Thursday (19), at Oceanside Hospital, in New York, United States. His lawyer, John Silberman, was the one who reported the death to the press.

With photos as a base, Chuck used an airbrush and diluted black paint to create grisaille paintings nearly ten feet tall and highly detailed. One of his most famous works is a self-portrait in which he appears with a lit cigarette in his mouth, messy hair, a scruffy beard, and thick black-rimmed glasses. After some time, Chuck improved his own technique and began to produce colorful works.

Chuck Close
Big Self-Portrait, by Chuck Close (Photo: Getty Images)

Charges of sexual harassment and neurodegenerative disease

In late 2013, Chuck was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, then, in 2015, the diagnosis changed to frontotemporal dementia, according to his neurologist, Dr. Thomas M. Wisniewski, director of the Center for Cognitive Neurology at New York University. In a telephone interview, Dr. Wisniewski said that the conduct Close was accused of harassing women could be attributed to the disease:

“He was very uninhibited and did inappropriate things that were part of his underlying medical condition.”, stated Dr. Wisniewski. Despite this, the National Gallery of Art, located in Washington, decided to indefinitely postpone an exhibition of Chuck Close’s works due to the accusations.

That “it has more face than back” thing that does not even paint to Chuck Close. Some of his portraits reach almost three meters. Find out who this man is who takes photos with brushes.

Photography or painting? Both. We talk about Chuck Close and we talk about photorealism.

We have introduced you to  Chip Kidd, Bárbara Kruger, Pati Núñez, Alejandro Magallanes, and loads of other artists. We are passionate about creative people, we can’t help it. We do not lower the bar and we continue to bring you the best of each house.

Take a look with us if you want to meet a man who is as great as his portraits. Obsession for the faces of an artist unable to recognize them.

Biography of Chuck Close

A living legend of American art who was born Charles Thomas Close in 1940 and who had his flirtations with abstract expressionism before finding his great love, hyper-realism

It seems like a joke, but this obsessed with portraits suffers from prosopagnosia, a visual cognitive disorder that makes him unable to recognize faces. Is that why you work almost exclusively creating portraits? The first ones he made were the ones with the faces of his best friends.

“Painting is the frozen evidence of a staging”

His works are so realistic that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish them from the photographs on which they are based.

Portraits in formats almost as large as your talent. His work Great Self-Portrait was the first he did like this and it took him more than 4 months to finish it. This is his face in black and white at a size of 2.73 m by 2.12 m.

He has been exhibiting his paintings at the Pace Gallery since 1977 and one of his works, John (1971-1972), was sold for almost 5 million dollars in 2005… change!

Chuck Close’s photorealism

Chuck’s works go from hyperrealism to photorealism since they are all based on photographs.

His way of painting is mechanical and impersonal. Whether in black and white or mixing the three primary colors by layering, his works are practically large-scale copies of the photographs he uses.

To create these photos taken with a brush, Close uses a grid made with a mesh on the photo and another on the canvas and copies and paints cell by cell or pixel by pixel, as Georges Seurat did a century before. Sprayers, scraps of cloth, blades, and even an eraser mounted on a drill, this artist used for his works.

“I have an optimistic nature, my glass is half full”

Later he begins to experiment and shows us the mesh with which he works in his works. They are paintings that deceive and that no longer form a single image when you see them up close.

An example of talent and resilience. After an illness that left him in a wheelchair in 1988, he continued to paint with a brush between his teeth and now paints with a brush tied to his hand.

What do you think? We do not know if it has made us more want to take out the camera or the brushes.

Chuck Close net worth

The famous American painter has an estimated net worth of $25 million at his death.

Amelia Warner writes all the Latest Articles. She mostly covers Entertainment topics, but at times loves to write about movie reviews as well.

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