Chuck Close valuation
Vast heads built square by square, by a painter who could not recognise a face.
Chuck Close was born in Washington State in 1940 with severe dyslexia and prosopagnosia — an inability to recognise faces — which is the reason he gave for painting them flat, from photographs, and very large.
What a work by Chuck Close is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Chuck Close was born in Washington State in 1940 with severe dyslexia and prosopagnosia — an inability to recognise faces — which is the reason he gave for painting them flat, from photographs, and very large. The early airbrushed black-and-white heads of the late 1960s are nearly nine feet tall and appear photographic at a distance. In 1988 a spinal artery collapse left him largely paralysed; he returned to work with a brush strapped to his wrist and made the late paintings, in which each cell of the underlying grid holds its own small loop of colour that resolves into a face only from across the room. He died in 2021.
Close was an unusually inventive printmaker and the print output is where most sellers meet the work: mezzotints, spitbite aquatints, woodcuts made in Japan, reduction linocuts, silk tapestries and handmade paper pulp pieces, many produced with Pace Editions in editions of thirty-five to eighty. Each process behaves differently and needs identifying precisely. The large paintings are few and are institutional. Allegations made against the artist in 2017 affected exhibition programming and are a known factor in the market.
At a glance
- Born
- 5 July 1940, Monroe
- Died
- 19 August 2021, Oceanside
- Movement
- Contemporary art
More on Wikipedia.
Polaroids, daguerreotypes and tapestries
Close was also a photographer. From 1977 he worked with Polaroid's large-format cameras, first one that made 20 by 24 inch pictures and later a still larger one, and he made daguerreotypes with Jerry Spagnoli, the photographer who revived the process. From 2005 he worked with Magnolia Editions in Oakland on woven Jacquard tapestries, many of them based on those daguerreotype portraits.
Each medium is described and valued on its own terms. A large Polaroid has no negative and is a single object, with a surface sensitive to light and handling. A daguerreotype plate is also unique, and should stay sealed in its housing, since the image can be damaged by a touch. The tapestries are editions, numbered and documented by the workshop. Knowing which of these a work is, and having the paperwork that says so, is the starting point for any valuation.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
