I was back in New York recently and made a stop at the East 86th Street subway station. Tucked into the walls there are Chuck Close’s mosaics, giant portraits staring at commuters and shimmering in tile and glass. They are a fitting tribute to an artist whose life’s work was obsessed by faces, even though he struggled to recognize them. Close had dyslexia and prosopagnosia – face blindness – yet he advanced to the forefront of the avant-garde by painting faces with meticulous precision. In the 1980s, his photorealistic canvases were not just admired; they were landmarks. Then, at 48, at the pinnacle of the art world, his body failed him. Overnight, he became a quadriplegic.
I want to rewind to early 1989, to the time when Close was struggling to rehabilitate at the Rusk Institute. What unfolded was a story of an artist confronting physical and creative limitations, searching for a way back to work, and turning paralysis into a catalyst for reinvention.
During the first month at Rusk, Close sank into despair. Without the ability to make art, he could not live the life that had defined him for decades. He worried about his family and about losing his ability to provide. He was nearly completely immobile, watching muscles waste away, noticing even the hollow forming between his thumb and forefinger. Noticing that kind of detail had once been his power; now it was evidence of what was slipping away.
The unraveling had begun two months earlier, in December 1988 when he experienced what he referred to as “the event.” Close had just presented an award at Gracie Mansion. Instead of returning to his seat, he staggered out, crossed the street, and admitted himself to Doctor’s Hospital with the help of a policeman. The pain in his chest and arms was severe. Doctors assumed a heart attack. Pain medicine. Tests. His wife Leslie rushed to his side. Soon his body convulsed, then went still. He remained conscious through it all, aware even as his lungs failed and his muscles shut down. He was paralyzed from the shoulders down, his diaphragm stopped functioning, breathing sustained only by constant intervention.
Strangely, amid the chaos, Close felt a kind of calm. He later compared it to the eerie stillness of a car crash: time slows, instincts take over, and fear does not grow. Only afterwards does the weight of it all settle in.
Now, at Rusk, he carried a single ambition: “I just want to paint again.” Ever since childhood painting had been his motivation. It had given him purpose once, and now it could possibly provide purpose again, not just as art but as rehabilitation itself.
Rehabilitation exposed all the obstacles between Close and a blank canvas. He could not walk, which meant no crouching to reach the bottom of a canvas and no stretching to reach the top. Large-scale painting had always required gallons of paint and mineral spirits, careful preparation, and many tasks that now seemed impossible. His hands, once trained to mix subtle shades with a flick of the wrist, barely moved at all.
For a time, he imagined himself reduced to an “idea man,” conceiving works for others to execute. But that thought crushed him. What he loved was the physicality of painting, the drag of the brush and the rhythm of the body in motion. His paralysis, caused by a blood clot at the C-3 vertebra just below the skull, left him with little more than head movement. He even considered improbable workarounds, painting with a brush clenched in his teeth or spitting paint onto canvas. The longing to paint never left.
At Rusk, where he had his own room, Close began to test limits. His rehab had two faces: therapy by day, visitors by evening. Friends dropped in, drank beverages from his fridge, filled the place with chatter until nurses told them to quiet down. Close insisted the activity and socializing helped his recovery. His physical therapist, Meg, did not generally approve of him drinking alcohol during his rehab, but she made him a promise. If he managed to paint again, she would take him out to celebrate by getting good and drunk.
Visitors reminded him that painting was not in his limbs, it was in his mind. He still had his eyes and his imagination and he knew how to make art. That reminder lit a fire. As a clumsy, dyslexic teenager, he had found in painting a place where he could focus, excel, and feel whole. Now it offered him the same lifeline, a way back to himself.
The obstacles remained significant. He could not reach canvases the way he once had, so Meg built him a wheelchair-accessible easel that adjusted to his range of motion. He could not prep his materials, so staff mixed and poured for him. The hardest challenge of all was the brush itself. His hands, numb as if plunged in ice water, could not grip. The solution was improvisation. They strapped the brush to his hand, guided it to the palette, and pushed color across the canvas again, stroke by stroke.
Close began to shrink the problem down to something he could manage. If he could not command a massive canvas as he once did, maybe he could command a tiny square. A two-inch patch could be its own painting. One square at a time. He imagined mounting these small panels with Velcro, letting an assistant assemble them into a larger whole like a jigsaw puzzle of color and form.
At first, the work left him drained. He tired quickly, his arms sagging back into his lap. His assistant strapped a crude brace to his wrist, and Close worked out a sequence: lift the brush with both hands, grip it briefly with his teeth, slide it into the Velcro slot of the brace. Awkward, slow, imperfect, yet eventually he was painting again.
The larger question hovered: what could he accomplish with his paralysis? He was not sure. What mattered was that each week he could hold out a little longer. Where once his arms collapsed after a few strokes, now he steadied them by locking both hands together and finding ways to stabilize the brush. The progress was incremental but unmistakable. He was learning, square by square, how to make painting possible again.
Seven months after arriving at Rusk, and nine months after the event, Close was discharged. His doctors had urged him to stay longer, but his therapist recognized that daily gains were leveling off. He had regained some mobility, yet the wheelchair would be permanent. Still, what mattered to him was getting home.
Leslie had already remodeled their country house to accommodate his new lifestyle. His studio was reworked with a moveable easel, and assistants stepped in to handle tasks he could no longer do alone, laying out the grid on canvas, mixing paints, washing brushes, keeping the process flowing. His mechanics had changed, but the studio was alive again, and Close was back where he wanted to be in front of the canvas.
The first painting he tackled after leaving Rusk was a portrait of Alex Katz titled Alex II. Naturally, it was very different than his previous work. For one, its color palette was different than his older portraits. It was brighter, more saturated than anything he had done in years, almost cheerful. He later said, “I felt things were going to be alright.”
The roots of his post-event change go back to Close’s early career. As a young painter, he idolized the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning and embraced vibrant color and expressive brushwork. When he moved from abstraction to photorealism, he stripped down his palette to the three primaries, red, yellow, and blue, and pursued meticulous, almost industrial precision. At Rusk, surrounded by the grey hospital walls, he rediscovered the vivid colors of his youth, and Alex II emerged alive with that energy.
Before the event, Close had already been experimenting with shifts in his style. In the portraits he made of his artist friends Francesco Clemente and Cindy Sherman, for instance, he had begun to dissolve the subject, allowing the image to fracture into more pronounced painterly marks. These experiments were subtle accents to his rigorous photorealism. The paralyzing incident, however, forced him to accelerate that evolution because of his limited control. He no longer possessed the dexterity to refine every detail. Reflecting back on the Clemente painting, he noted that his style had already begun to evolve.
The grid remained the foundation of his work, but his approach had changed. Where he once relied on seamless control, he now adapted to the limits of his body, using brushes strapped to his hand, arms stabilized, and movements tentative but deliberate. The process became a collaboration with himself and his assistants, a careful choreography of hands, arms, and teeth.
Looking at his portraits before 1988, the artist remained in the background of the work, and the subject commanded attention. The portraits felt photographic at every distance. After 1988, the balance shifted. From afar, the subject emerged clearly, and up close, the surface exploded into messy, tactile marks, smears, streaks, and dabs of uneven color. Each small square, roughly the size of a Post-it note, became its own abstract unit. Viewed alone, chaotic; together, cohesive. Lavender blended into gray, brown streaked with orange, black flecks punctuated dark fields. The viewer’s eye stitched the fragments into likeness.
The incident forced Close to accept imperfection, to let go of absolute control, and to make his hand visible in every stroke. Precision gave way to expression, photographic illusion to painterly presence. The work began to oscillate between recognition and dissolution, subject and artist.
In a sense, painting saved Chuck Close twice, first as a teenager when dyslexia and clumsiness left few outlets, and again after 1988, as a way to reclaim purpose and reassert his identity.
When Leslie first saw Alex II, she cried. The painting captured both recovery and reinvention. The work was purchased by MoMA in New York, cementing its place as a milestone in Close’s extraordinary journey.
