A spinal cord blood clot has kept Chuck Close confined to a wheelchair since 1988. But, as we discover in Marion Cajori’s documentary named after the photorealist artist, it has not stopped the 67-year-old New Yorker from leading a productive and fulfilling life.
“Chuck Close” goes back and forth between the artist, whom we watch as he works on a wall-size self-portrait, and his art-world friends, who speak freely about Close.
Close, who played a key role in the 1960s and ’70s downtown art scene, tells how his father started him on a life of art when he gave his son a box of cheap oil paints on his fifth Christmas.
“The painter I learned the most from, and copied the most, was [Willem] de Kooning,” Yale-educated Close confesses. “I was de Kooning . . . Then the problem was to purge him from my work, which took a long time.”
Cajori, who died in 2006 at age 56, stays well in the background as she allows such luminaries as Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg and minimalist composer Philip Glass (who wrote music for the film) to chime in.
The result is a portrait that should interest art-savvy viewers and neophytes alike.
Running time: 116 minutes. Not rated (mature subject matter). At Film Forum, 109 W. Houston St., east of Sixth Avenue.