Close is a superstar artist known for his larger-than-life portraits of art-world figures and his improbable comeback from medical calamity.

After a working-class childhood in Washington State, Close was first introduced to the New York art scene while a student at Yale, at which point he abandoned his early Abstract Expressionist-inspired style in favor of the photorealistic portraits that were to become his signature. He spent a couple years in Europe on a Fulbright and taught at the University of Massachusetts, then moved to New York where he was among the first wave of artists to move into SoHo. His first one-man show at the Bykert Gallery in 1970 impressed the curators of the Whitney Biennial enough that they decided to buy his portrait of Philip Glass, and the resulting exposure helped Close make a name for himself. He moved to the upscale Pace Gallery (now PaceWildenstein) in 1977, and at 40 had his first major retrospective, cinching his status as an art superstar.

It was widely assumed that Close would never paint again after he suffered a blood clot in a spinal artery in 1988 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. But he managed to regain some movement in his arms and resumed painting almost immediately. His paintings had always been labor-intensive, requiring him to divide each image into thousands of tiny squares and paint square-by-square for months on end, but the process only became more difficult once he was forced to Velcro the brush to his arm and use a special device to move the canvas into place. Nevertheless, his post-paralysis paintings have been hailed by critics as a breakthrough, and many consider them to be his best work. [Image via Getty]