Striking, large-scale portraits the artist himself simply refers to as "heads" established Chuck Close as an eminent American painter by the mid-1980s. But when he suffered a medical trauma that left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair, he assumed he would never be able to hold a brush again, let alone wield it with any finesse. However, Close--one of the most respected and genial of personalities inside the sometimes vicious New York art scene--recovered enough strength in his arms to begin painting again; since then his work has altered and expanded in a way that typically leaves viewers and reviewers stunned.

Perhaps the first painter in the history of art who has confined his subject matter to depictions of other contemporary artists, Close works on a monumental scale that has progressed from the superrealistic likenesses of the late 1960s to near-Impressionistic works of the Nineties that are...