American artist (born 1931)
Audrey Flack
(born May 30, 1931) is an American artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of
photorealism
and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.
Flack has numerous academic degrees, including both a graduate and an
honorary doctorate degree
from
Cooper Union
in New York City. Additionally she has a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from
Yale University
and attended
New York University Institute of Fine Arts
where she studied
art history
. In May 2015, Flack received an honorary
Doctor of Fine Arts
degree from
Clark University
, where she also gave a commencement address.
Flack's work is displayed in several major museums, including the
Museum of Modern Art
, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
,
Smithsonian American Art Museum
, the
Whitney Museum of American Art
, and the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
. Flack's photorealistic paintings were the first such paintings to be purchased for the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, and her legacy as a photorealist lives on to influence many American and International artists today.
J. B. Speed Art Museum
in
Louisville, Kentucky
, organized a retrospective of her work, and Flack's pioneering efforts into the world of photorealism popularized the genre to the extent that it remains today.
[1]
Audrey Flack is an Honorary Vice President of the
National Association of Women Artists
.
Early life and education
[
edit
]
Flack attended New York's
High School of Music & Art
.
[2]
She studied fine arts in New York from 1948 to 1953, studying under
Josef Albers
among others.
[3]
She earned a graduate degree and received an honorary doctorate from
Cooper Union
in New York City, and a
Bachelor of Fine Arts
from
Yale University
. She studied art history at the
Institute of Fine Arts
,
New York University
.
[4]
Career
[
edit
]
Flack's early work in the 1950s was abstract expressionist; one such painting paid tribute to
Franz Kline
. The ironic
kitsch
themes in her early work influenced
Jeff Koons
.
[5]
But gradually, Flack became a
New Realist
and then evolved into photorealism during the 1960s. Her move to the photorealist style was in part because she wanted her art to communicate to the viewer.
[6]
She was the first photorealist painter to be added to the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art
in 1966.
[7]
Between 1976 and 1978 she painted her Vanitas series, including the iconic piece
Marilyn
.
[8]
The critic Graham Thompson wrote,
"One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism, radical realism, or
hyper-realism
and painters like
Richard Estes
,
Denis Peterson
, Flack, and
Chuck Close
often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs."
[9]
Art critic
Robert C. Morgan
writes in
The Brooklyn Rail
about Flack's 2010 exhibition at
Gary Snyder
Project Space,
Audrey Flack Paints a Picture
, "She has taken the signs of indulgence, beauty, and excess and transformed them into deeply moving symbols of desire, futility, and emancipation."
[10]
In the early 1980s Flack's artistic medium shifted from painting to sculpture.
[6]
She describes this shift as a desire for "something solid, real, tangible. Something to hold and to hold on to."
[11]
Flack has claimed to have found the photorealist movement too restricting, and now gains much of her inspiration from
Baroque
art.
[
citation needed
]
Her work is held in the collections of museums around the world, including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
,
[12]
The Museum of Modern Art
,
[13]
the
Whitney Museum of American Art
,
[14]
the
Allen Memorial Art Museum
,
[15]
Smithsonian American Art Museum
,
[16]
and the
National Gallery of Australia
in
Canberra, Australia
.
[17]
In 1986 Flack published
Art & Soul: Notes on Creating
, a book expressing some of her thoughts on being an artist.
[11]
Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster
Some Living American Women Artists
by
Mary Beth Edelson
.
[18]
In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition
Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970
at the
Whitechapel Gallery
in London.
[19]
Photorealism
[
edit
]
Audrey Flack is best known for her photo-realist paintings and was one of the first artists to use photographs as the basis for painting.
[6]
The genre, taking its cues from Pop Art, incorporates depictions of the real and the regular, from advertisements to cars to cosmetics. Flack's work brings in everyday household items like tubes of lipstick, perfume bottles, Hispanic Madonnas, and fruit.
[6]
These inanimate objects often disturb or crowd the pictorial space, which are often composed as table-top still lives. Flack often brings in actual accounts of history into her photorealist paintings, such as
World War II' (Vanitas)
and
Kennedy Motorcade.
Women were frequently the subject of her photo-realist paintings.
[6]
Sculpture
[
edit
]
Audrey Flack's sculpture is often overlooked in light of her better-known Photorealist paintings. In
The New Civic Art: An Interview with Audrey Flack
,
[20]
Flack discusses the fact that she is self-taught in sculpture. She incorporates religion and mythology into her sculpture rather than the historical or everyday subjects of her paintings. Her sculptures often demonstrate a connection to the female form, including a series of diverse, heroic women and goddess figures. These depictions of women differ from those of traditional femininity, but rather are athletic, older, and strong. As Flack describes them: "they are real yet idealized... the 'goddesses in everywoman.'"
[6]
In the early 1990s, Flack was commissioned by a group called Friends of Queen Catherine to create a monumental bronze statue of
Catherine of Braganza
, in whose honor the
borough of Queens
is named. The statue, which would have been roughly the height of a nine-story building, was meant to be installed on the East River shore in the Hunters Point area of Long Island City, across from the United Nations.
[21]
The project was never fully realized, however, as protestors in the mid-late 1990s objected to Queen Catherine's ties to the
Transatlantic Slave Trade
. (Others objected to the statue of a monarch overlooking a Revolutionary War battleground.)
[22]
Flack nevertheless remained dedicated to the project, and notes that she endeavored to depict Catherine as biracial, reflecting her Portuguese background and paying homage to the ethnic diversity of the borough of Queens.
[23]
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Baskind, Samantha,
Audrey Flack: Force of Nature, 1949-1956
, exhibition catalog (New York: Hollis Taggart, 2022).
- Baskind, Samantha,
Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America
,
Philadelphia, PA, Penn State University Press, 2014,
ISBN
978-0-271-05983-9
- Baskind, Samantha, “’Everybody thought I was Catholic’: Audrey Flack’s Jewish Identity,”
American Art
23, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 104-115.
- Flack, Audrey,
With Darkness Comes Stars: Audrey Flack, A Memoir
(University Park: PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024).
- Flack, Audrey, Thalia Gouma-Peterson, and Patricia Hills.
Breaking the Rules: Audrey Flack, a Retrospective 1950-1990
. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.
- Flack, Audrey,
Audrey Flack: The Daily Muse
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989).
- Flack, Audrey,
Art & Soul: Notes on Creating
, New York, Dutton, 1986,
ISBN
0-525-24443-3
- Flack, Audrey,
Audrey Flack: On Painting
, with an essay by Ann Sutherland Harris (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981).
- Flack, Audrey, “On Carlo Crivelli,”
Art Magazine
55 (1981): 92-95.
- Flack, Audrey, “The Haunting Images of Louisa Roldan,”
Helicon Nine: A Journal of Women’s Arts and Letters
(1979).
- Flack, Audrey, “Louisa Ignacia Roldan,”
Women’s Studies
6 (1978): 23-33.
- Malone, Peter, “Learning from an Artist’s Early Experiments with AbEx,”
Hyperallergic
(May 28, 2013).
- Mattison, Robert S.,
Audrey Flack: The Abstract Expressionist Years
Archived
2017-05-28 at the
Wayback Machine
,
New York, Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2015,
ISBN
978-0-988-91397-4
.
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Meisel, Louis.
"Biography of Audrey Flack"
. Archived from
the original
on 2008-03-18
. Retrieved
February 27,
2015
.
- ^
"Oral history interview with Audrey Flack,"
Archived
November 4, 2016, at the
Wayback Machine
Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art website (2009 Feb. 16).
- ^
"Audrey Flack papers, circa 1952-2008"
.
Archives of American Art
. Smithsonian Institution
. Retrieved
9 April
2013
.
- ^
"Biography"
.
Audrey Flack
. audreyflack.com. Archived from
the original
on 2012-08-01
. Retrieved
9 April
2013
.
- ^
arts, Women in the (2010-05-19).
"From NMWA's Vault: Audrey Flack"
.
Broad Strokes: The National Museum of Women in the Arts' Blog
. Archived from
the original
on 2019-03-06
. Retrieved
2019-03-02
.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
f
Gaze, Delia (1997).
Dictionary of Women Artists
. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. pp.
526
.
ISBN
1-884964-21-4
.
- ^
"Audrey Flack Biography"
.
Jewish Virtual Library
. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise
. Retrieved
9 April
2013
.
- ^
"Audrey Flack's Marilyn: Still Life, Vanitas, Trompe l'Oeil"
.
The University of Arizona Museum of Art and Archive of Visual Arts
. Retrieved
2018-01-11
.
- ^
Thompson, Graham:
American Culture in the 1980s
(Twentieth Century American Culture), Edinburgh University Press, 2007
- ^
Morgan, Robert C. (November 2010).
"Audrey Flack and the Revolution of Still Life Painting"
.
The Brooklyn Rail
.
- ^
a
b
Flack, Audrey. (1 October 1986).
Art & Soul: Notes on Creating
. Dutton.
ISBN
978-0-525-24443-1
. Retrieved
9 April
2013
.
- ^
"Audrey Flack | Queen"
.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
. Retrieved
19 April
2023
.
- ^
"Audrey Flack"
.
Museum of Modern Art
. Retrieved
19 April
2023
.
- ^
"Audrey Flack"
.
Whitney Museum of American Art
. Retrieved
19 April
2023
.
- ^
"Strawberry Tart Supreme"
.
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
. Retrieved
19 April
2023
.
- ^
"Audrey Flack | Smithsonian American Art Museum"
.
americanart.si.edu
. Retrieved
2023-04-27
.
- ^
"Audrey Flack - Jolie madame [Pretty woman]"
.
National Gallery of Australia
. Retrieved
19 April
2023
.
- ^
"Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper"
.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
. Retrieved
21 January
2022
.
- ^
"Action, Gesture, Paint"
.
Whitechapel Gallery
. Retrieved
19 April
2023
.
- ^
Brigham, David R.; Flack, Audrey (1994).
"The New Civic Art: An Interview with Audrey Flack"
.
American Art
.
8
(1): 2?21.
doi
:
10.1086/424205
.
JSTOR
3109159
.
S2CID
194094910
. Retrieved
19 April
2023
.
- ^
Fried, Joseph P. (1992-07-26).
"Catherine of Queens?"
.
The New York Times
.
ISSN
0362-4331
. Retrieved
2019-03-02
.
- ^
Bearak, Barry (1998-01-09).
"The Queen of Ethnic Nightmares; Cultural Politics Mires Statue of Borough's Namesake"
.
The New York Times
.
ISSN
0362-4331
. Retrieved
2019-03-02
.
- ^
Kilgannon, Corey (2017-11-09).
"The Statue That Never Was"
.
The New York Times
.
ISSN
0362-4331
. Retrieved
2019-03-02
.
External links
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