Background
Audrey Flack was born on May 30, 1931, in New York, United States, into the family of Morris and Jeanette Field Flack.
Audrey Flack was born on May 30, 1931, in New York, United States, into the family of Morris and Jeanette Field Flack.
Audrey attended the Music and Art High School in New York City before going on to graduate from Cooper Union in 1951. However, she was recruited to Yale University by German American painter Josef Albers, then chairman of that university’s art department, and she graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1952. Thereafter she returned to New York City to study art history in 1953 at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
During the late 1950s Flack retreated from the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic, which she felt did not communicate effectively or clearly with viewers. That realization marked an important turning point in her artistic career. Because she thought her ability to paint in a realistic manner was inadequate, Flack enrolled at the Art Students League to paint anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale. She looked to artists such as Spanish Baroque artist Luisa Roldán and Italian Renaissance painter Carlo Crivelli as models. Her Photo-realist painting of a crying Virgin Mary, "Macarena of Miracles", created in 1971, makes direct reference to Roldán’s sculpture "Virgen de la Macarena, La Esperanza."
The 1960s brought the development of Flack as a pioneer of Photo-realism. She became one of the first painters at the Art Students League to use photographs as the foundation of her work. Her innovative method led to paintings such as "Kennedy Motorcade, November 22, 1963", which depicts a scene from the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. It was during that period that the artist also began to fine-tune her photographic method and her subject matter. In addition to works with sociopolitical commentary, such as her painting of the Kennedy assassination, she also began to paint mundane objects such as perfume bottles or items of makeup, which she featured as a way to question the construction of femininity. Unlike male Photo-realists such as Richard Estes and Chuck Close, who chose subjects that avoided emotional content, Flack sought a broader message through her work.
A significant painting from this period, "Farb Family Portrait", painted during 1969 – 1970, was the result of a new working technique. Starting with a slide of the family portrait, Flack projected the image onto the canvas to use as her guide for painting. This method relieved her of having to make preliminary drawings. She also developed a method of applying paint in layers with an airbrush. Using those innovations, Flack created a number of iconic works, including a portrait of Michelangelo’s David in 1971.
The early 1970s marked the beginning of Flack’s mature body of work, composed primarily of still lifes, including the well-known "Royal Flush", created in 1977, a close-up hyperrealistic painting of a table strewn with money, playing cards, cigars, cigarettes, beer, and whiskey. She also turned to photographs from her own family albums and to images of public figures for inspiration. She applied Photo-realism to her Vanitas series, still life paintings of items ranging from flowers to jewelry to photographs of prisoners in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Notable works from that series include "World War II", "Marilyn", and "Wheel of Fortune."
Flack underwent another transformation in the early 1980s, when she switched her primary medium from painting to sculpture. The fledgling sculptor began to use iconographic and mythological elements to communicate in her new medium. Flack’s sculptures started to trend toward reinterpretations of mythological figures and goddesses that evoke a feminist message. Pieces such as "Egyptian Rocket Goddess" and "Medusa" exemplify the types of heroic women she portrayed through sculpture. Her new trajectory led to many public commissions for her artwork. One of the best-known is "Civitas", also called the Monumental Gateway to the city of Rock Hill, South Carolina. It consists of four 6-metre-high bronze figures on granite bases. Her "Recording Angel" and "Colossal Head of Daphne" were both commissioned by and are located in Nashville, Tennessee.
Flack holds an honorary doctorate and was awarded the St. Gaudens Medal from Cooper Union and the honorary Albert Dome professorship from Bridgeport University. She is also an honorary professor at George Washington University and has previously taught at honorary professor at George Washington University, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, The Pratt Institute in New York, New York University, and The School of Visual Arts. Flack has also written two books.
Invocation
Still Life with Grapefruits
Jolie Madame
Abstract Landscape
Kennedy Motorcade
Abstract Expressionist Autumn Sky
Shiva Blue
Abstract Force - Homage to Franz Kline
Wheel of Fortune
Macarena of Miracles
Energy Apples
Royal Flush
Marilyn (Vanitas)
Landscape with Sky
Crayola
Parrots Live Forever
World War II (Vanitas)
Farb Family Portrait
Macarena Esperanza
Rich Art
Strawberry Tart Supreme
Queen
Self-Portrait
Chanel
Audrey brought feminine identities under scrutiny. In meticulous, complex arrangements of fruit, flowers, candles, makeup, and ladies’ accouterments, Flack’s loaded symbolic tableaus address stereotypes of the female ideal.
Quotations:
“For me art is a continuous discovery into reality, an exploration of visual data which has been going on for centuries, each artist contributing to the next generation's advancement.”
"Art is a calling. Artists are not discovered in school. Artists do not just paint for themselves, and they don't simply paint for an audience. They paint because they have to. There is something within the artist that has to be expressed . Every creation reveals something more about the universe and about the artist."
Quotes from others about the person
Flack is one of a group of early feminist artists whose work was crucial in generating new ideas concerning the representation of women, and her goddesses continue to chart new territory. Although there is still a dearth of images of women grounded in their bodies, gestures and actions rather than in their cultural condition or social positioning, few artists have hazarded the ideologically treacherous task of creating them. Flack has the courage (and perhaps the naïveté) to present her goddesses as hopeful emissaries of public and private succor. Her sculptures take too many risks to be politically correct, but their recklessness is part of their strength. These figures deserve serious critical attention as works that activate the field for alternative representations of women. As uneasy sites of contentious meanings, located differently for remarkable instances of female art-making.