Audrey Flack
Born in New York City in 1931, Audrey Flack immediately knew she wanted to become an artist. Despite her family s lack of enthusiasm about her artistic goals, Flack attended the high school of Music and Art, where she won the St. Gaudens medal. Following graduation from Cooper Union where she was a top student, she was recruited by Josef Albers to participate in the fine arts program at Yale. She received a B.F.A. in 1952, and an Honorary Doctorate from Cooper Union in 1977 (Gouma-Peterson 9).
Flack them moved back to New York to study anatomy at the Art Students League responding to her desire to paint realistically, a technique ignored in her previous years of education. Audrey Flack writes:
I always wanted to draw realistically. 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. I wanted to go a step further and extend the boundaries. I also believe people have a deep need to understand their world and that art clarifies reality for them (Gouma-Peterson 15).
For Flack, the 1960s was a period of artistic consolidation. She gave birth to two daughters, one autistic, and attempted to balance art with marriage, children, and part-time teaching jobs. In the mid-sixties, she branched into compositions based on photographs taken from documentary news, focusing on public figures like: Roosevelt, Kennedy and Hitler. Her most significant work was titled Kennedy Motorcade, capturing the moments just before Kennedy was shot. She also painted numerous portraits of women, all from public media sources.
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Audrey is most often identified as one of the leading artists of Photorealist, from its origin in the early 1960s to the present day. However, her art has long since moved beyond the mainstay of much Photorealist art. Not content to merely copy the world as we see it, Audrey Flack has used her obvious technical skill in the service of an art, replete with symbols, which comments on the transitory nature of life and favors the search for spiritual harmony (Hills 60).
It was not until 1969-70, however, the Flack produced her first photo realist work, the Farb Family Portrait. In this painting, she developed the technique of taking a slide of her subject, projecting it onto the canvas and then painting over the projected image with exacting trompe-l oeil detail (Hills 63).
Shortly thereafter, she began using an airbrush, a commercial tool used for billboards, which enabled her to create an immaculate surface of near photographic clarity.
Unlike many other photorealists s work, Flack s paintings were filled with personal memorabilia and closely related to her experiences as a woman. In her famous 1970s series of vanitas paintings, for example, she updates the 17th century Dutch still life tradition. Filling her compositions with rich fabric, luscious lipsticks, bright jewels and family or celebrity photographs, she presents a late 20th century women s commentary on the fleeting pleasures of the material world (Gouma-Peterson 97).
By the early 1980s, the vanity paintings gave way to Flack s depictions of spiritual beings, goddesses in particular, a theme she has continued to pursue to date. The monumental portrait of her daughter, entitled Hannah: Who She Is, now in the museum s collection, is the fist such image of the women/goddess. Depicted frontally with a gypsy star on her forehead and surrounded by a halo of light and stars, Hannah easily assumes the mantel of a secular goddess. The text beneath the image, from a poem by Joe Pintauro, furthers that reading, while Flack s recording of the date and time the painting was completed establishes her daughter s being (Hills 61).
As Flack described, it was like giving Hannah a second birth.
She then made a change from painting to sculpture, responding to a need for something solid, real, tangible something to hold and hold on to. She made a series of diverse, heroic women and goddess figures (Hills 65).
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Her works present strong, heroic feminine images. Flack described these images as real yet idealized the goddesses in every woman.
Unlike other photo-realist painters who claimed that the subject of their work were irrelevant, Flack pursued photographic imagery that communicated a particular sociopolitical point of view. This is what makes her a monumental representation of a personified heroic goddess, because of her intrinsic motivation in her art and her challenging the structures of society that have a foundation built on false conceptions of the past.
