Born in New York, Audrey Flack studied art at Cooper Union from 1948 to 1951 and painted in an Abstract Expressionist style until a further period of study at Yale and conversations with her peers in New York City introduced her to a combination of competing influences -- her lecturer, Josef Albers, the painter Philip Pearlstein -- that cemented her determination to pursue realism over abstraction. She graduated from Yale with a BFA in 1952. Eleven years later in the wake of the Kennedy assassination she began to paint the late president from a photograph (Kennedy Motorcade, 1964 -- the painting was completed the following year). “I never worked from life again,” she said in an interview with Robert C. Morgan. “That did it ... After that, straight photorealism.” For the Farb Family Portrait of 1969 she came up with the idea of projecting the image onto her canvas through a slide. The broad brushwork of her Abstract Expressionist days was becoming finer and more detailed. The Kennedy work was painted with areas of dry mild color but later paintings acquired a deep gloss and gleam, like classical stiff lives, and the subjects began to mimic still lives too, arrangements of objects on tables and cloths. “I was interested in texture,” she said, “and light being absorbed and bouncing off of something.” In 1966 she was the first Photorealist to have work acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Her subject matter set her apart from the other Photorealists, the men; she painted commentaries on Marilyn Monroe, and her Jolie Madame (1973) was an assortment of rings, jewels and decorated vessels standing on a mirror. She had her own way of being a feminist, she said. In the early 1980s she began to work in sculpture.
DK Sole, Marjorie Barrick Museum 2013
Bibliography: Robert C. Morgan, Oral history interview with Audrey Flack, 2009 Feb. 16, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Audrey Flack website: http://www.audreyflack.com
