Who is Audrey Flack and why is she so important?

Art is long, life is short warns the banner about Audrey Flack in his recent Self portrait with burning heart (2022). The formidable nineteen-year-old artist, whose artistic career and life have indeed been enviably long (especially compared to the multitude of abstract expressionists with whom she has already rolled), presents us with a Sacred Heart on fire. If one of his idols, Albrecht Dürer, could paint himself as Christ, then surely he can present himself as the Virgin Mary, as he does here with the Star of David pendant that symbolizes that he is also a Jewish mother. A crossed halo crowns his head and two Pre-Raphaelite women flank him in a sky of Marian blue, like saints.

The “drip technique” scarf around Flack/Mary’s neck might not seem like a match for the cherub-filled frame, but it’s likely telling you to deal with it. As is often the case, she weaves her threads together ars long practice “His work evolved by saturating the canvas with ideas, myths, styles, color and humor,” says Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, executive director of the Parrish Art Museum. “It’s as if each painting is a review of his career in itself.”

Flack has always experimented with the self-portrait and, among other things, is known for fusing the personal with historical art and the present with the past. She calls her recent work (including this self-portrait) her “Post-Pop Baroque” period, in which she appropriates images of pop culture figures like Elizabeth Taylor and Superman, and places them in opulent surroundings.

Along with 15 other post-pop baroque paintings, Self portrait with burning heart will be on view this month in “Audrey Flack: With Darkness Comes Stars,” a solo show at New York’s Hollis Taggart Gallery. The exhibition is entitled Flack’s new memoirs, With Darkness Came StarsPublished by Penn State University Press. In October, Flack will have a show of work from the 1950s to the present at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York.

Now 92, Flack is having a moment. This was not a fact, considering that it was always against the norm. It was figurative when abstraction and minimalism were rising; he used airbrushes when fine artists would not touch them; his still lifes of lipsticks, roses and beaded necklaces did not match the cars and trucks painted by his fellow Photorealists. And when she suddenly decided to be a sculptor, her sculptures were polychrome.

In her memoir, written in Flack’s unmistakable no-nonsense voice, she describes growing up in a Washington Heights apartment where reproductions of Old Master paintings covered the walls. “The people in these paintings became my friends,” she writes, recalling Ghirlandaio’s bulbous-nosed grandfather atop his green velvet sofa (next to a house of Rembrandt and Van Eyck). Arnolfini wedding, no less). Although her mother loved these reproductions, Flack’s family was not particularly artistic, and it was a surprise when she was accepted to the High School of Music and Art and then Cooper Union in 1950.

It was at the height of Abstract Expressionism, and Flack mingled with the more established Abstract Expressionist painters living in the inner city. Although she was interested in the work that Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were doing, she eventually avoided Cedar Tavern and its scene. “Art was the most important thing in my life, but I wasn’t going to let it kill me,” Flack writes. “I wasn’t attracted to testosterone-fueled aggression and uncontrolled drinking. So I stayed outside, watching, listening, observing, learning.”

After Cooper Union, Flack studied with Josef Albers at Yale. Initially an abstract painter, she was increasingly drawn to the work of the old masters, becoming first a new realist and then, in the 1960s, a photorealist. Although the abstraction stayed with her, she says. His photorealistic still lifes have a slanted picture plane and crowded patterns that extend to the edges of the canvas, both of which are concepts informed by Abstract Expressionism.

Flack returned to New York, where he became part of a drawing group in the early 1960s that included artists such as Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, Joyce and Max Kozloff, and Raphael Soyer. When she wasn’t drawing with a model with them, she was increasingly painting from photographs she had taken herself. She turned her studio bathroom into a darkroom and taught herself to print her own photos in color, something not all photorealists have done.

While his peers focused on shiny cars and motorcycles, Flack painted lipsticks and compacts, jewelry and glassware—the everyday stuff of his life. Paintings like pretty lady (1972–73) are replete with bright or reflective tchotchkes. This set her apart from other photorealists and also led to criticism from the growing feminist movement that she was too feminine and therefore not feminist.

Sometime in the early 1970s he received a postcard in the mail from Whitney Museum curator Marcia Tucker of La Macarena, a 17th-century wood carving of the Virgin Mary in Seville, Spain. Flack was so enthusiastic about the sculpture that he made a pilgrimage to Seville to see it and while there he learned that its author was a woman, the baroque sculptor Luisa Roldán.

“I didn’t care that this art was dismissed as low-class kitsch,” Flack continues in his memoir, using a word that has been used to describe his own work. “I loved it.” The sculpture inspired a series of paintings, shown in a solo gallery in 1972, with pieces going to private collections as well as the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum (though all these years later, Flack is disappointed that the Met only showed the his 1971 Macarena dos Milagres once).

By the late 1970s Flack had completed his “Vanitas” series (1976–78), a major body of work that included three monumental paintings: Wheel of Fortune, Marilyn, e Second World War. Filled with objects as varied as a framed black-and-white snapshot of the artist and her brother Milton as children and a petit four pastry, these still lifes address the passage of time in the same way as the 17th-century Dutch paintings that inspired them.

In 1980 Flack appeared in a group photo on the cover of ARTnewsissue of October 1980, which asked (as a counterpoint to Linda Nochlin’s landmark essay published a few years earlier) “Where are the great men’s artists?” (Flack is in the back row, second from left, smiling at painters Isabel Bishop and Dorothea Rockburne.) She was also among the first women, along with Mary Cassatt, to be included in an updated edition of HW Janson’s work. History of Art textbook in 1986.

At the time Flack was well known. But few knew that, for much of her career, she had been in an abusive marriage while raising two daughters, one of whom had severe autism. Flack eventually left her husband, found a suitable environment for her daughter, and remarried. After two years of battling creative block and depression in the 1980s, he returned to his studio and tried something completely different, experimenting with plasticine. He locked himself in his studio and learned to sculpt. She sculpted for the next 10 years, with a particular focus on mythological women. Public commissions soon began to arrive.

In a recent interview via Zoom, I asked Flack if there is one constant that unites all of his work: abstract canvases and figurative sculptures, still lifes of banana split ferns and Spanish Baroque Madonnas. He showed me a piece of paper that he keeps on a stand on his desk. It’s a quote from artist, curator and critic Robert Storr that he’s very fond of, and he says he meant it as a compliment. “Flack’s work is an obvious challenge to good taste,” the note reads. Flack took it a step further, adding, “I don’t want to use the word because I don’t see it that way, but it’s kitsch. And what’s another word for kitsch? It’s something that people can relate to.”

Flack is already planning paintings he wants to start after opening his two exhibitions and publishing his book. She’s not ready to reveal what they will be, but she has this to say: “It’s not going to be paintings on the couch.”