Though today best known for her revelatory Photorealist paintings, Audrey Flack (1931-2024) first came to artistic maturity among the vibrant downtown scene of Abstract Expressionism. Her studio in the early 1950s was located on Eighth Street and was thus “right in the middle of the explosion,” as she once put it. Flack was a regular at the Eighth Street Club and the legendary Cedar Tavern, where she was immersed in the social atmosphere of the period and developed ties with luminaries such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. Through Abstract Expressionism Flack found her artistic identity and ultimately created highly original work that was ordered yet gestural and captured the core sensibility of the age. Flack recalled of this time: “Abstract Expressionism meant working intrinsically from within. You had the freedom to experiment, deal with your inner self, and catch the power of that moment.” (1) The deconstructing and restructuring of the object, the all-over composition, and the intense compositional energy that infused her Abstract Expressionist works remained essential to her practice throughout her career.

This work is a rare example of Flack’s early canvases created in her Abstract Expressionist vocabulary. It is comparable to two works from this period that are now in institutions: “Lady with a Pink” (1952) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “Abstract Expressionist Landscape (with Clouds)" (1951) at the FAMM (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum).

In this particular work, Flack’s unique fractured sense of space creates a feeling of depth within the composition, her own version of the infinite depth she found in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. At the same time, her references to life and the natural world are worked through in the canvas: “Everything I learned is here, fracturing line, fracturing space, fracturing light. But you are still in the world. You can’t be swept away.” (2) In the early 1950s, when this painting was made, Flack was a student at Cooper Union when Josef Albers personally recruited her to Yale University. Under Albers’ tutelage, Flack honed her sense of the spatial interplays of abstract forms, as evident in this work. It is a study in shading and depth, in which Flack investigates the possibilities of dynamic positive and negative forms.

Alongside Mary Cassatt, Flack was one of the first women artists to be included in the seminal art history survey text, Janson’s History of Art. Flack’s work "Leonardo’s Lady" (1974), similarly, was the first Photorealist painting purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In the 1960s and 1970s, she began painting still lifes and images from news media in a hyper-realistic style, solidifying her position as a pioneering Photorealist painter in a cohort of predominantly male artists. In 1969, she innovatively projected a photographic slide onto a canvas as the basis for her work “Farb Family Portrait” (1969–70, Rose Art Museum), which, in her words, “opened up a new way of understanding light.” Her decadent photorealistic compositions of Baroque excess fill the visual field with seductive depictions of modern still life elements, alluding to her sustained interest in the work of Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Reubens, and other Old Masters. These works were championed by the influential critic Lawrence Alloway, who credited Flack with the reinvention of the still life.

In the 1980s, Flack began focusing on sculpture. Her subjects were often powerful female figures, and through this work, Flack explored the sources and variations of female essence and power, from goddesses such as Islandia and American Athena or queens such as Queen Catherine, for whom the New York borough of Queens is named.

Born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York, Audrey Flack attended Cooper Union before receiving a BFA from Yale University in 1952. She completed numerous public commissions, and her work can be found in the collections of most major American museums: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among many others.

1. Flack quoted in Rick Friedman, “A Conversation with Audrey Flack,” in Heroines of Abstract Expressionism: A Survey of 19 Acclaimed Abstract Expressionist Women Artists, exh. cat. By Megan Holloway Fort, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, September 19-December 31, 2019, 14.
2. Flack quoted in Robert S. Mattison, Audrey Flack: The Abstract Expressionist Years. (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2015), 16.