In the early 1970s, the artist Audrey Flack traveled to the Basílica de la Macarena in Seville,
Spain, to see a carved-wood statue called a polychrome depiction of a weeping Virgin Mary adorned with jewels, crystal tears, and false eyelashes. Flack is Jewish, but she was no less overcome by the ’s sorrowful splendor: Here was a mother shedding tears for her child—Flack could relate—but she was also regal, grand, beautiful. Flack photographed the statue and, once back home in New York, made several paintings based on her pictures, capturing each resplendent detail in high definition. One of those paintings, , was included in the 1972 Whitney Biennial. Critics thought Flack was poking fun at the statue’s kitsch—that she added the cartoonish tears as some ironic commentary on femininity. They loved it. When Flack clarified and said that, actually, the work was incredibly earnest, the critics withdrew their praise and labeled the piece vulgar. The same was said of her other paintings, and the photorealistic still lifes she made later: too sentimental, too feminine, tacky. But Flack was undeterred. She still is. “I’m usually way ahead of the times,” Flack, a sprightly 92, tells me when I visit her home studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in January. She leapt from Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s to photorealism in the 1970s to public sculpture in the 1980s. She has been a teacher, a writer, a musician, and, crucially, a mother to two girls. When I visit, she is about to publish a memoir, (out now from ), which traces her sweeping career as an artist as well as the nitty-gritty of her personal life, including an abusive first marriage and the challenges of parenting a child with autism. She was also preparing to stage a show at , where 16 new works bring together the many aspects of her remarkable life. (Her work will also be the subject of a exhibition this fall.) “It’s about the timestream,” Flack says of her new paintings for the Hollis Taggart show, which pull in art historical references like Dürer, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Jackson Pollock, whom she knew, as well as icons of both pop culture and religion. Jesus, Charlton Heston as Moses,
Queen Elizabeth I, Marvel’s Doctor Strange and Clea—they’re all here. “When I’m painting now, everything is at my fingertips. It’s magical,” she says. She has dubbed her new style post-Pop baroque. “They say before you die you see everything from your life. In my 92 years, a lot pops up.” Flack was born in
New York City in 1931 to
immigrant parents, growing up among other Jewish families in
Washington Heights. From a young age, she pursued art. She attended the High School of
music & Art, a precursor to LaGuardia High School, and then Cooper Union. While at Cooper Union, she was selected by Josef Albers himself for a scholarship to Yale to help add an avant-garde edge to the school’s design department. “He asked for the names of the ‘enfants terribles,’ and mine was the first one on the list,” Flack writes in her memoir. Flack was a member of the Artists Club and hung out at the legendary Cedar Tavern in the late 1940s and ’50s with Ab Ex icons like Pollock, , Franz Kline, and William de Kooning. Her memoir is riddled with stories from this era, both good and bad. Misogyny and harassment were pervasive, and she was put off by the excessive drinking and debauchery the crowd was known for. She stopped going to the Cedar Tavern altogether after Pollock, an artist she revered, drunkenly propositioned her around a year before he died. “I took one look at Jackson’s ravaged face and knew I no longer wanted to be part of the scene,” she writes. She left Abstract Expression, seeking more structure and stability in both her art and her life. But it cost her: “I paid a heavy price by absenting myself.” She studied the Old Masters, embraced her love of figuration (which was not “in” at the time), and found her way to realism. By the late 1960s, she was part of the group that pioneered photorealism, a new genre that used photographs to create hyper-realistic pictures. The other photorealists were men; cars and trucks were common subject matter. Flack, however, painted lipstick and strings of pearls, icons like Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy. “Images are powerful,” she says, so she painted the images that meant something to her. Overtly feminine, her work was subject to both harsh criticism and, sometimes, inaccurate interpretations, as happened with her in the early 1970s. And when she picked up the “verboten” airbrush? Scandal! As she was building her career, Flack struggled in her personal life. The memoir marks the first time she’s gone in-depth in a public way about the challenges she faced with her first husband, who was emotionally abusive, and raising a daughter with severe autism. She scrambled to find care for her daughter and the money to pay for it. There was scant research on autism, and often mothers, including Flack, were blamed. It was important for her to tell this story in full, to show what it can look like to be a working mother with an unreliable partner and few resources, and to sustain an art career despite it all. “That’s my life,” she says. “I’m a mother. People don’t like that. They don’t want you to be both.” But success came too. Her work was acquired by The Met, MoMA, and the Whitney. She left her husband and remarried, happily. She was showing in galleries and museums at the height of her photorealist fame when, in 1983, a creative block struck and she was unable to paint. But after two years, she found her way back to art—through sculpture. She started carrying a little ball of clay around with her everywhere, rolling it between her fingers at restaurants. She took up sculpting goddesses, putting modern spins on ancient figures of female strength. “Medusa, Daphne, and Medea became my sisters and guides,” she writes. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s she won competitions and placed public sculptures in cities all over the US, including Nashville, Tampa, and Rock Hill, South Carolina. In 1991, her work on a 35-foot sculpture of the 17th-century Queen Catherine of Braganza—the wife of King Charles II of England—which had been commissioned by a group in Portugal as a gift for the borough of Queens, was mired in controversy and ultimately canceled over concerns the statue would be celebrating someone who benefited from slavery. This was heartbreaking to Flack. She had modeled her Queen Catherine after a biracial cousin and had intended the figure to be a strong, bold woman who could speak to the borough’s diverse population. And she maintains that Catherine was against slavery personally, even if
England permitted it while she was queen. In recent years, as Flack found her way back to painting and combed through decades’ worth of journal entries for her book, the memories of her prolific career came flooding back. Her new “timestream” works survey it all: her Ab Ex background, the photorealist still lifes, a love of things old and new. Taken together, the effect is like an art history version of “They try to categorize you,” Flack says. She hasn’t let them. At the opening of her show at Hollis Taggart last weekend, it was packed despite the downpour outside. Guests peered closely at the fine detailing (a feat for anyone, let alone an artist in her 90s), as others queued up to have their copies of her memoir signed. It was the culmination of something, but hardly an end. With Darkness Came Stars,