Audrey Flack | |
---|---|
Born | New York City, U.S. | May 30, 1931
Nationality | American |
Education | The High School of Music & Art New York University Institute of Fine Arts Yale University Cooper Union |
Known for | Painting, Sculpture |
Movement | Photorealism |
Spouse | H.Robert Marcus |
Website | http://www.audreyflack.com |
Audrey Flack (born May 30, 1931) is an American artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.
Flack has numerous academic degrees, including both a graduate and an honorary doctorate degree from Cooper Union in New York City. Additionally she has a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Yale University and attended New York University Institute of Fine Arts where she studied art history. In May 2015, Flack received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Clark University, where she also gave a commencement address.
Flack's work is displayed in several major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Flack's photorealistic paintings were the first such paintings to be purchased for the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, and her legacy as a photorealist lives on to influence many American and International artists today. J. B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, organized a retrospective of her work, and Flack's pioneering efforts into the world of photorealism popularized the genre to the extent that it remains today. [1] Audrey Flack is an Honorary Vice President of the National Association of Women Artists.
Flack attended New York's High School of Music & Art. [2] She studied fine arts in New York from 1948 to 1953, studying under Josef Albers among others. [3] She earned a graduate degree and received an honorary doctorate from Cooper Union in New York City, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University. She studied art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. [4]
Flack's early work in the 1950s was abstract expressionist; one such painting paid tribute to Franz Kline. The ironic kitsch themes in her early work influenced Jeff Koons. [5] But gradually, Flack became a New Realist and then evolved into photorealism during the 1960s. Her move to the photorealist style was in part because she wanted her art to communicate to the viewer. [6] She was the first photorealist painter to be added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. [7] Between 1976 and 1978 she painted her Vanitas series, including the iconic piece Marilyn. [8]
The critic Graham Thompson wrote, "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism, radical realism, or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs." [9]
Art critic Robert C. Morgan writes in The Brooklyn Rail about Flack's 2010 exhibition at Gary Snyder Project Space, Audrey Flack Paints a Picture, "She has taken the signs of indulgence, beauty, and excess and transformed them into deeply moving symbols of desire, futility, and emancipation." [10] In the early 1980s Flack's artistic medium shifted from painting to sculpture. [6] She describes this shift as a desire for "something solid, real, tangible. Something to hold and to hold on to." [11]
Flack has claimed to have found the photorealist movement too restricting, and now gains much of her inspiration from Baroque art.[ citation needed ]
Her work is held in the collections of museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, [12] The Museum of Modern Art, [13] the Whitney Museum of American Art, [14] the Allen Memorial Art Museum, [15] Smithsonian American Art Museum, [16] and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, Australia. [17]
In 1986 Flack published Art & Soul: Notes on Creating, a book expressing some of her thoughts on being an artist. [11]
Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson. [18]
In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. [19]
Audrey Flack is best known for her photo-realist paintings and was one of the first artists to use photographs as the basis for painting. [6] The genre, taking its cues from Pop Art, incorporates depictions of the real and the regular, from advertisements to cars to cosmetics. Flack's work brings in everyday household items like tubes of lipstick, perfume bottles, Hispanic Madonnas, and fruit. [6] These inanimate objects often disturb or crowd the pictorial space, which are often composed as table-top still lives. Flack often brings in actual accounts of history into her photorealist paintings, such as World War II' (Vanitas) and Kennedy Motorcade. Women were frequently the subject of her photo-realist paintings. [6]
Audrey Flack's sculpture is often overlooked in light of her better-known Photorealist paintings. In The New Civic Art: An Interview with Audrey Flack, [20] Flack discusses the fact that she is self-taught in sculpture. She incorporates religion and mythology into her sculpture rather than the historical or everyday subjects of her paintings. Her sculptures often demonstrate a connection to the female form, including a series of diverse, heroic women and goddess figures. These depictions of women differ from those of traditional femininity, but rather are athletic, older, and strong. As Flack describes them: "they are real yet idealized... the 'goddesses in everywoman.'" [6]
In the early 1990s, Flack was commissioned by a group called Friends of Queen Catherine to create a monumental bronze statue of Catherine of Braganza, in whose honor the borough of Queens is named. The statue, which would have been roughly the height of a nine-story building, was meant to be installed on the East River shore in the Hunters Point area of Long Island City, across from the United Nations. [21] The project was never fully realized, however, as protestors in the mid-late 1990s objected to Queen Catherine's ties to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. (Others objected to the statue of a monarch overlooking a Revolutionary War battleground.) [22] Flack nevertheless remained dedicated to the project, and notes that she endeavored to depict Catherine as biracial, reflecting her Portuguese background and paying homage to the ethnic diversity of the borough of Queens. [23]
Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be used broadly to describe artworks in many different media, it is also used to refer specifically to a group of paintings and painters of the American art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Richard Estes is an American artist, best known for his photorealist paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with such painters as John Baeder, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, and Duane Hanson. Author Graham Thompson writes "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs."
Ralph Goings was an American painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was best known for his highly detailed paintings of hamburger stands, pick-up trucks, and California banks, portrayed in a deliberately objective manner.
Events from the year 1977 in art.
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Denis Peterson is an American hyperrealist painter whose photorealist works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Tate Modern, Springville Museum of Art, Corcoran MPA, Museum of Modern Art CZ and Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York.
Glennray Tutor is an American painter who is known for his photorealistic paintings. He is considered to be part of the Photorealism art movement. His paintings are immersed with bright colors, nostalgic items, metaphor, and with a complete focus on detail. Tutor is a graduate of the University of Mississippi where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Art and English in 1974 and his Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting in 1976.
Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph. Hyperrealism is considered an advancement of photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the United States and Europe that has developed since the early 1970s. Carole Feuerman is the forerunner in the hyperrealism movement along with Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.
Robert Alan Bechtle was an American painter, printmaker, and educator. He lived nearly all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose art was centered on scenes from everyday local life. His paintings are in a Photorealist style and often depict automobiles.
Mary Frank is an English visual artist who works as a sculptor, painter, printmaker, draftswoman, and illustrator.
Idelle Lois Weber was an American artist most closely aligned with the Pop art and Photorealist movements.
Robert Neffson is an American painter known for his photorealistic street scenes of various cities around the world, museum interiors and for early still lifes and figure paintings.
The Nassau County Museum of Art (NCMA) is located on the former Frick "Clayton" Estate, a 145-acre (59 ha) property in Roslyn Harbor on the Gold Coast of Long Island, New York. The main museum building, named in honor of art collectors and philanthropists Arnold A. Saltzman and his wife Joan, is a three-story Georgian-style mansion that exemplifies Gold Coast architecture of the late 19th century. In addition to the mansion, NCMA, which receives nearly 200,000 visitors each year, includes The Manes Family Art & Education Center, opened in 2017, as well as a Sculpture Park, a Formal Garden, rare specimen trees and marked walking trails.
Janet Fish is a contemporary American realist artist. Through oil painting, lithography, and screenprinting, she explores the interaction of light with everyday objects in the still life genre. Many of her paintings include elements of transparency, reflected light, and multiple overlapping patterns depicted in bold, high color values. She has been credited with revitalizing the still life genre.
Anne Goldthwaite was an American painter and printmaker and an advocate of women's rights and equal rights. Goldthwaite studied art in New York City. She then moved to Paris where she studied modern art, including Fauvism and Cubism, and became a member of a circle that included Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. She was a member of a group of artists that called themselves Académie Moderne and held annual exhibitions.
Gertrude Glass Greene was an abstract sculptor and painter from New York City. Gertrude and her husband, artist Balcomb Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art. They were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization.
Louis K. Meisel is an American author, art dealer and proponent of the photorealist art movement, having coined the term in 1969. He is also the owner of one of the earliest art galleries in SoHo at 141 Prince Street. In addition to Photorealism, Meisel is responsible for the resurgence of interest in the sub-set of American illustration identified as "Pin-up", and is the largest collector of original art of both genres. Louis and Susan Meisel own the largest collections of Photorealism and pin-up art in the world.
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Cheryl Kelley is an American painter known for her photorealism, especially her paintings of classic and muscle cars. Her work has been featured on the cover of Harper's Magazine and can be seen at the Scott Richards Contemporary Art gallery in San Francisco, California, the Bernarducci·Meisel Gallery in New York City, New York, and the Seven Bridges Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 2009 and 2011 she was a finalist for the Hunting Art Prize, and in 2012 she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. The art collectors' resource Artsy considers her one of ten "Masters of Photorealism".
Marilyn (Vanitas) is an oil over acrylic on canvas painting by Audrey Flack executed in 1977. It has the dimensions of 96 x 96 inches. This contemporary piece is part of a collection Flack compiled titled Vanitas. It focuses heavily on an intensely colored, realistic presentation, symbolism dating back to historical work, formal sources, and historical context. The work is in the collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art.