acclaimed photorealist artist dies at 93 – Legacy.com
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Audrey Flack was an acclaimed photorealist artist whose paintings and sculpture earned worldwide accolades.
Audrey Flack’s legacy
When Audrey Flack was a child, she often got in trouble for laughing, giggling, and fidgeting in class. A teacher handed her crayons and paper to keep her occupied, a practice that had a profound effect on her. “Art calmed my brain, essentially it saved my life,” she told the Art Students League of New York in 2011. She studied fine art at New York’s High School of Music & Art, Yale University, Cooper Union, and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, then made art her career.
Though best known for her photorealistic work, Flack’s early art was abstract expressionism. However, in the 1950s, she began experimenting with painting reproductions of photos she took, often of objects she had laying around her apartment. It was a sharp contrast to the abstract work that dominated the art world at the time. Being so against the grain won her attention and accolades as a pioneer of modern photorealism. In the 1980s, after she felt she had explored her art as much as she could, Flack reemerged as a sculptor.
Flack’s work has appeared in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and many others. She and Mary Cassatt were the first women to be entered into “Janson’s History of Art.” She has a number of books to her credit, including “Art & Soul: Notes on Creating” and “With Darkness Comes Stars: Audrey Flack, A Memoir.”
On deciding to become an artist
“I don’t think it was a decision. I think for some people it’s a calling like to the clergy, you just gotta do it. And I think in those days, it takes that kind of intensity and feeling because there weren’t that many artists, I mean, it’s so different now.” — Interview with Hyperallergic, 2021
Tributes to Audrey Flack
Full obituary: The Washington Post
