The names Pollock, Basquiat and Frida make us think of artists struggling with alcohol, heroin and staggering physical pain. For each, a personal angst exposed in the public domain. We remember their visual legacies — drips, urban graffiti and surrealist folk with a feminist twist — and familiar faces reduced to a quick read by the scowl, the dreadlocks and the eyebrows.
For each of these 20th-century icons, others wait in the wings with significant contributions and equally compelling lives, albeit far less sensationally hyped. Inevitably we discover — despite good intentions to let art stand on its own — that biography adds rich layers of meaning in ways that elude the eye.
Audrey Flack, coming to Tampa next week, is one of these artists.
An acclaimed painter, she's renowned for photorealist paintings she began to show during the '60s and '70s. In 1976, New York's Museum of Modern Art purchased "Leonardo's Lady," the first painting of this style to gain recognition at the museum, in effect proclaiming her a leader of the new male-dominated movement. Her work was collected privately and by major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim. In the early '80s, she abandoned her paints and, except for occasional watercolors or drawings, began a 20-year odyssey as a sculptor. Her subjects are powerful women, goddess statues based on feminist themes, classical or mythological figures, and the power for healing through art.
In the 1990s, Flack encountered the opposite of healing, a nasty dose of sturm und drang generated by the rise and fall of a colossal five-story sculptural commission she won through a privately funded international competition. Original supporters claimed New York's borough of Queens was named for Queen Catherine of Braganza, a former Portuguese princess and wife of 17th-century England's Charles II. The 35-foot (plus 15-foot base) bronze statue in her honor would have been a female image second in height only to the Statue of Liberty; plans were to locate it on an East River shore facing the U.N. After Flack devoted 10 years to the commission, it was derailed by 11th-hour antagonists who claimed (with questionable evidence) that the Queen held slaves. A legacy any artist would dream of was dashed, after big guns Giuliani, Sharpton, Pataki and Trump made politically expedient decisions to withdraw support.
Paralleling the high drama of her art life is a riveting personal biography.
Audrey Flack is a survivor. Not in the campy reality show vein but in the game of life. Touched by chance, a quirk of nature, her first-born child, Melissa (Missy), was born with autism in 1959, the year of the artist's first N.Y. solo exhibition. The event marked the beginning of her double life as artist and parent (eventually a single one) of two children, one with extraordinary needs. It's a story she's not always shared, suppressed as much by societal and art world norms as by the artist's choosing. Flack, and untold numbers of mothers of that era, lived with their children's unexplained behaviors, exacerbated by delayed diagnoses, little outside help, plus unscientific accusations of poor parenting as causing the condition.
Flack's artistic evolution from two-dimension to three was more than simple aesthetic transformation; it was a profound emotional, spiritual and philosophical journey.
Art critic Judith Stein calls Flack a maverick. Maybe it's a question of attitude, a feisty will to promote her own art agenda.
She hardly looks like a maverick. At 72, the petite, soft-spoken, banjo-playing artist is stylishly arty and typically adorned with multiple necklaces and rings.
Flack used the word maverick metaphorically when she pleaded the case for Carlo Crivelli, a largely forgotten 15th-century Italian sculptor: "It is the original artist, the one who breaks the rules, the eccentric, the maverick, who should be more carefully considered, and not cast aside because he or she does not fit into the mainstream of a movement." (Arts Magazine, 1981). Fittingly, Breaking the Rules was the name of Flack's 1992-93 40-year retrospective and accompanying book of images and essays.
Her conversation is sprinkled with art historical references, whether female artists left out of the art chronology, Renaissance sculptors like Bernini, or obscure 19th-century neo-classical sculptors she favors. Her contagious fervor compels us to take a fresh look at artists we've ignored or dismissed.
By temperament she seems wired for perfection whether for words or images; when she speaks of paint, it's from a scientific sensibility. Yet beneath the erudition, hints of vulnerability underlie the tight professional schedule and crushing family responsibilities she continues to monitor from homes in Manhattan and East Hampton (see Architectural Digest, 1988) where she also maintains studios. Welcome to the reshuffled sandwich generation, caretakers caught for decades between the severely developmentally impaired and elderly family members. Missy at 45, non-verbal, suffering effects of premature osteoporosis and fractures, resides in a Pennsylvania school where the artist and husband Bob visit every three weeks. Flack's 101-year-old mother lives in a Long Island nursing home.
Visiting Tampa
On April 4 Flack begins a 10-day residence at Studio-f, the University of Tampa's print facility. Open since 1990, the studio has hosted such famed artists as Ed Paschke, Sam Gilliam and Komar and Melamid — each creating a collaborative series of monoprints with master printer Carl Cowden. (Monoprints are single original works of art, often enhanced by hand; print multiples are created through mechanical means.) Aside from studio time, artists deliver a lecture at UT's Scarfone-Hartley Galleries. The university's Fine Art Permanent Collection receives a few prints from each artist. Others are available to collectors.
Flack has a whirlwind of appearances scheduled, beginning with the dedication of her Hillsborough County public art commission, the contemporarized classical statue, "Bella Apollonia." Created in honor of the late Louise Kotler, longtime Tampa Museum of Art board member and a founding member of the county's seven-member Public Art Committee, the 5-foot pedestaled bronze figure also references the museum's renowned classical collection. Paint drips and a bronzed paint tube at the base salute both Pollock and the creative process.
The artist will lecture at the museum. She'll also participate in a dialogue sponsored by the Carter-Jenkins Center in north Tampa, second in their series, "Inspiring Minds and Creativity." An interview with Flack (conducted by UT English professor Elizabeth Winston and myself) will appear in Tampa Review 27, the forthcoming edition of UT's hardcover literary review. Flack's art will adorn the cover.
She is no stranger to the Tampa Bay area. She's frequented the Safety Harbor Spa for years, a place she considers spiritual and healing. In 1981, art historian Linnea Dietrich curated Flack's first retrospective at USF, Works on Paper (1950-80), which were photographs of her photorealist paintings.
Last December, she signed a second contract with Hillsborough County Commissioners for "Veritas et Justitia ('Truth and Justice')," a nearly 14' bronze and gold-leafed statue based on the artist's favored updated Greco-Roman style. The work will stand on the plaza in front of the new downtown Tampa courthouse, the first female statue by a female artist in an outdoor environment within the county.
USF Art Department Chair Wally Wilson was on the committee that commissioned the piece. Wilson says the new courthouse is considered the centerpiece of the downtown judicial district, thus elevating the importance of having a signature work by a renowned artist in this locale. Aside from justice, the image has multiple contexts. Jan Stein, county coordinator of public art, suggests the sketch "reflects a universal face — multicultural, Indian, African American and Spanish — much like the general population of classic Tampa." Tobacco leaf motifs on the base, she says, are the result of a discussion between Flack and Judge E. J. Salcines, Ybor native and historian.
Three small related statues, included in the commission, will be placed in public municipal buildings in Temple Terrace and Plant City. Stein is pleased at the uniqueness of having an "artist of great accomplishment" and multiple images uniting the entire county.
Flack's commission for "Bella" extends her commitment to putting statues of powerful women in public places — traditionally a sphere for representations of heroic males. "Bella" comes on the heels of her privately commissioned "Galatea," which was installed in a South Pasadena park in 2000. Her model for multiple statues exists in Rock Hill, S.C., her "Civitas" commission (1990-91): four nearly identical, almost 14' bronze goddesses, beautifully proportioned and representing civic and community pride. Community leaders there report that "Civitas" has attracted a considerable increase in tourists. Another major work, "Islandia, Goddess of the Waters," is in University of Florida's Harn Museum of Art.
Beginnings
How the sculptor arrived at her feminist philosophy has long roots.
Brooklyn-born in 1931 to a middle-class Jewish couple, Flack grew up in Manhattan where she was educated at Cooper Union. She was one of its 10 top students personally selected by distinguished colorist Josef Albers for the Yale art program he was reorganizing. Despite the school's prestige and the privilege of working under Albers — an impeccable credential — Flack remembers awkward "silences" between them. Though the focus was abstraction, she says, "I went home and copied old masters in sepia and color pencil." Eventually, "He let me do my own thing."
Doing her "own thing" also meant defying school rules against females wearing pants to class. Despite her scholarship, Flack the maverick, even at this early age, refused to back down. And she won.
After Yale, she studied at The Art Student's League and was introduced to the legendary by-invitation-only Greenwich Village phenomenon known as the Artists Club, a weekly gathering of abstract expressionists. Flack remembers artists like Pollock and Philip Guston arguing about everything from paint and color to aesthetics. "These guys were totally dedicated, didn't care about money. They were really impassioned."
But there was more than art on their minds. The young, single and attractive artist was constantly on guard in the "very promiscuous atmosphere" where "women were treated like objects," she says. "It was very dangerous, lots of bravado, almost a brutality. Very scary." She describes Pollock's drunken unwanted advances, undercut in her retelling by deeply felt compassion for the man and artist drowning in his despair. Typically Flack, she advocated the shamanistic role of the artist/healer, writing later, "Art could have saved him. He lost his way."
By the late '50s, Flack entered a troubled marriage to a talented cellist. In 1959 she gave birth to Missy, her "startlingly beautiful" baby. It was a mystery why the child showed no facial expression or visible response to stimulation.
In a telephone interview, Flack hesitantly shared bits of this painful period of her life. "Missy screamed constantly and didn't sleep through the night for four years. She wasn't toilet trained until four. I had to carry her everywhere and no one would take her. I don't know how I managed. It was a nightmare of profound proportions."
Making matters worse, noted psychologist Bruno Bettelheim's theories suggested that "cold" mothers caused the autism, thereby inflicting severe anguish onto the mothers. In some cases children were removed from their homes, kept in isolation with no family contact. In the 1990s, Flack and six other women were featured in Refrigerator Mothers, a poignant award-winning PBS documentary that records emotionally scarring experiences.
"The first time I thought women were heroic were mothers of autistic children. And maybe that's a connection to my statues. I hadn't thought of that," she says in the video.
Flack's second daughter, Hannah, born in 1961, wrote the video's music and lyrics. Video producer David Simpson writes, "Hannah had lived through this story — watching her sister Melissa's autism and the blame and guilt heaped on her mother turned their family life upside down." Her mother painted a tribute to Hannah in an enormous portrait (1982) hanging in the National Museum for Women in the Arts.
A touch of irony: Missy and Hannah's father was the nephew of Joseph Breuer, Sigmund Freud's mentor and colleague, both key players in the history of psychoanalysis, the field of study that fostered Bettelheim's thinking.
Research psychologist Bernard Rimland, himself the father of an autistic son, rescued the accused women with his book Infantile Autism (1964), establishing an alternative biological model as the source of damage. Autism is now considered a neurological disorder occurring in one out of 500 children, a recent dramatic rise worrisome and still unexplained.
Flack's marriage dissolved, yet despite her untenable situation, she continued to paint, sometimes into the middle of the night and holding Missy in her arms.
In the early 1970s the artist married Bob Marcus, a commodities trader. He adopted the girls and gave them his name.
When I first met Flack, early in 2003, she told me she had only recently learned to be less guarded in speaking about her daughter. Indeed, in Art Talk (1975), a collection of individual soul-baring conversations between art historian Cindy Nemser and a dozen famous female artists (including Louise Nevelson, Eva Hesse, and Sonia Delauney), Flack reveals details of her private life, but not a word about her children. During these years she remembers that it was off limits for females to reveal details about their lives with a handicapped child. Hers was a heroic existence denied by gender proscription, replaced perhaps by romantic notions that a male painter urinating in the street while drowning in alcohol was more newsworthy.
Parallel Threads/Art & Family
After graduating from Yale in 1952, the heyday of abstract expressionism, Flack briefly painted in the style. Then came a series of self-portraits, with gestural strokes marking her transition out of abstraction: the artist at her easel, holding chalk or brush; her quiet image after her father's death; "Melissa and Me" (1959), with her own eyes nearly obscured, the still undiagnosed Missy in her arms. In this last piece, the baby engages us, her eyes fixed on ours; ironically, lack of communication or social interaction is one of the hallmarks of autism.
In 1960, the artist painted herself in dark hues, understandably somber, an image ripe with contradictions. Though her face and upper torso occupy half the vertical space as if empowered, the dark and partly obscured image conveys vulnerability and defeat.
Art historian Thalia Gouma-Peterson writes, "She did not paint another self-portrait for 14 years. She could not bear to look into the mirror."
During the social upheavals of the '60s, Flack painted some of the first documentary works using photos, like JFK and Jackie innocently frozen in Dallas sunlight shortly before the pink suit transforms into a blood-stained national icon. Though contemporary artists were integrating photographs into their art through collage, converting a photo into paint was still controversial. She painted migrant workers, movie stars, a civil rights protest parade and black boxer "Davey Moore" (1964).
In the early '70s, she produced large paintings of religious statuary or cathedrals — reproductions revealing a technique of incredible surface perfection. Art historian Lawrence Alloway suggested her "sudden and intense fame" during this period resulted from her series of Madonna-images on canvas based on the 17th-century Spanish Baroque sculpture of Luisa Roldan; she copied the statue but added tears. These led to her 1974 acrylic self-portrait (the first since 1960), the artist more confident, the airbrushed skin tight and flawless, though her eyes still avert ours. Her quest for spiritual answers continues in images of Baba, the Indian spiritual advisor she met in India.
Her career flourished. Throughout this period she exhibited work and taught at Pratt Institute, New York University, School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union, using her mother or mother-in-law as occasional babysitters. Later, with Missy settled, she became a visiting professor and lecturer throughout the United States and abroad. She also wrote two books, Art and Soul and Audrey Flack on Painting.
Style and Impulse
Flack's eye and meticulous process were phenomenal, evident in her innovative use of projected photographs like "The Farb Family Portrait" (1969), a stunning first example of this process.
Nevertheless, controversy and criticism shadowed these and other aesthetic decisions. Her work was attacked because she used personal and feminine objects, she says, unacceptable to an art world on the cusp of acknowledging and valuing female artists and their choices. She had broken a "silent code," she wrote.
Her passion for realism also kept Flack on the "edge" during decades when anything but was de rigeur: Realism during the heyday of abstraction, flatness, and critical rejection of subject matter; Realism in place of Pop Art and Minimalism; Realism while Conceptualism, Post-Modernist irony, and anything-but-the-kitchen-sink occupied center stage.
Despite this, it's interesting to consider Flack a conceptual-realist (my term), an artist valuing and promoting ideas but submerging them beneath a realist mask. Yet without explanations the deeper meanings can be elusive.
But why realism? Curious about her early attraction to realism, I asked why it was so critical to her artistic expression. She surprised me with candor, describing painful childhood experiences she believes are "psychoanalytic" in nature. She was referring to her mother's life-long addiction to gambling and the aura of deception reverberating through her family. (At 101 her mother continues her passion for gambling.)
"I didn't know this as a child. But I would hear my mother cover up the situation, lie about money which she lost, but distort the truth, the reality," she says. "A lot of this I wasn't aware of until after the fact."
"What I think I found myself doing, even at an early age, was trusting my eyes, trusting what I saw. The face doesn't lie. I trusted the visual reality, so it translated into a need for clarification and visual reality. My father was very straight, very direct. He couldn't handle the convoluted. He would demand the truth."
Such painful episodes led to works like "Solitaire" (1974), an impeccably painted still life with the debris of a late-night card game and surrealist-looking clock with a broken reflection. Familiarity with her family dysfunction eliminates simple readings. Similarly, "Crone" (1996), a seemingly innocent bust of the artist's mother, with dice strewn crown-like across the head, translates into the woman's invisible power.
During the '70s, male photorealists like Richard Estes and Ralph Goings painted shiny chrome and reflective glass, while Flack revived a 17th-century still-life genre known as Vanitas. Some paintings were updated with images of a young Marilyn Monroe. In others, objects spilled illogically off a tilted frontal plane, energized with a life of their own while keeping viewers at a distance. One work showed luxurious symbolic items beyond reach of Holocaust prisoners behind barbed wire. She painted oranges with surfaces so real we imagine the skin indenting under one's touch. And gooey monumentalized desserts and cut fruit with just the beginning of decay hinting of time passing, a favored Flack theme.
Famed art critic Robert C. Morgan, a Flack fan since his graduate school days, describes polarities in her photorealist canvases. "Sometimes corny, often effete, I find the work nearly hallucinatory in its indulgences — its hopelessly mesmeric glitz — and utterly miraculous in the way she pulls disparate components together in the most lucid and fastidious manner: a veritable chorus by Handel."
Sculpture, Spirituality, Feminism
And then she turned to sculpture. Why? The artist writes, "Our society is fragmented, empty, and falling apart, so I wanted to make solid objects, things that people could literally hold on to … ."
Previously, she had collected sculpture and placed small statues within paintings: Buddha, Jesus and a miniature cherub, all part of her search for spirituality, anathema to the contemporary art scene. "Macarena of Miracles" (1971) was one of many paintings she based on a Spanish sculpture. Art historian Thalia Gouma-Peterson suggests it represents the "Great Goddess of the 1970s," favored by feminists to counteract "male-centered mythologies."
From the 1980s on, Flack pursued an ambitious vision for public art, featuring feminist sensibility, classical tradition, ancient mythology and a return to "beauty," a new synthesis countering a contemporary art world she considers sterile and adrift.
Flack the shaman, the magician, summons art's mystical healing process, using mythological figures. She sculpts "Daphne," traditionally associated with the laurel tree and wreath, rebirthed in the artist's hands as an "ecological goddess" enveloped in fruits and foliage. The bust of "Amor Vincit Omnia ('Love Conquers All')," contradicts its surface message with a revolver tucked into the hair and sculpted tears on its face. Then there are her creative reinterpretations of the Medusa myth. The striking "Colossal Head of Medusa" exudes a synthesis of mythological, religious, and feminist themes. Another bronze bust, just 10 inches tall, is a fitting metaphor for Flack. To me, the open mouth evokes a silent scream — the iconic symbol of the 20th century, perhaps of the current century as well. Here is the essence of powerlessness and the muted voice crying out for help in a world that is not always listening.
Art historian Tony Janson, son of late author H.R. Janson, praises Flack for "invest[ing] sculpture with new meaning" during a postmodern era believing "in nothing except the failure of Western civilization." Strong words.
Biography suggests the artist's turn to sculpture is more than externally imposed, perhaps even Pygmalian-esque. Her "pantheon" of goddesses appeared only after her first born was fully grown, the time of revelation for any special needs child, when Missy the child/woman is, fatefully, what she will be. So in addition to societal concerns, the artist translates her deepest emotions into beautiful figures of power and healing. Of Missy. Of Hannah, and of herself.
Astonishingly, Missy today is a smiling, joyful human being, loved and loving.
Warhol spoke of "art and life."
For Audrey Flack, art was life. Is life. She says now, "The art kept me alive."
That's a message worth remembering.
Art critic Adrienne M. Golub is also a mother of an adult daughter with disabilities. She will participate in the discussion with Flack and psychoanalyst Frances Marton at the Carter-Jenkins Center. She can be reached at randagolub@aol.com.
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2004.