Audrey Flack’s Last Words: A Tale of Success in a Sexist Art World
Late last month, artist Audrey Flack passed away at the age of 93. Her photorealist paintings expressed a vision of the life of a woman as represented by colorful, if everyday, objects—fruit, cosmetics, flowers, desserts, photographs—while her large-scale sculptural projects heralded women who often were marginalized in history. Her art, as they say, spoke volumes, but there was more that she had to say, and a memoir, With Darkness Came Stars, which was published shortly before her death tells the story of her struggles—and those of other women of her generation and those a bit ahead of hers—making her way through an art world heavily dominated by male artists, dealers and museum officials.
The structure of this memoir is a bit contrived, told within the context of a creative block Flack experienced in the early 1980s: fleeing her studio to sit on a nearby park bench in Manhattan’s Upper West Side where she recalls her life and challenges. It is those recollections that form the bulk of the narrative. The block eventually disappears, and we are offered the story of her life and that of others she knew.
Flack attended New York City’s High School of Music & Art, later studying at Cooper Union and earning a Master’s degree at Yale Art School. Her parents, only modestly observant Jews, supported her educational ambitions, even though they themselves had received only limited schooling. “Too much education spoils a girl’s chance of getting married,” was her mother’s repeated mantra, but her parents ultimately were tolerant (mother) or supportive (father) of her desire to become an artist.
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Born in 1931, Flack came to adulthood during the heyday of abstract expressionism, for a time painting in that style herself. “Abstract Expressionism was electrifying the city, revolutionizing the art world and riveting the public,” she writes. By going where the leading artists of the day—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, among others—hung out, she met these men, as well as the women who became their wives, girlfriends and punching bags. A large portion of the story she tells is not about abstract expressionism or its leading (male) figures but those women who provided her with an object lesson of what not to let happen to her.
Women artists were all “girls” to make free with, and that wasn’t just the point of view of the painters. Morton Feldman, an up-and-coming composer, made unwelcome sexual advances to Flack at Manhattan’s downtown Cedar Bar, which became known as The Club and attracted all manner of artists and wannabes. “I jammed my elbow into his belly and shoved,” knocking him to the floor. That was their last interaction. Fighting back wasn’t always her reaction, but being sexually harassed was a constant. Jackson Pollock glared at Flack on one occasion. “He stared like an animal,” she writes, eventually putting “his lips close to my ear and whispered, ‘How about a fuck. Let’s fuck.’”
Pollock was by no means the worst. On meeting painter Reuben Nakian for the first time, she extended her hand to shake, which he bypassed and “clamped his two thick, muscular hands on my breasts like suction cups.” While studying at Yale under Josef Albers, what began as a conversation with the older artist quickly became uncomfortable when “I felt his hand on my knee… He’s just being friendly, I told myself; this is Yale; this is not happening. Still looking straight ahead, he let his hand slowly creep up my thigh.” She pulled back. Albers left the room, and the incident was never discussed.
Other women fared worse. Painters Lee Krasner and Elaine De Kooning, wives, respectively, of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, were regularly humiliated by their husbands, their talents treated as minor at best. Painter Michael Goldberg ”was having an affair with Joan Mitchell. He smacked her around, beat her up…. He was jailed and spent time in a mental institution where Joan was raped by an attendant while visiting him.” Grace Hartigan, another painter, told Flack that the married Franz Kline, with whom she was having an affair, “pulled out my diaphragm before we had sex.” Multimedia artist Hannah Wilke revealed to Flack that her live-in boyfriend, Claes Oldenburg, mistreated her. Flack met Canadian artist Sylvia Stone who appeared to receive no better treatment. “Sylvia Stone and Joan Mitchell were being physically abused—Joan by Mike Goldberg and later by the painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Sylvia by the painter Al Held.” Beatings, insults and “[m]ultiple abortions were part of the scene.”
At first, she believed that her middle-class values kept her from entering this world the way other women of her acquaintance did, later concluding that “Realists lived more stable lives than the abstract expressionists.” She wasn’t celibate but kept her distance from the dark side of the art world. The realists she came to know—Robert Bechtle, Richard Estes, Chuck Close and Philip Pearlstein—didn’t hassle her and generally were more supportive. Flack decided “to leave the glamorous mythology” of abstract expressionism, reintroducing herself to European Old Masters and figuration, pursuing the Pop-offshoot of Photorealism.
Eventually, through participation in group shows, Flack began to receive recognition for her developing style of painting. In the meantime, she worked in an insurance company as a typist, adding up numbers for an accountant and as a designer in an advertising agency, later freelancing designs for a textile firm. During this time, she was married and had two children with an infrequently paid cellist named Frank who was physically and emotionally abusive to her and showed little to no interest in helping raise their two daughters, the oldest one autistic. Flack felt blamed for her daughter’s woes, particularly by the medical community of the time, which described mothers like herself as the cause of their children’s challenges—she was a “refrigerator mom.” It was always difficult to get away from condemnation.
After some years, she divorced Frank, marrying Bob, a divorced man with daughters of his own, who was more supportive of Flack’s career and her children. In addition to the group exhibitions, Flack also began participating in women’s consciousness-raising groups in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and she credits them with helping her steer away from the acceptance of patriarchy and more of an advocate for equal rights for women generally, as well as for equal representation in museums and galleries. Many of those older women of the abstract expressionist era never became feminists.
It is suggested that a late-career interest in sculpture helped break that 1980s creative block, and it is now for both her painting and sculpture that Flack is widely known. Here, she tells her story, and that of other women artists, painfully and with the aim of inspiring others to bypass the remnants of patriarchy in the art field and elsewhere to achieve what they are meant to do. Her last words are a gift to us offering a revised history of postwar American art and inspiration.