- Breaking the Rules: Audrey Flack, a Retrospective, 1950-1990Our PickBy Thalia Gouma-Peterson
- Audrey Flack: A Pantheon of Human DeitiesBy Susan Casteras
- Audrey Flack: VanitasBy Louis K Meisel Gallery
- Audrey Flack. Abstract expressionist to photorealist: paintings from 1949 to 1977By Robert C. Morgan
- June Blum - Audrey Flack - Alice Neel: Three Contemporary American Women Artists, December 5-6, January 4-19, 1978 exhibition catalogueBy Karen Valdes
Important Art by Audrey Flack
Abstract Force: Homage to Franz Kline (1951)
At the start of her career, Flack became immersed in the Abstract Expressionist movement. While still a student at New York's Cooper Union, Flack joined the Artists Club in Greenwich Village, becoming one of a select group of women to become directly involved in the Abstract Expressionist scene. Her expressive, yet ordered, paintings captured the movement's zeitgeist and the brave creative spirit that lay behind her early paintings was widely acclaimed. Most influential amongst her early supporters was the Bauhaus artist Josef Albers. It was he who persuaded Flack to take up a scholarship at Yale with the mission of shaking up the institution's stuffy academic reputation. Although her studies would lead her away from abstraction toward realism, the principles of structure and form in her early paintings would stay with her throughout her career.
Flack once recalled a conversation she had had with Franz Kline who she questioned on his black and white abstractions: "I remember saying to him once, 'How about using color?' Because I love his work. He... said, 'Maybe yellow. Yeah, maybe I'll use yellow.'" Abstract Force then becomes a response to that conversation: an homage to Kline's black and white abstractions to which she brings her own preference for vibrant color (with yellow hues). Flack achieved this gestural abstraction through a series of broad, angular brushstrokes that form a tight, grid-like structure across the picture plane. The image does not only invoke Kline however. One sees here Flack's stated admiration for the likes of Picasso, Braque and Gris who emerge as a secondly reference to the Cubist technique of deconstructing symmetrical patterns.
Self Portrait (The Memory) (1958)
In this intimate self-portrait Flack paints her own image with muted, sombre tones and anxious, agitated brush marks. With one hand on her hip and the other jutting forward she appears confident with her identity as an artist. Gazing outwards at the viewer, she has a contemplative expression. Between 1952 and 1960 Flack painted a series of self-portraits which borrowed their sombre tone from Rembrandt's work. We find this connection not only in the subject matter but in the use of earthy colors also. Elements of Flack's previous expressionist style had by now developed into narrative, figurative subject matter, which she painted by looking into a mirror. Her numerous portraits of the time document a journey of artistic and personal exploration. This painting - subtitled The Memory - was made just after Flack's father had died. In painting her own image Flack subverts the traditional male/female role of voyeur/muse by performing both, her aim being to break with the stereotypical image of the glamorous 1950s American woman.
Kennedy Motorcade (1964)
John and Jackie Kennedy are seen here leaving Dallas airport on November 22, 1963, just moments before his assassination. Flack wrote: "People were horrified at the subject matter. Everybody is smiling, and, of course, you know that one moment later Kennedy is going to get shot.'" The couple sit in the back of a convertible car surrounded by security and airport staff, waiting to make their ill-fated parade through downtown Dallas. Flack reproduced this scene from a color newspaper photograph of the Kennedys published at the time. Caught squinting in the glare of the Texan sun, the Kennedy's, accompanied by state governor John Connally, appear relaxed and happy, unaware of the momentous tragedy (and historical event) which is about to unfold.
Close inspection reveals the potential for a sinister reading of the image; Connally's hand is seen slipping inside his jacket while an ominous shadow is cast across John Kennedy's torso. Flack was one of many artists who moved beyond the introspection of abstraction towards the re-staging of popular imagery and culture. However, in the 1960s, and even in the wake of Pop Art, it was still considered divisive for 'proper' artists to directly copy photographs. Whatever one's view on the meaning of 'original' art. Audrey Flack's Kennedy Motorcade ranks as an innovative example of a Photorealist style that invites the spectator to reflect on the very ontology of art. On a personal level, meanwhile, Photorealism allowed Flack the freedom to push beyond the confines of her own life story and to look outward into the wider world for thematic stimulus.
Influences and Connections

- Jackson Pollock
- Franz Kline
- Willem de Kooning
- Luisa Roldan
- Maria van Oosterwyck
- Franz Kline
- Margaret Ponce
- Jeanne Hamilton
- Margaret Ponce
- Robert C Morgan
- The Pictures Generation
- Neo Pop Art
- Feminist Movement