In Living Color
A pioneering photorealist painter offers a lively account of her career, along with vivid portraits of other New York artists.
NOW IN HER 90S, Audrey Flack still fights the urge to leap over the edge of the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda, “not to kill myself, mind you, just to swoop around the atrium.” This image captures the formidable
personality behind “With Darkness Came Stars,” Flack’s memoir of her career as a New York artist who graduated from art school at the height of Abstract Expressionism in the early 1950s, hung out with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock at the Cedar Bar in the Village and gained renown as the lone woman in a group known as “photorealists” for canvases brimming with high-definition detail — many of which are reproduced here.
PRUDENCE PEIFFER is the author of “The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever.”
Flack’s memoir opens in 1983, with her sitting on a park bench in New York City in a moment of crisis: She is unable to complete her paintings for an upcoming show. So begins a series of flashbacks, each chapter boomeranging to her “bench of reflective solitude,” where she performs “isolated self-analysis.”
Flack is a natural, unfiltered storyteller; it’s too bad that a cumbersome narrative structure holds up, in both senses, her book. Despite her repeated returns to a scene of creative block, the person who emerges from her pages is someone who never doubts she has somewhere to go.
Her first surge of artistic ambition arrives in primary school, to the bafflement of her Jewish immigrant parents. Her subsequent history is punctuated by unforgettable episodes: Her brother finds watercolors by Adolf Hitler while fighting in World War II and smuggles them home to his family; her neighbor the painter Alice Neel waves her cane at Flack, yelling, “You’re in all the museums and I’m not, and I am a better artist than you!”
In the early 1970s, Flack takes up the “fast and dangerous” airbrush, brazenly wielding a commercial tool for her painting at a time when virtually no artist had done so. When she turns to sculpture in the mid-1980s, she carries clay around in her hands for days. And when she and Philip Pearlstein are voted “favorite contemporary artists” by readers of The Village Voice, their prize is V.I.P. entry to Studio 54.
Some of the most profound passages in “With Darkness Came Stars” involve messy collisions of family and creative desire. Flack struggled with an abusive husband and an autistic daughter; chronically short on cash, she paid her obstetrician in paintings. She arrived late to a glamorous opening because she was busy plunging the toilet that her daughter had clogged with Play-Doh and diapers.
Even after abandoning abstraction, Flack dwelled on Pollock, calling him “an astronaut wandering through galaxies, severed from worldly connection.” It’s a generous description, considering that he drunkenly propositioned her when they met — at the Cedar Bar, of course. Elsewhere, she cites snide remarks by male artists about her generation of women painters, and makes cutting asides about some of those women’s promiscuity and opportunism. These comments stand out given the depressing cycle of harassment and sexism that Flack herself endured.
A letter (reprinted in full) to a New York Times critic who in 1978 found her paintings “cornily redolent” serves as a soft warning shot to haters. Insisting that the critic misrepresented Flack’s technique — her work involved not “grotesquely retouched” photographs but painting — the letter shows her determination to be taken seriously as an artist working against the headwinds of the avant-garde.
Flack repeatedly declares her affinities with the 17th-century sculptor Luisa Roldán, whose work “the smug art world” considered “kitsch”: “too sentimental, too glitzy, with too much color and too much emotion.” How fitting that her memoir lives up to that description and makes it something to savor.