Framed Audrey Flack Print, "Fourth of July Still Life", 1975

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Up for sale is this print by Audrey Flack from the Kent "Spirit of Independence" Bicentennial portfolio, published in 1975 … Read more Up for sale is this print by Audrey Flack from the Kent "Spirit of Independence" Bicentennial portfolio, published in 1975 by Lorillard. A wonderful assemblage of objects pertaining to our history, painted in her trademark photorealist style, it is matted in a pH neutral 16" x 20" mat and framed. New old stock from the original portfolio, it is in excellent condition, as pictured.
About the artist:
Audrey Flack was born in Washington Heights, New York in 1931 into a middle-class family. A rambunctious student who was sometimes sent to sit in the hall with pencil and paper, she thus discovered her vocation, graduating to "class artist" and ultimately applying (with a submission of pencil drawings on typewriter paper) for a place at the Music and Art High School in New York City. She attended the school for four years, then went on to study art at The Cooper Union in New York, graduating in 1951. There she was taught by Nicholas Marsicano, one of the founding members of the legendary Greenwich Village Artists' Club, a weekly gathering of up-and-coming artists. Flack was one of a small number of women invited to join. Abstract Expressionism was the style du jour and Flack was enamoured by the likes of Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, even producing large scale abstractions that followed in their footsteps. Bauhaus artist Josef Albers who persuaded her to study for a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Yale University., where she moved beyond expressionism and to bring a political dimension to her paintings. However, Flack felt there was still some missing elements to her training. As she put it: "I had this burning desire to draw like a master" and on graduating in 1953, she moved to the Art Students League to study human anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale. It was here that Flack began painting solid human figures with a blunt realism.
After her first marriage, Flack struggled to combine the roles of wife, working mother and artist. "I don't know how I did it," she recalled later. The apartment's living areas doubled as Flack's studio and she would often paint in the middle of the night. Flack said of her painting that it was "the thing that kept [her] sane". Nevertheless, Flack's eleven-year marriage broke down in the late 1960s, leaving her as a single parent and even more heavily reliant on the sale of paintings and private commissions to make ends meet. Changes in her personal circumstances instigated a second shift in her artistic focus. For the first time Flack began to paint socio-political commentaries, painstakingly reproducing documentary photographs of people from all social strata at a time when directly copying photographs was still considered, from a fine art point of view at least, somewhat fraudulent. Women featured prominently - as teachers, nuns, migrant workers, activists and even movie 'sex goddesses' - in her work and towards the end of the 1960s Flack made an important breakthrough with Farb Family Portrait (1969-70) through which she had achieved a new level of realism - or Photorealism - by projecting a photograph onto her canvas which she then traced using unnatural, animated colors.
In the 1970s, Flack was included in two highly influential exhibitions: Twenty-two Realists, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972, and, in 1975-6, Super Realism at the Baltimore Museum of Modern Art. In the early 1980s, Flack, by now a firmly established figure within the New York art establishment, published a book, Art and Soul and Audrey Flack, and accepted invitations to lecture at the Pratt Institute, New York University's School of Visual Arts, and at Cooper Union. The latter honoured her with the Saint Gaudens Medal in 1982. It was during the same period that Flack began to focus ion sculpture, a medium in which she was self-taught: "Our society is fragmented, empty, and falling apart", she said, "I wanted to make solid objects, things that people could hold on to".
More recently Flack, who still lives with Bob (her husband) in Manhattan, has returned to working in two dimensions. Her time in the studio is split however with academic responsibilities. She currently holds the post of honorary professor at George Washington University and as visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently represented by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York and the Hollis Taggart Galleries in Los Angeles. Sher remains best known for her contribution to the Photorealist movement of the 1970s, taking her place alongside the likes of Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close and Wayne Thiebaud. Her celebration of female icons and archetypes has also invited comparisons with the Pop Art of Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and Roy Lichtenstein. See less