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The Great Women Artists

Audrey Flack (1931–2024)

The Great Women Artists

Katy Hessel

Arts

4.8877 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Remembering the great Audrey Flack (1931–2024). Earlier this year, I interviewed Flack over a series of interviews before she passed away on 28 June 2024. Audrey was a force, and I hope you enjoy listening to her powerful and moving words. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend her memoir: With Darkness Came Stars: A Memoir (https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09674-2.html) -- I couldn’t be more excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed American artist, sculptor, photo-realist painter, and native New Yorker, Audrey Flack. Hailed for her sculptures of divine goddesses and Biblical characters; her paintings evocative of Old Masters that explore the historic subjects but with pop imagery; and abstract canvases, made in the 1940s and 50s, filled with swathes of movement, colour, and vigour – Audrey Flack, has been at the forefront of the art world. Brought up in New York City, Flack studied at Cooper Union and then Yale, where she was one of the only women and was taught under Josef Albers – in the early 1950s Flack found herself amongst the burgeoning downtown art scene, where she frequented the Abstract Expressionist haunt, the Cedar Bar, and hung out with her friends who included Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan. Audrey Flack knew them all. At the onset of Pop, she turned to photorealist painting, capturing in it distinctively feminist subjects, such as traditional objects associated with femininity and beauty, and then it was to sculpting female archetypes, taking back ancient-old stories steeped in misogynism, and reworking them for a 20th and 21st century audience. Whilst she paints and sculpts – and is in the collections of museums such as the Met and MoMA, – Audrey also takes the role of lead vocals and banjo with her band “Audrey Flack and the History of Art Band”, where she centres her songs around female injustice, the most recent being about the French sculptor, Camille Claudel. At 93 years old, you can often find her wearing t-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as Feminist AF, posing in front of her large-scale works, and wearing sunglasses inside. Flack has written it all down in a memoir – With Darkness Came Stars, one of the most moving, extraordinary books I’ve ever read. Not just for her artistic insights and incredible first-hand analogies of those who she knew in the 20th Century New York artworld, but, for writing, in such genuine words, the truth of what it’s like being a mother, a mother and an artist, and a mother to an autistic child. I was moved to tears a number of times. It made me realise, so acutely, how women and mothers have been treated with such injustice, yet had so much resilience to fight for their voice, their art, their children, and their path. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Great Women Artist podcast. Today's episode is a little

0:06.2

different from normal because sadly our guest Audrey Flack is no longer with us. She was born in

0:14.8

31 and she passed away last June, age 93. I feel so excited to release this episode because you'll hear Audrey's voice,

0:24.3

which is so full of love and energy and obsession with this mystical thing that we call art.

0:31.8

And I'd interviewed her over a series of recordings from January to June. And she would always be on Zoom with a cup of coffee,

0:39.3

a piece of chocolate, and a jumper that said feminist AF, because she thought it stood for Audrey

0:45.0

Flack. Audrey Flack was a force, and I'm so excited for you to listen to this episode.

0:52.7

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Great Women Artists podcast.

0:56.7

Just before we get to today's episode, I am so excited to say that this series is again

1:01.2

supported by the Levick Collection, a vast and varied art collection of which a major and

1:06.9

ever-increasing portion is dedicated to works by women artists. Today, there are over 600

1:12.7

works by women artists in the collection. After publishing the must-have book, Abstract Expressionists,

1:19.0

the Women in 2023, Christian Levitt went on to open on the 21st of June this year, FAMM, the first

1:25.8

private museum in Europe, entirely dedicated to women artists.

1:30.9

Located in Mujan, Nican in the south of France, this newly transformed space features a stunning

1:37.1

collection of over 100 masterpieces by many of the leading female artists from impressionism

1:43.1

to contemporary. The impressive exhibition of paintings, sculptures, photographs and more from the Levitt Collection

1:50.0

highlights the creative brilliance of women who have played pivotal roles in shaping some of the major artistic movements of the modern period.

1:58.0

It's only 30 minutes from Nice Airport.

2:06.5

FAM, which stands for female artists of the Mujan Museum, is open every day and for further information and bookings, please visit www.fam.com.

2:11.9

I hope you enjoy this episode.

2:23.3

Hello everyone and welcome to the Great Women Artist podcast with me, Katie Hessel. Some of you might know me from The Great Women Artists, an Instagram account I set up in October 2015,

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