Audrey Flack
American, 1931-2024
Self Portrait Holding Charcoal Stick, 1956
Oil on canvas, 40 x 28 1/4 inches
Gift of the Artist
1993.39
Audrey Flack was a painter and sculptor who believed art was a visual representation of what we feel and how we think. She understood art as a protest to death and after her passing in 2024 the featured artwork, Self Portrait Holding Charcoal Stick, stands to that testament. The image of the artist, waist high, is relentlessly frontal and commanding. Right hand on hip, and left across her body holding the charcoal, she is framed by vertical lines of paint in mostly blue and oranges, and the paint drips from her torso. Though the style of painting is quite different, the image recalls Bronzino’s ca. 1540 Portrait of Lucretia Panciatichi, a beauty with an equally confronting gaze.