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Plasters
and Disasters: Audrey Flack's Recent Sculptures
“[Audrey
Flack’s] recent plasters and bronzes suggest a certain timelessness.
[…] She understands that there are regressive forces –
unenlightened forces in society – that are ignorant of the
renewing and regenerative powers of art.”
Since 1982, Flack has focused her attention on creating sculptures
of powerful female figures ranging from small to colossal in scale.
This exhibition explores the process of Flack’s working method
and the maquettes (preliminary sketches) for future large-scale
sculptures. Although these maquettes are the most fragile, most
embryonic versions of her sculptures, they also represent the state
of each piece at its most pure form – they are the models that
the artist actually works on before each sculpture is transferred
to a foundry for casting into metal. In her book Art and Soul, Notes
on Creating (1986), Flack stated:
The artist continues the tradition of figurative sculpture in America
that began in the 1830s with the work of Horatio Greenough, the
country’s first professionally trained sculptor. Additionally
she carries on the tradition of colossal sculpture in America that
was epitomized by such works as Hammatt Billings’ thirty-six
foot tall National Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, Massachusetts
(1854-89) and the French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi’s
one-hundred and fifty-one foot tall Statue of Liberty (1886). The
medium of sculpture has always been reserved for the depiction of
heroes, sometimes glorious, sometimes tragic, but more often created
by men. In traditional sculptures, heroes are depicted as male and
allegories as female. Flack has continuously challenged traditional
sculptural images with her program of commanding women from a feminist
point of view; these women are always powerful and stalwart but
do not lack fluidity and grace. Flack has not sculpted the male
figure to any great extent. In an interview with David R. Brigham
in American Art (1994), she stated that she intends to sculpt a
male figure, but that she “would like to sculpt some new male
heroes. We need a new vision of a male hero, a true hero, who’s
kind and gentle and cares about the earth and all people” (American
Art, 1994, 19). Thirteen years later, given the climate of recent
political and social events, it is understandable why she has continued
to work with and develop female heroic figures. Flack’s
vision of seeing her works as markers at important sites has come
to fruition, as many of her colossal sculptures have been placed
in a number of public spaces in the United States over the past
sixteen years. Often destined for a public space, the colossal works
are part of Flack’s designs for a new type of “civic”
art, with women, rather than men, as the focal point of city, citizenship
and community. A group of four twenty-foot bronze figures comprise
her most well-known large-scale project, Civitas: Four Visions (Gateway
to the City of Rock Hill), installed at the Rock Hill Gateway in
South Carolina in April of 1991. In the same year, one of her first
major sculptural commissions was made for the City University of
New York: Islandia: Goddess of the Healing Waters, a nine-foot high
bronze figure, is part of the Edward Durrell Stone addition (Edward
Larabe Barnes Atrium) to the New York City Technical College on
Jay Street in Brooklyn. More recently, Flack has completed a fifteen-foot
high sculpture entitled Recording Angel (2006, figure 1) for the
Schermerhorn Symphony Center at the Nashville Symphony, which overlooks
the Country Music Hall of Fame. The Recording Angel is certainly
a reference to one of the nine muses, goddesses of the arts, considered
elemental to human inspiration, necessary for the conception and
creation of works of art. The wet-style drapery on her abdomen and
her wings remind one of the Hellenistic Nike of Samothrace at the
Louvre – it is as if Flack has reconstructed that once-whole,
now-fragmented ancient work. Yet the Recording Angel is a muse for
our own time: she holds a CD disc in her right hand. Her left hand
is held upright with her thumb and forefinger together, holding
a feathered quill. Flack wanted the quill to be fitted with a laser,
incorporating light into the sculpture as well as symbolizing the
burning of music onto the disc. Both
photorealist painting and large scale figurative sculpture have
been domains largely dominated by male artists, and this has remained
so particularly in the case of sculpture. For Flack, as it was for
other female sculptors of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries
whom she greatly admires (including Camille Claudel, Malvina Hoffman,
Anna Hyatt Huntington, Marcello and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney),
participating in the creation of sculpture is far from an easy task.
The very medium seems gender-identified as male, as the majority
of carvers, founders, modelers and other craftspeople who help to
bring a sculptural sketch or maquette from the artist’s studio
to its final realization, have traditionally been, and have remained,
men. Many
sculptors who happen to have been women have often complained throughout
history of being ill-treated at the foundries where their sculpture
is brought to completion, and Flack could be counted among them.
Recently, at a foundry where one of her large scale pieces was being
cast, a founder directed technical questions to Flack’s husband
(who is not a sculptor) rather than to her; such an event would
seem more probable in the nineteenth century than in the twenty-first.
Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), one of America’s greatest and most
successful nineteenth-century sculptors, complained of similar treatment,
among other biases, against women. Additionally, people in general
have a hard time understanding that sculpture is created in many
stages and often requires the help of assistants (both male and
female) to bring a work to completion. In her essay, “The Process
of Sculpture,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in December
of 1864, Hosmer felt compelled to discuss how sculpture is made,
step-by-step, hoping to end rumors in the American and British press
that she did not make her own sculptures. In fact the use of assistants
was an accepted practice among sculptors of either sex. Flack too
uses the necessary help of foundry assistants, but, as she has herself
noted, “All sculptors need assistance, but making art is like
making love. You cannot have somebody else do it for you” (American
Art, 1994, 6). Sculpture
is a difficult, physical medium that often produces disastrous setbacks,
hence the title of our exhibition. In Art and Soul, Flack recalled
a clay sculpture that literally melted from its armature in her
studio (p. 23). To produce the very earliest models of her sculptures,
Flack uses wax and clay. These works are then “destroyed”
during the casting process. She has lamented, as have most sculptors,
of the numerous pieces ruined in molds and poorly cast, after which
the maquettes have been lost and are difficult to replicate. In
this exhibition, one can view versions of Flack’s sculpture
in a variety of materials often used in the early stages of creating
a sculpture. A pointed-up plaster version of the artist’s Recording
Angel exhibited here (figure 2) shows the small penciled markings
on the sculpture used to transfer measurements to a huge block of
clay or marble. Through pointing, the artist can have any sculpture
“blocked out” in another malleable material in either
reduced or enlarged versions. Flack refines and models the rough
enlargement, a process which can take several months. She oversees
the entire technical process of her works, spending almost as much
time at the foundry as in her own studio. Flack
cites Luisa Ignacia Roldán (called La Roldana, 1650-1704),
the seventeenth-century sculptor of dramatic Baroque polychrome
sculptures in terra-cotta and wood, as one of the major influences
on her three-dimensional work. She discovered La Roldana’s
work in reproduction before she began making sculpture herself.
Equally significant to Flack’s artistic program were nineteenth-century
sculptors, particularly women artists whose large-scale work was
visible to her in the streets and parks of New York City. As a child,
Flack was enthralled by the AT&T logo image on the cover of
its New York telephone book, based on Evelyn Beatrice Longman’s
24-foot tall Genius of Electricity (also known by the titles Spirit
of Communications and Golden Boy, 1914). Flack has specifically
mentioned Whitney’s Washington Heights – Inwood War Memorial
(1921, now at 168th Street) as one of the influential sculptures
that she saw in her youth while walking to the museum complex that
at that time comprised the National Museum of the American Indian
and the Hispanic Society Museum on 156th Street and Broadway. She
was thus certainly aware of Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington’s
over life-sized sculptural group, El Cid Campeador with Four Warriors
(1927-43), which can still be seen at the Hispanic Society of America
at Audubon Terrace. Without doubt Emma Stebbins’ Angel of the
Waters: Bethesda Fountain (1868) in Central Park seems most closely
related to Flack’s current themes of protective angels and
idols of civic virtue (Stebbins was the first female artist to receive
a commission for a major public work of art in New York City). Interestingly
enough, Flack had no idea at the time that these work were created
by women artists. Male
artists have also influenced Flack’s sculptures, especially
British nineteenth-century sculptors such as Alfred Drury, whose
large scale figures for the town square in Leeds, England inspired
her when she was working on Civitas for the Rock Hill Gateway, and
Alfred Gilbert, one of the major figures of the British New Sculpture
movement. Flack has stated that her work is similar to nineteenth-century
models in their “attitude towards craftsmanship, thematic references
toward allegory and symbolism, an approach toward work, and concerns
with proportion” (American Art, 1994, 17). Moreover, Flack
has embraced the usage of natural and chemical patinas that were
used by La Roldana in the seventeenth century and which were revived
in the nineteenth-century, especially after the 1860s when artists
and scholars began to realize that the ancients were fond of using
color in their sculpture. She does not simply restate timeless interests in the goddess figure; instead she partly reinvents the subject, mobilizing an impressive visual injunction for viewers. […] she reverses and subverts the traditional male way of perceiving the female form in sculpture, instilling in her own figures a sovereignty and superiority, a self-possession and assurance, that sustains these remythologized beings as they invade our space and we enter theirs (Casteras, 1990, p. 129). In
her own words, the past is to be contended with, studied and consumed
before something new can emerge, as stated in American Art (1994):
Breaking the rules has become Flack’s specialty, sometimes
causing problems. Flack’s most recent sculpture is a ten-foot
tall sculpture for the Thirteenth Judicial Courthouse in Tampa,
Florida, entitled Veritas (figure 3). Installed in 2007, the sculpture
will be accompanied by a smaller version of the head of Veritas
inside the rotunda and two bronze maquettes in related courthouses.
Crowned with stars and symbolically blindfolded, Veritas gestures
with her extended arms and hands in a manner that suggests weighing
evidence. She steps forward into the unknown future, where truth,
one hopes, will reign supreme. Indian Icon, displayed in our exhibition,
was an earlier version of Veritas, but was refused by the commissioning
body because, unlike the case of Cuewe Pehelle (discussed below),
the figure of a Native American was seen as too controversial for
the courthouse steps. One
of Flack’s largest commissioned projects failed to come to
fruition because of political controversy. At the time of her interview
with Brigham in American Art, Flack had just begun work on her future
colossal statue entitled Queen Catherine of Braganza (1994, figure
4), a figure that some believe was the namesake of the borough of
Queens, New York. Planned for Hunter’s Point in Long Island
City opposite the United Nations, it was to obtain a height second
only in New York to the Statue of Liberty, at thirty-five feet.
Although some two million dollars was raised for the commission
and Flack worked for many years on the maquettes and large-scale
models for Catherine (figure 5), the project came to a close in
the year 2000 after political activists attacked the project on
the grounds that Portugal dealt in the slave trade in the seventeenth
century; this is an argument that, if put into practice, would be
cause for dismantling many a monument to the American forefathers.
Additional problems with the casting of Catherine ultimately led
to its demise and today only a few maquettes and plasters remain
of the original sculptural concept. Slightly
before the creation of Catherine, in 1993, Flack began work on a
figure of the Greek nymph Daphne, a six-foot high head of the daughter
of Peneus who ran endlessly to escape the grasp of Apollo. To prevent
Apollo from capturing her, Peneus allowed her to be transformed
into a laurel tree before Apollo could catch her; Apollo remained
in love with Daphne, the tree became sacred to him and the laurel
leaf became his most important symbol. Flack’s Daphne, exhibited
at the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton in 1996, speaks through
a tape recorded message that mesmerizes and tantalizes viewers.
As nymphs like Daphne were connected to the earth, its beauty and
unspoiled nature, originally Flack envisioned Daphne to be part
of a series of architecturally designed temples. The temple for
Daphne was to be called the Temple of Ecology (1993) for which the
artist made drawings and plans. The sculpture, with its multitude
of branch-like elements and still expression, radiates the mythic
and ecological nature of the nymph. Not
all of Flack’s large scale works are Greek figures in origin,
and not all of the suspected “disasters” ended as such.
Cuewe Pehelle (1997, alternately spelled Quewe Pehelle), a seven-foot
tall sculpture of a Native American girl, actually began as a commission
for a traditional sculpture of a Greek muse for Lebanon Valley College
in Annville, Pennsylvania. Flack felt compelled, however, to create
a Native American figure for the college, after discovering pictures
and stories of the murders of women and children from the Susquehanna
tribe in 1763 (known as the “Paxton Massacre” or the “Conestoga
Massacre”). Certain that the figure would be rejected by the
college because of its theme, Flack was surprised that not only
did college officials embrace the work, but came up with the title
for it, which is the original form of the word “Quittapahilla,”
Algonquin for “a stream that flows from the ground among the
pines.” The fruits and ears of maize in the figure’s hair
make reference not only to Native American cultivation but also
to the traditional agricultural production of the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania. Flack’s works can be seen at some of the most prestigious public spaces and museums in the United States. Museums that hold her works include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Her other recent public works include Cuewe Pehelle (1997), installed at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania; Beloved Woman of Justice (2000), installed at the Howard Baker, Jr. Federal Courthouse in Knoxville, Tennessee; and a fountain version of Islandia at the Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton, New York. The Art Gallery of Kingsborough Community College is proud to welcome home this Brighton-born, world-renowned artist and present the working models of her recent sculptural work. Caterina
Y. Pierre, Ph.D. Audrey
Flack’s work appears courtesy of Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New
York.
Exhibition Checklist Indian
Icon, 2006 Cuelle
Pehelle, 1997-98 Medicine
Woman, 1989 Recording
Angel, 2006 Galatea,
c. 2003 Bella
Apollonia: The Art Muse, 2001 Islandia
(head), 1987 Islandia
(bust), 1987 Local
Girl, 1995-97 Sky
Gateway (Pair of heroic female figures for an unrealized project),
1990 Ginette
Flack: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1995 Woman
with a Heart and Dagger (working model on stand), 2006 Alexandria,
2003 Recording
Angel, 2006 Recording
Angel, 2006 Islandia,
1987
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