Audrey Flack & the History of Art

[caption id="attachment_43406" align="alignnone" width="800"] Audrey Flack. Dawn Watson photo.[/caption]

By Dawn Watson

The first time Audrey Flack became aware of the banjo, she was at a hootenanny in the early 1950s at Yale University.

Before that particular social gathering, the classical pianist and art student hadn’t put much thought into the stringed instrument. She was busy tickling the ivories and studying to earn her bachelor of Fine Arts. But after seeing mathematics student Tom Paley—who later formed the influential old-time string band New Lost City Ramblers with John Cohen and Mike Seeger—plucking away on the stage, she was hooked on bluegrass.

Before long, Ms. Flack took up the five-string banjo. She added that instrument and ukulele to her many talents, which included painting, and later, sculpting.

She ultimately chose a career in art, becoming one of most influential and groundbreaking painters of the photorealist movement, as well a sculptor of considerable accomplishments. The first woman to be included in “Jansen’s History of Art,” her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and many more around the world. Her next exhibit, Audrey Flack: Heroines” will be on view at The Hyde Collection Art Museum and Historic House in Glens Falls, New York from September 26 through January 3.

Though she’s a serious artist, Ms. Flack never lost her passion for music. She kept playing, and later began writing songs about art and those make it, eventually bridging her two big creative loves.

For the past several years, the prolific East Hampton-based artist has fronted the History of Art Band. The group, which formerly featured artist and guitarist Walter Us of Sag Harbor, who is now retired, now includes Johnny Jackpot on banjo, Adam Grimshaw on guitar and banjo, Deborah Grimshaw on fiddle, David Roger Grossman on bass, Ben Fraker on mandolin, and Connie Evans on spoons. The band will perform at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Friday, September 11.

Playing American old time and bluegrass music, the musicians will treat the audience to a dozen or so songs and entertaining history lessons about East Enders Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Bill King, and other famous artists, such as Marc Chagall, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Mary Cassat and Camille Claudel.

In setting a few facts about the artists’ lives to music, Ms. Flack endeavors to impact the way their work is viewed, she says.

“In my way, I’m trying to bring light and awareness to some of the depths behind and within the art we see. Beyond what we take for granted,” she explained during a visit to her East Hampton studio last week. “To me, that makes the work richer.”

For example, in “Action Jackson,” the first song she wrote about an artist, Ms. Flack sings:

Well, Jackson Pollock, that’s my name.

Abstract painting brought me fame.

I sell my work one by one.

I get drunk when I am done.

Peggy Guggenheim sponsored me.

Gave me a show, gave me a fee.

I pissed in her fireplace at her party.

It made the event a lot more arty.

In delving into an artist’s life beyond the palette, Ms. Flack sheds light on the person and not just the finished work.

For example, Picasso, a legendary womanizer, is said to have told one of his decades-younger lovers. Françoise Gilot, “For me, there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats. Women are machines for suffering.”

Ms. Flack’s song about the best-known Cubist in the world includes the lyrics: “My name is Picasso and I’m a sexy guy. I kiss all the women and I make them cry.”

“Think about that the next time you look at ‘Dora Maar,’” says Ms. Flack of the Spaniard’s portrait of his muse. Ms. Maar, born Henriette Theodora Marković, inspired Picasso’s “Weeping Woman” and even painted some minor elements of his masterpiece “Guernica.”

As it frequently happens in art, much of the music is born of tragedy. As a result, some of the stories are riddled with tales of heartbreak.

In “Woman of Constant Sorrow,” Ms. Flack writes about Ms. Claudel, an artist’s assistant and mistress of Rodin who was shunned by the more famous sculptor and her family and committed to an insane asylum after he “dropped” her. Upon her death, she was buried in a communal pauper’s grave.

Rembrandt lost three out of four children before they reached adulthood, and his wife, Saskia, died shortly after delivering their fourth child. He died penniless and was also buried in a pauper’s grave.

“Oh Rembrandt. What a life that poor man had,” says Ms. Flack. Referencing his lifelong commitment to self portraiture, she explains the deeper meaning behind her song, “The Rembrandt Blues.”

“There’s one in the Met, it’s one of his last, where he’s looking very soulful. I see that and I think, ‘he understands how I feel,’” says Ms. Flack. “And then, that last one, right before his death. It looks like he’s lost his mind. He’s hunched over, almost animal like, as if he’s descended to such depths, like there’s nothing left to do except laugh at the tragedy … That last one, it’s a killer.”

Juxtaposing the tragedy with more palatable whimsy is part of the charm of old time Appalachian music, Ms. Flack says.

“It is so pure and simple sounding that you can write a song where someone gets stabbed in the heart, then hung from a tree and then drowned in the river and it can still sound upbeat,” she explains. “It’s one of the things I love about it.”

Audrey Flack and the History of Art Band will play at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Friday, September 11, at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10, or free for members. Learn more at www.parrishart.org.