With Darkness Came Stars: A Memoir

by Audrey Flack

Only in the darkest moments of our lives do the brightest stars appear.

An artist, mother, teacher, and rebel, Audrey Flack is counted among the most important American artists of the twentieth century. In With Darkness Came Stars, she recounts and reflects upon a life fully lived.

Flack came up in the New York art scene when the city was fast becoming a world arts center. She had a studio in the Bowery and frequented the Cedar Tavern, where she rubbed elbows with Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and other giants of the Abstract Expressionist movement. After leaving that scene and starting a family, she spearheaded Photorealist painting, alongside the likes of Chuck Close and Richard Estes.

Flack has lived a remarkable life, successfully navigating a vibrant and virulently sexist art world, escaping an abusive marriage, and reshaping the rules of art creation in the middle of the twentieth century—all while raising two children, one with severe autism. Her story is full of strife and striving, but as an artist, Flack has always been able to find the beauty in it.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Memoir

296 pages, Hardcover

Published March 19, 2024

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, by far, my favorite read of the year. Audrey Flack is an incredible storyteller and artist who lived a rich life and leaves behind an extraordinary legacy. I have absolutely fallen in love with her.

[Caterina Pierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Darkness Came Stars is a heartfelt memoir by one of the twentieth century's great American artists. I should disclose here that I knew Audrey personally, and I curated a show of her sculptural work in 2007. But because I knew her, although somewhat briefly, I could hear her voice throughout the book. The written text reflects her personality: she was funny, she loved art history, and she was as tough as nails. You will get this sense of her from the memoir.

The memoir begins in the mid 1980s, when Audrey suffered a creative mental block, and was unable to paint for around two years. This was just after her major successes with her Photorealist paintings. Because she couldn't face the empty canvas, she decided to sit outside on a bench in New York City near her uptown studio. There she reminisces on her life, and it is through this vehicle of memory that we learn about her life in the memoir.

Audrey had told me many of the stories that appear in the book: that Jackson Pollock propositioned her and she refused (he was drunk, as usual, and married); that her mother was a gambler (we had a piece in the exhibition, a portrait bust of her mother with a crown, decorated with dice); that her daughter Melissa was in an assisted living situation (I don't think I knew the extent of Melissa's diagnosis, but I do remember that Audrey visited Melissa frequently, and wasn't available really on weekends). I'm not sure I knew some of the other stories (I was surprised by her relationship with Ruth Klingman, I'm not sure I knew it), but Audrey spills all of the tea, particularly in the first part of the book. Audrey had to live through the years when men behaved like animals, and women used their god-given talents to land a man who might be famous. We learn about the ugly side of some of the art world's most prominent individuals. Audrey herself steers clear of most of the drama, but ends up in her own doomed marriage to a cellist who essentially ignores their two daughters, Melissa and Hannah.

It is difficult enough to maneuver a career in the art world: but being working class, with two children who require mostly full-time care, many teaching jobs, and a husband who was absent most of the time and abusive the rest of the time, it should have been impossible. She was also working in a Photorealist style at a time when Abstract Expressionism, and later Minimalism, were the darling styles of the elites. But we can sense that Audrey was a woman who was not going to give up her art under any circumstances. Once she finds her niche, taking photographs and using them as the subject of her paintings, she takes the art world by storm. She had to fight for every win she achieved. Nothing was handed to her.

When I knew her, Audrey was working on her large sculptures, and her switch from painting to sculpture (playing with Plasticine is what breaks her out of her mental block), takes up the last third of the book. Again, making large scale sculptures of goddesses as public artworks was, to some, a throwback to nineteenth-century allegory. But Audrey loved artists of the nineteenth century, especially the sculptor Marcello (Adèle d'Affry). We met because Audrey found out that I had written my dissertation on Marcello, a woman sculptor like her, and because we had somewhat similar backgrounds and because I had a sister with a disability, we clicked. She gave me a lot of personal advice, and she repeats this advice at the end of her memoir. One of her biggest regrets was her loss of a big commission for Queens, New York of Queen Catherine. It's one of the first big public sculpture commissions in New York in the twentieth century that was cancelled because Catherine owned slaves. It's also one of the pitfalls of making figurative public sculpture.

Audrey died on my birthday in 2024. I am glad that she did get to see the book in print, as it came out in March of the same year. It is an excellent read, especially so if you are interested in how to become an artist when you have very little resources. The key is to do as Audrey did: never, ever, give up on the work.

[Deborah Underwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engrossing memoir of an extraordinary painter and sculptor, Audrey Flack. Now 93 years old, she describes the New York Art scene (1949-1959), her experiences as an artist and her friendships with other well-known artists over the years. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Chuck Close and many many others are written about in detail. Her personal life as a mother of two daughters, one of which was autistic, while being married to an abusive man, recounts the almost unbearable challenges she lived with for many years. An amazing woman, this book is not to be missed if you are an artist or interested in reading about the lives of artists.

[Jane Hammons · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this memoir because of the interview I heard with Audrey Flack on the Great Women Artists podcast with Katy Hessel. The writing is kind of dry, and much of it sounded like it was taken from interview material. But Flack's life is so interesting that it doesn't matter. The artists she discusses along with her own evolution as an artist--a feminist and mother of two--is fascinating and inspiring. Gorgeous illustrations as well.

[Victoria Olsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting account of the too-little-known artist's long life and work in NYC from the 1940s-2000s. She moved through trends to find photorealism and figuration after abstract expressionism, and persisted through all the obstacles of being a woman in that art world. She is also painfully candid here about her personal life, which she kept hidden while trying to compete with male colleagues like Pollock, de Kooning, et al. Overall, an astonishing life and career and a recommended read.

[Cecilia Anastos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read! Absolutely fascinating!

[Ellen Martens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have this large book on the bathroom, where I read a few pages now and then. Her experiences are remarkable, with details about other artists along with her personal life.