Photo By Gail

Audrey Flack (1931 – 2024) was the most prominent woman artist to gain recognition as a photorealist in the 1960s and 1970s. She approached the genre of still life, which for centuries had been considered unprestigious by European and North American standards, with irreverent pleasure. Leonardo’s Lady (1974) presents tokens of traditional femininity (a jeweled bubble, embroidered ribbon, pink rose, and pressed powder compact), frivolity (effervescent champagne and shiny objects), and sexuality (a ripe, dripping pear and a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci‘s portrait of Francis I’s reputed mistress).

Flack went against the grain on multiple scores at a time when abstraction reigned supreme, and it was all but heretical for women artists to paint pretty things. The artist lamented, “we have been brainwashed into believing that beauty is a bad word,” however, she doubled down, using an airbrush to create a finish daringly redolent of magazine advertisements  and commercial art.

Photographed in the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA )in Los Angeles.