Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
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This Week’s Special
Audrey Flack
Strawberry Tart Supreme, 1974
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College
As the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, where I worked from 2017-2020, I was the steward of about 5,000 objects across all mediums, from photographs to paintings, to sculptures big and small. Whenever someone asked what my favorite work was, which happened more than I would have liked, I would feign offense. How could I love any one child more than all the rest? I’m not a monster!
But when you’re a curator in charge of a collection, you inevitably do have your favorites, and one of mine was—is—Audrey Flack’s Strawberry Tart Supreme, a dreamy Photorealist painting from 1974.
Flack’s bakery case vision features a glistening strawberry tart surrounded by a supporting cast of cupcakes, a snowball, a lemon meringue, and a thick slice of chocolate-raspberry jelly roll, arranged on a silvery mirrored surface. Clocking in at 54 by 60 inches, the painting is a larger-than-life tableau of sweet treats, one that consumes you while you stand there wishing to consume it.
Born in the late 1960s, the style that became known as Photorealism was all about virtuosity and machismo—it was about painting clapping back at photography, snarling, You think you’re hot stuff? Check this out! (That’s how they talked in the ‘60s, right?) As a movement premised on (among other things) showing off technical ability, Photorealism was unsurprisingly dominated by a group of male artists, including Robert Bechtle, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, and Ron Kleemann. Many of their works from the ’60s and ’70s showcased impossibly shiny objects, capturing light bouncing off polished chrome or store windows in a feat of nuanced paint application and verisimilitude.
Flack was (and still is) drawn to things that glitter, but she self-consciously replaced the cars, fire trucks, and windows privileged by her male counterparts with ostensibly “feminine” subjects: jewelry, hand mirrors, lipstick, and lots of confections. In her artist statement for the Brooklyn Museum’s Feminist Art Base, Flack writes:
As the only woman artist in the groundbreaking Photorealist movement, I broke the unwritten code of acceptable subject matter. Photorealists painted cars, motorcycles and empty street scenes. Cool, unemotional and banal were the terms used to describe the movement. My work, however, was humanist, emotional and filled with referential symbolic imagery. Even deadly serious subjects like the liberation of Buchenwald in my painting World War II were filled with feminine subject matter—silver trays, demitasse cups and pastries. These works were attacked and berated for their feminist content but this very same type of subject matter has found its way into the mainstream. Vision has changed.
Indeed it has, and maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to Flack’s work. What’s intriguing to me, though, is not just her choice of objects, but the way she painted them. She photographed her still life setups herself, then painted them at an enlarged scale, using a projected color transparency as a guide for airbrushing. The effect, especially in a work like Strawberry Tart Supreme, or its sister painting from the same year, Strawberry Tart, is a Vaseline-on-the-lens soft focus characteristic of porn, which makes a certain kind of sense given the luscious sexiness of the tart—and even the word “tart” itself, used as an old-school epithet to describe a girl with the air of promiscuity.
Having seen Strawberry Tart Supreme in storage early on in my tenure at the Allen, where it sparkled even under subterranean fluorescents, I knew I had to find a reason to put it on view. I had my chance in the spring of 2019, with a small show I organized called The Thingness of Things: Portraits of Objects, which was inspired by German New Objectivity-era photography. I made up for the pretension of referencing Heidegger in my title by pulling together a show of 30-some paintings and works on paper, all approachable and relatable and rather charming in their straightforward views of everyday things. Once I had a checklist, though, I couldn’t fathom writing labels interpreting each work. What was there to explain? I feared that traditional “chats”—the curator-written interpretive texts displayed next to artworks—would suck the magic out of these object portraits, leaving them boring and lifeless.
Instead I enlisted two of Oberlin’s poetry faculty, Chanda Feldman and Lynn Powell, to work with students to write poems that would accompany the objects. Paige Reinstein, who graduated from Oberlin last month, wrote about Strawberry Tart Supreme, and gave me permission to print her poem again here:
AGE OF RIPENESS
A slabbering of spring skids
through your nose, summoning you
towards the glob of cream,
which is softer than your blankie—
your blankie that lies sprawled
beneath your bed since
today you turn seven;
since today you became
a man.
With your face pressed against
the window you imagine the
buttery crust that crumbles into
pieces as it meets the tip
of your tongue and the
shimmering strawberries that
squish against your teeth,
their sweetness expanding
like clouds.
You imagine a candle dent
within the fluffy cream and
the lighting of a flickery flame
that grows until you suffocate it with a
wish for a carton of icy chocolate milk
or for a world without girls—
then you stare down at the price tag
and realize wishes are not meant
for kids like you.
—Paige Reinstein
Paige’s poem captured, better than I could, what Flack’s closely cropped painting suggests: a viewer whose face is smushed against the cold glass of a bakery case, eyeing the prize jewel that is a cream-topped strawberry tart.
Postscript
The more I looked at Strawberry Tart Supreme these past weeks, the more I wondered about the desserts themselves—where they came from, who made them, why Flack chose them. I wrote to Flack to ask her a smattering of questions about the tart and she very graciously shared this:
I bought all my pastries from Lichtman’s Bakery on the Upper West Side. A family owned Jewish bakery that took great pride in their products. I spent a lot of time picking out the best looking one, the one that would be good to paint. Unlike the rotting fruit I used for Vanitas paintings, the strawberry tart had to be fresh, vibrant and alive. My daughter and her friends always waited until the end of the photo shoot to gobble up the pastries. Strawberry Tart [Supreme] was painted for sheer joy, a delectable feast, as a technical tour de force.
Before receiving Flack’s email, I had never heard of Lichtman’s, which closed its shop on 86th and Amsterdam in 1987. But judging by the numerous articles I found on its closing (and the auction of its equipment), and the death, three years later, of its Hungarian-Jewish patriarch, it was evidently a New York institution—one of many—I’m sorry to have missed.
For Further Eating
Naturally I considered pulling together a strawberry tart recipe for this issue, but that would have required turning on the oven and it was positively broiling last weekend—and promises to only get worse for most of us. So I decided instead to live up to my potential as a Geriatric Millennial™ and instead make fancy toast. (I’m making it at home instead of paying $12 at a cafe because I do want to own a house one day, okay?) I was spurred on by the surprise gift of a box of tiny edible flowers, which I found tucked into my bag of produce by the kind folks at my semi-local farm stand.
So here’s a no-recipe recipe for fancy strawberry toast, which you can make for 1 or 100. And as a bonus, a list of all the tasty variations I could think of, because once you make this, you’ll want it again and again, tweaked slightly each time to keep it special.
Strawberry Ricotta Toast
Serves 1 (though you can easily scale it up)
Grab a fresh loaf of sourdough and cut a thick slice on the diagonal for maximum surface area. Heat a tablespoon or so of butter in a frying pan and toast the bread on both sides. (If you’re making toast for a crowd, you can also do this in the oven on a baking sheet; melt butter on the sheet, add the bread in a single layer, and bake at 350°F for 5 minutes on each side.)
While the bread toasts, wash a handful of the best strawberries you can find, dry them gingerly with a tea towel, and then hull and cut into halves (if small) or slices (if medium to large). Place your toasted bread on a plate, let cool slightly, and dollop with a generous quantity of ricotta cheese; use the back of a spoon to spread the cheese into big, fluffy swoops, covering the surface of the toast. Drop a few teaspoons of strawberry jam over the cheese, swirling it in if you want consistent flavor, or leaving it sporadic if you, like me, want a concentrated sweet surprise every few bites. Artfully arrange as many fresh strawberries as you can over the whole thing, then sprinkle with a modest bit of flaky salt. Tuck in as many baby leaves of mint as you desire, and if you’re feeling extra, decorate with a handful of edible flowers. Eat it up with a fork and knife.
That’s the basic recipe.
Here are all of the variations I’m dreaming of:
The Base: Switch out sourdough for another toothsome bread or a split scone, biscuit, crumpet, or yeasted donut. Or! A stack of buttermilk pancakes.
The Cheese: You could use whipped cream cheese instead of ricotta, or even whipped cream if you really wanna embrace decadence. If you want to flavor the cheese, you could mix in lemon zest and/or a splash of rose or orange blossom water. Can’t do dairy? Kite Hill makes a legit vegan ricotta, or you can make your own.
The Jam: Swap strawberry jam for rhubarb, orange, or something blended with rose or champagne. Or skip the jam altogether.
The Fruit: I really think this toast is best with strawberries, but you could mix it up by adding other berries or sliced stone fruit, and when tomato season hits, go the savory route and throw on some juicy heirlooms!
The Garnishes: Drizzle with balsamic, honey, or chocolate sauce. (Soom just re-released their Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Tahini, which is so good with strawberries. Also delicious straight from the jar.) Sprinkle with finely chopped pistachios or sliced almonds. Switch out mint for basil or lemon balm. Decorate with Valrhona chocolate pearls. Dust with crushed freeze-dried strawberries for crunch and even more strawberry goodness.