When Audrey Flack was at Cooper’s Union in the late 1940s, the school was surrounded by the studios of New York’s Abstract Expressionists. She was friends with them and painted in dynamic bursts of color—but had other ideas. Still active at 88, Flack tells her story in the documentary Queen of Hearts. At Yale during the oppressive heyday of sterile Modernism, she covertly copied the Old Masters and rebelled against the precepts of her teachers. “A feminist who is an artist, not a feminist artist,” as she describes herself, Flack became a leading figure in the resurgence of figurative art. Queen of Hearts recalls an age when artists could live cheaply in Manhattan, vacation in Europe and work in an atmosphere relatively free hype and artspeak. (David Luhrssen)