"Times Square Triptych,"
1986-87, one of three oils on canvas from the collection of the
artist. Photo courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York City.
Aerial
Muse:
By Stephen May
YONKERS, N.Y. - "One must never forget," the incomparable
Gertrude Stein observed years ago, "that the earth seen from an
airplane is more splendid than the earth seen from an
automobile." Recognizing that reality, for the past 30 years
Yvonne Jacquette has utilized the vantage point of commercial
jets and private planes, as well as high-rise buildings, to
create both daytime and nighttime views of cities and towns,
factories and farmlands, rivers and harbors, and woodlands,
pastures and power plants from coast to coast and border to
border, as well as in the Far East.
Although looking from tall buildings or airplanes at cities and
landscapes below is an experience common to all of us, few other
contemporary artists have explored its artistic possibilities.
Evolving from faithful translations of views to images in which
she splices together segments from different angles and
locations, Jacquette's urban and rural depictions convey a sense
of complexity and wonder. Now at the top of her game, she has
gained an enviable reputation with critics and the public.
Her achievements are on view in "Aerial Muse: ," at The Hudson
River Museum through May 4. The exhibition was organized by the
Iris & Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford
University and capably curated by Hilarie Faberman, Robert M. and
Ruth L. Halperin Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the
Cantor Center. With approximately 40 paintings, pastels, drawings
and prints, the show offers an overview of the development of the
artist's idiosyncratic landscape work.
Recognition has come relatively late for Jacquette, in part
because her career has not followed a usual evolutionary path and
her art is not easily categorized. In her mature work the artist
has sought to bring what she calls "intimacy to vastness." In the
process, in curator Faberman's words, Jacquette "embraces a
variety of contradictory tendencies -- her art is sophisticated
and childlike, earth bound and heavenly, comic and grave, and
ordinary and heroic."
"Hong Kong Ocean Pier VI," 1992. Oil on canvas from the
collection of the artist.
Jacquette was born in Pittsburgh in 1934 to a family that
eventually included seven children. Her father was an accountant
and management consultant, her mother a homemaker. Neither parent
was artistic, but they encouraged her to draw, especially her
mother. She began taking private art lessons after the family
moved to Stamford, Conn., in 1941. By the time Jacquette
graduated from Stamford High School she had won art competitions
and had a work published in Seventeen magazine.
In 1952 she enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, where
she learned the fundamentals of drawing and design. Dropping out
at the end of her third year, she moved to New York City, hoping
to learn more about new movements in art at the city's museums
and galleries and to pursue a career as an artist. Early on, she
admired the work of Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell.
Jacquette worked at different jobs, including stints in a display
studio, a company where she drafted designs of helicopters for
catalogs and a textile design firm. Along the way she honed her
drafting skills and sharpened her understanding of color.
In 1961, she met Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999), a gifted,
Swiss-born photographer, filmmaker and painter, who had arrived
in New York a quarter century before and had become part of a
wide circle of creative figures. He and Jacquette married three
years later.
Jacquette became friends with such artists as Alex Katz, Red
Grooms, Mimi Gross and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, as well as
Rackstraw Downes and Janet Fish, and poet/critic Edward Denby.
The Burckhardts' only child, Tom, has established his own career
as a respected artist, while also working as an assistant to
Grooms.
Much of Jacquette's early art emphasized odd angles or
perspectives of familiar objects such as floors, windows,
telephone poles and buildings, painted with a precisionist touch.
It is work that brings to mind that of Charles Sheeler and
Mangold. By the early 1970s, categorized as a New Realist, she
exhibited at major New York galleries and in group shows.
In 1965, Jacquette, Burckhardt and Denby bought a house in
Searsmont, Maine, using the adjacent barn as a studio. Faberman
credits Katz, Jacquette's Maine neighbor, with inspiring her to
develop an orderly process leading to more ambitious works.
"Jacquette's observation of his [Katz's] processes helped her
learn how to prepare colors in advance and develop the small
sketch from life into a medium-sized study and then a large
painting," the curator writes in the exhibition catalog.
Jacquette was soon creating large paintings of: views in New York
looking up at the sky between buildings, street signs and traffic
lights near her East 14th Street studio. Several are reminiscent
of Fairfield Porter's cityscapes. She also did work in pastel and
experimented with printmaking, especially monotypes and
lithographs, that influenced her painting. In 1975 the Burckhardt
family moved to a Manhattan loft in Chelsea, where Jacquette
still lives and works.
Around the mid-1970s Jacquette started making watercolors of
clouds as she flew in airplanes, sometimes turning them into oil
paintings. Then, one day, when the clouds disappeared, she
considered painting the landscape below. It was a task that at
first seemed too daunting, but she tried it and persevered.
Today, such serial perspectives have become her trademark and
have earned her a unique niche in the art world.
Her first serial painting, "Passagassawaukeag I," 1975, depicts
the town of Belfast, near her summer place in Searsmont, the
river that flows beside it and several bridges that traverse it.
Chartering a Cessna, Jacquette circled over the area at about
1,000 feet, studied its topography on foot, and made a
three-dimensional model to understand the site's space and scale.
After sketching the view in pastel from the plane, she further
refined the images back in her studio. Her early aerial work was
influenced by the meticulously detailed, panoramic paintings of
her friend Downes, albeit he painted subjects from the ground
level.
In the second half of the 70s, Jacquette started work on
nocturnal paintings. She was intrigued by the challenge of
depicting cities after dark, particularly the glow of bright
lights against the surrounding blackness. New York City has been
memorably recorded by such titans as John Sloan, William
Glackens, Joseph Stella and Georgia O'Keeffe, but none achieved
the grace and panache of Jacquette's elevated views.
One of the most successful of the early New York night scenes,
"Flatiron Intersection," 1979, is based on views from the 15th
floor of a nearby building. Included are a corner of Madison
Square Park in the upper left and the confluence of 23rd Street,
Broadway and Fifth Avenue in front of the familiar prowlike shape
of the historic landmark edifice.
As Faberman notes in her essay, the painting brings to mind other
pictures of the modern city by such disparate artists as Edward
Hopper, with his lit-up buildings, and Piet Mondiran's famous
"Broadway Boogie-Woogie," 1942-43, with its elevated perspective
and geometric patterns. "Unlike these earlier artists, however,"
Faberman observes, "Jacquette presents a more cozy, intimate view
of a public space, de-emphasizing its civic status and focusing
instead on its role as a kind of urban playground."
In 1980 Jacquette created a number of views from the Empire State
Building, including a pastel, "Diptych: Two Views from the Empire
State Building," and a striking lithograph, "Aerial Views of 33rd
Street," 1981, that is in the current exhibition. She also
completed notable aerial images of the Verrazano and Brooklyn
Bridges and a number of portrayals of lower Manhattan, some
planned from the observation deck of one of the twin towers of
the World Trade Center.
Later in that decade she explored nighttime aerial views of other
American cities, including Washington (of the Jefferson
Memorial), Minneapolis and San Francisco, where a highlight is
"Embarcadero with Bay II," 1984. She continued to record the
nocturnal wonders of The Big Apple, such as the George Washington
Bridge and a vibrant triptych of Times Square.
Flying over the Midwest she captured daytime views of scattered
structures, expansive farmlands and trees of America's heartland.
In a similar vein is "Pennsylvania Spring Plowing Patterns,"
1983.
A dedicated environmentalist, Jacquette campaigned in the 1980s
for greater regulation of nuclear energy sites and created
aesthetically pleasing but ominous views of Pennsylvania's
notorious Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and a
controversial facility in Wiscasset, Maine. In the latter, "Maine
Yankee Nuclear Plant VI," 1983, a 79- by 70-inch oil, she
depicted the waterbound facility "as a kind of toxic treasure
box, with an alluring orange glow," in Faberman's words. "The
mood is complex and contradictory," the curator adds, "the four
elements of earth, air, fire, and water in precarious
co-existence."
On an extended visit to Japan, Jacquette stayed in various
high-rise hotels, from which she produced pastels that led to
paintings emphasizing the vivid neon signs, lighted billboards,
cars and crowds of that congested, brightly lit city at night.
In a number of works resulting from a visit to Hong Kong,
Jacquette incorporated elements of collage, manipulated scale and
perspectives, and utilized heightened colors, to present dramatic
nocturnal images, such as "Hong Kong Ocean Pier VI," 1992. This
particularly brilliant canvas, integrating composite viewpoints
of the crowded city, measures a sizable 75¼ by 64¾ inches.
The Hong Kong experience also triggered a series of astutely
organized composite or rotational views of sites ranging from New
York City to Belfast, Maine. As Vincent Katz writes in the
exhibition catalog, "she blends varying viewpoints within a
single canvas, always with such dexterity that while we are
conscious that reality has been altered, we are at pains to put
our finger on where exactly the sleight of hand has occurred."
On occasion, the wing or wings of the airplane serve as visual
anchors and geometric complements to the landscape below, as in
"Double Wing Sunset I," 1995. Sometimes, hovering above and
adding perspective to other works is a giant dragonfly, which has
become Jacquette's personal symbol and perhaps a stand-in for
viewers, who can move in and out to look at her compositions. A
large dragonfly replica hangs on the wall of the artist's studio
in Maine. She explains that she has come to admire the grace and
agility of the fragile insect from frequent viewings at nearby
Lawry Pond, where they feed on mosquitoes.
In her most recent paintings of New York and Chicago, Jacquette
has expanded her artistic vocabulary, taking added liberties with
reality and letting her imagination soar. Based on observation
and seemingly representational, close scrutiny suggests a kind of
alchemy in which the artist has manipulated the physical
characteristics of cities or rural areas, as viewed from on high.
In Chicago in 1997, Jacquette painted several scenes at dusk, of
Lake Shore Drive, clogged with cars, and "Chicago River Fork II,"
1998, depicting the Y-shaped confluence of two branches of the
river ringed by highways and bridges aglow with a red-orange
light. A sizable dragonfly floats above, adding perspective to
the view.
In her adopted hometown, Jacquette created several views of the
Chelsea neighborhood and composites of the Chrysler Building, a
detail from which became a striking woodcut, "Midtown Composite,"
1997. That same year she accepted an invitation to participate in
the World Views project, a cultural program that gave artists the
opportunity to use empty offices as studios on various floors of
the twin towers of the World Trade Center. While working there,
Jacquette looked at basically the same view but from slightly
different angles or different floors. "Therefore," she explained,
"the conventional consistence of scale of objects or buildings
could be ignored, in order for a freedom of visual activity:
sometimes a subtle dislocation of space happened or a drastic
one."
Operating in the dark with a camper's headlamp and a flashlight
for illumination, she prepared pastel sketches that served as the
basis for several gaily painted, nocturnal canvases, including
"Mixed Heights and Harbor from World Trade Center II," 1998, a
composite view from the 37th and 81st floors. Readily discernible
are the West Street Building, the Museum of Jewish Heritage and
the Statue of Liberty. "Vertiginous: World Financial Area," 1999,
resulted from nighttime observations from the particularly
dizzying perspective of the 107th floor of the World Trade
Center.
These are unforgettable images and, although they were made from
rather than of the WTC, they have special resonance for all in
the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, that demolished the
artist's favored observation station.
Through intrepid travel to great heights, constant
experimentation with process and composition, and a deft sense of
place, color, perspective and style, Yvonne Jacquette has evolved
an admired art form that is all her own. "Approachable, profound,
and subtle, Jacquette's art offers much to the thoughtful
viewer," says Faberman.
"Mixed Heights and Harbor from the World Trade Center II,"
1998. Oil on canvas from a private collection.
It is hard to quarrel with Faberman's conclusion that "it is the
power of the aerial view and its capacity to suggest the quirky,
menacing, and exhilarating aspects of landscape and society that
continue to intrigue Jacquette and captivate audiences."
The comprehensive, 176-page catalog accompanying the Hudson River
Museum show -- the first major monograph to examine the artist's
life and work -- is exceptionally rich in insightful information
and visual documentation. Essays by art critics Bill Berkson and
Vincent Katz and the principal chapter by Faberman explore all
facets of Jacquette's career and trace diverse influences on her
art.
There are more than 40 color plates, including foldout views of
Minneapolis, lower Manhattan, Times Square and the Triboro
Bridge, and 100 black-and-white illustrations, plus an
illustrated chronology, a bibliography, and documentation of the
more than 50 prints that Jacquette has produced since the 1970s.
Co-published by the Cantor Arts Center and Hudson Hills Press,
this handsome volume is the indispensable, comprehensive resource
about this important contemporary artist. It sells for $50.
Yvonne Jacquette has recently been elected to membership in the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. Secretary of the Academy,
Robert Pinsky, will induct eight new members, including
Jacquette, at the academy's annual Ceremonial in May. The honor
of election is considered by many to be the highest formal
recognition of artistic merit in this country.
The exhibition was previously on view at the Cantor Center,
Colby College Museum of Art and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The
Hudson River Museum is located at 511 Warburton Avenue in
Yonkers. For information, 914-963-4550, www.hrm.org.
