Yvonne Jacquette is looking at the world from above as an “Aerial Muse” [1]. Here Times Square, by night, the flashes, the lives, the colors. After training at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1950s, Yvonne settled in 1955 in New York, her forever playground. This city, already and still the melting pot of a new generation of artists, now rock stars of the art world, will allow her to grow and in compensation she will depict it as a peaceful and perpetual city by night.

In the 1960s, after meeting her husband, filmmaker and artist Rudy Burckhardt, she encountered two couples who would become lifelong friends, Alex Katz and his wife Ada, and Robert Mangold and his wife Plimack. Working side by side for several summers in Maine, they will share ideas, advice and challenge themselves for multiple years. Jacquette will be strongly influenced by the Yale-educated circle who cultivated the idea of reductivism and minimalism. 

According to Vincent Katz, it’s in 1971, in a plane from San Diego to visit her parents, that Jacquette will have a revelation1 and start sketching the aerial views of the clouds and the sky [2]. With a commissioned project for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation in 1973 she will definitely embrace the landscape and the skyline curve. These early works will be the start of a long commitment to aerial views across America and the world. Her subjects will be legion. Environmentalist, she will paint with intent, by day and by night, the power plants, the vast landscapes and will dedicate herself to urban views. Perhaps it is by night that the art of Yvonne Jacquette is the most extraordinary. Her views from New York, Chicago, Tokyo, where the “artificial light casts a glow so intense that it transforms the sidewalks and roofs of passing vehicles into multicolored urban fabric”[3] might be among the most beautiful views you will ever gaze upon. 

Encouraged by gallerist Brooke Alexander she will introduce herself to printmaking in the early 1970s and all her life will continue to print magnificent views from the sky: cars, airplanes, boats, rivers, cities, roads. Jacquette manipulates reality as Hilarie Faberman says “Like a practiced magician, [...] employs a lifetime of experience to convince the viewer that seeing is not necessarily believing and that art can be more interesting than reality”[4].

The view offered here, Times Square, is a monumental print of breathtaking precision providing the anonymity of the urban experience [5]. The brush stroke inspired by her numerous pastels, allows us to distinctively see every intended touch in the composition; encompassing her vision clearly, with simplicity and enabling her to share with us her view; a talent forever intact.

​

[1] Hilarie Faberman, Aerial Muse, The Art of Yvonne Jacquette, Hudson Hill Press, New York, 2002

[2] Vincent Katz, Early spaces, A window on Yvonne Jacquette artistic World, in. Hilarie Faberman, Aerial Muse, The Art of Yvonne Jacquette, Hudson Hill Press, New York, 2002, p.20 
[3]  Id., Hilarie Faberman, Aerial Muse, p.86

[4]  Id., p.121

[5]  Id., p.40
 

​

Yvonne Jacquette (born in 1934), 
Motion Picture (Times Square), 1989-1990
Lithograph and screenprint in twelve colors on Arches 350 gm
Signed, titled, dated "1990" and justified from the edition of 60, Plus 10AP, 5PP, 6TP, 1BAT, 1 Archive Proof.
S. 48¼ h × 36 w in (123 × 91 cm)
Published by Brooke Alexander Editions, New York. 
Printed by James Miller and Maurice Sanchez at Derrière l'Étoile Studios, New York.
Private Collection, U.S
Hilarie Faberman, Aerial Muse, The Art of Yvonne Jacquette, Catalogue raisonné of the prints, #31, p150.