Two simultaneous exhibitions of works by Yvonne Jacquette, Look Up/Down/Inside/Outside And Recent views, Maine and New Yorkboth at the DC Moore Gallery until June 17, had long been in the works when Jacquette died in April this year, shortly before the openings. Look Up/Down/Inside/Outside consists of 25 paintings and works on paper produced between 1962 and 1976, while Recent views, Maine and New York contains nine paintings, including a diptych dated between 2019 and 2022. The exhibition of earlier paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints, sketches and studies shows the evolution of an artist who never stopped pushing herself to enter a new territory she has made her own. Best known for her aerial views, which began with “East River at Night” (1978), and which she explored for more than 30 years, these shows complete a little-known career that should be better known, especially the first years.
When I asked Jacquette in a 2008 Brooklyn Railroad interview how she began to consider steeply slanted viewpoints, she told me:
It happened because I started from the opposite angle, looking up. I was starting to do yoga and I had to look up at the ceiling of my loft, which was stamped pewter. So I did paintings of that, and doors and so on for a little while, and then suddenly it occurred to me to reverse that and look down. When my son Tom was born, I was standing there feeding him, and there’s his baby chair, and it makes an interesting shadow on the floor. Each year, the space between the baby and me seemed to widen. And then the view began to widen. We got a house in Maine and I started getting on airplanes.
Between 1962 and 1964, working in New York and Maine, Jacquette painted what she saw in front of her: a field seen through her curtained windows, the garden where she had installed an easel, a window and a fire escape. . As good as these observational paintings were, she had not yet distinguished herself from other realist painters working in the same vein. In Look Up/Down/Inside/Outside, everything changes with “Window Shadow” (c. 1965). Jacquette began to severely limit her palette to grays, painting here what reads like shadow and light from a paned window, cast onto a floor.
It was only by removing everything she had previously relied on (shared point of view, realistic color, daylight, painterly aspect) that Jacquette was able to begin to define the path she explored for many years. many decades. This severity of a limited palette is something I want to learn more about, especially after seeing the gripping ‘Under-Space’ (1966), which she described as her son’s ‘baby chair’. […] creating an interesting shadow on the ground. She took what could easily have been a sentimental or heartwarming subject and reduced it to a basic shape casting a shadow on the ground. The angle of view is improbable – it was hard to imagine exactly where the artist positioned herself to capture it – while the drab colors of the prison introduce another layer of meaning to the work.
While the reductive impulse of minimalism and her husband Rudy Burckhardt’s photographs of pedestrians’ feet were possible inspirations, what Jacquette achieves in these two paintings is unique. Between 1967 and 69, always limiting herself to interiors, she widened her palette to different whites, grey-greens, blacks or browns in a single piece. This work marks a step forward for Jacquette and deserves more attention. Together with Lois Dodd and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who were her friends, she managed to push back minimalism and conceptual art.
In “Study for Fluorescent Light” (1969), the slight angle of the cleanly rendered tube dialogues with the “zip” paintings of Barnett Newman and the sculptures of Dan Flavin. Yet, by rendering the lights fluorescent representatively, as well as using a limited palette to expand our view of observational painting, Jacquette refutes the cerebral abstraction of these two artists. She remained faithful to the visible while reinventing it with color, which she used to influence the work with feeling.
“Open Door with Hinge Study” (1967) and “Smaller Tin Ceiling” present extreme points of view. The plane of the door leaning against the plane of the picture and the shape and tilt of the ceiling in “Small Tin Ceiling” undermine the typical stability of American geometric abstractions, except perhaps for Frank Stella’s series of 11 Irregular polygons (1965–66). However, unlike Stella, she rejects flatness, favoring a spatiality that does not rely on perspective. I wonder what the dimensions of the final works are larger in comparison to these “studies”, especially since “Barn Ceiling” (1969), depicting a system of triangulated posts and lintels in oranges and browns, measures 80 by 64 inches. I see this group of works as a reintroduction that inspires me to look more at his early work. Drawing, watercolors and studies further fuel my curiosity.
Of the nine paintings of Recent views, Maine and New York, one particularly struck me; it was unlike any other work by Jacquette that I know of. In “Film Cans” (2020), she depicts a cropped, slightly tilted view of a shelf filled with stacks of cans containing Burckhardt’s films. We seem to be looking at the library. How will the films be stored? Towards the end of her life, Jacquette had to think about her late husband’s legacy. From “Under-Space” to “Film Cans”, the two exhibitions trace a arc of his life and art, but these two paintings, which are not characteristic of his best known work, are more personal. It’s a side of her that might be better known.
Yvonne Jacquette: Looking up/down/in/out And Yvonne Jacquette: recent views, Maine and New York continue at the DC Moore Gallery (535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) until June 17. The exhibitions were organized by the gallery in collaboration with Yvonne Jacquette and her son, Tom Burckhardt.
