Yvonne Jacquette, whose breathtaking aerial and cityscape landscapes dazzle in their evocation of both the vast natural world and the intimate yet distant allure of contemporary urban life, died on April 23 at the age of eighty-eight years old. News of his death was confirmed by his longtime gallery, DC Moore of New York. Although she painted from various low-altitude vantage points, including the World Trade Center and the sidewalk, Jacquette was first drawn to aerial views while flying across the country to visit her parents. . “The enviable achievement of Yvonne Jacquette”, writes the New York Times‘s William Zimmer in 1991, “is that she merged her art and her life so that she was never bored on airplanes.”
Yvonne Jacquette was born on December 15, 1934 in Pittsburgh. She moved with her family to Stamford, Connecticut, where she grew up. Attracted by art from her childhood, Jacquette began to study it at the age of ten; a few years later, she began to take lessons with the portrait painter Robert Roché. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1955, Jacquette took on a variety of teaching roles, including at Moore College of Art, Parsons School of Design, and the University of Pennsylvania. Seeking a way to stand out from her friends and contemporaries, including Lois Dodd, Mimi Gross, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver and her husband, Rudy Burkhardt, she turned to the aerial view that had so fascinated her during a trip to see his parents. Her early aerial paintings in her signature pointillist style, done from 1975, focused on the Maine landscape, but she soon expanded her focus to include nights of towns and cities, especially New York.
“Yvonne Jacquette is the kind of realist who, as Constable said of Ruysdael, communicates an understanding of what she is painting.” writing art forumby Bill Berkson in 1988. “Painting daily life seen from above, she follows the path of realism by intensifying seemingly casual visual perception so that its deep necessity is revealed. His understanding admits the entanglement of his subject: a view of the world that is each time separated, within reach of melancholy but spared from more current forms of agitation.
Its twenty-seven foot wide triptych autumn phrase, 1980, is at the U.S. Post Office in Bangor, Maine. Among the institutions in whose collections his works reside are the fine arts museums of San Francisco; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, all in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, both in Washington, DC; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and the Portland, Maine Museum of Art. Jacquette was inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. A retrospective of her work will open at DC Moore in New York on May 5.
