Lot #28 - Yvonne Audette
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Auction House:Deutscher and Hackett
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Sale Name:Important Australian + International Fine Art
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Sale Date:04 May 2022 ~ 7pm (AEST)
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Lot #:28
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Lot Description:Yvonne Audette
(born 1930)
The Jugglers, 1967
oil and collage on plywood (diptych)
153.0 x 229.0 cm (each)
signed and dated lower right: 1967 audette; signed, dated and inscribed with title on right panel verso: the Jugglers 1967 / audette; signed, dated and inscribed with title on left panel verso: the jugglers 1967 / Audette / oil on plywood / will collage (a few pieces); extensively inscribed with title and signed verso: Audette / A63. Related Work/s: The jugglers, 1966, gouache, brush and pen and coloured inks and collage of cut newspaper, 32.6 × 43.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne -
Provenance:Private collection, Melbourne
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References:Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 116, pp. 184 – 185 (illus.), 247
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Notes:Recently, a talented young artist walked past a painting by Yvonne Audette in Melbourne’s Victorian Arts Centre – he back-tracked and stood in front of it in awed silence. It was a “visual tapestry” he said. He was right. Audette is one of those rare artists whose paintings have what can only be called “visual arrest”. The secret of Audette’s paintings is that they are not of something but about something. In the case of her large and previously unseen diptych painting The Jugglers, completed in her studio in Sydney’s Rose Bay in 1967, it is about her assorted recollections of seeing the performances of various jugglers – she always thought them “wonderful”. 1. The way things were tossed about with dexterity, the swirling colours, the almost magical way objects seemed to hang in air and the space that was defined by arcs of revolving movements – all their whirling qualities captivated her artistic attention. It’s not well-known that Audette’s analogical way of thinking and her refined artistic alertness owe something to the French art movement called Art Informel (Art without Form) that was current in Paris (the city of “non-stop ideas”, she calls it) and later in central Europe from the early Fifties to the late Sixties. The term denotes a free and open-ended formlessness in painting with a strong leaning towards the use of mental responsiveness and a manual spontaneity that rested upon the artistic potential of shapes, textures and colours that successively suggested themselves or sprang up as unforeseen consequences of other preceding pictorial elements. It is a pictorial construct within which painted forms and colours were seen to “bounce off” each other in an internalised cause and effect “conversation” on the surface plane of the canvas. Art Informel might be instructively considered as a type of consequentialism in paint, where the effect of one thing gave rise to another that is then artistically judged by its visual qualities or textures, and so on throughout the painting – think of a saxophonist “riffing” off the sound of the horn of a passing car. Its rousing theory, with its air of responsive immediacy and artistic freedom, was first outlined by the French art critic and curator Michel Tapié (a close relative of Toulouse Lautrec) in his book Un art autre (Another Art) published in Paris in 1952. Its text elaborates upon the ideas in his short catalogue for Jackson Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Paris at the Studio Paul Facchetti in the March of the same year. After the horrors of World War II and after hearing Miles Davis’s resounding Bebop Jazz during his famous 1949 tour, Paris’s intelligentsia was ready for Abstraction, for free-form Jazz and for Pollock and the jaunty pulse of his abstract paintings. Subsequently, there is a wonderfully casual turned-up collar type of shuffling “gait” that may be sensed in the improvisational abstract paintings of many avant-garde artists during those free-thinking early days of “French Cool” – they included Alberto Burri, Asger Jorn, Enrico Donati, Antoni Tapiés, Georges Mathieu, Viera da Silva (who arranged a solo exhibition and wrote Letters of Introduction for Audette), Pierre Alchinsky, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Victor Vasarely (whose catchcry “being able to wander through the space of a painting” impressed Audette), Nicolas de Staël and, of course, Yvonne Audette, the “foreign talent”, who came to know many of them personally. It is worth making a much-overlooked observation: the remarkable fact is that Audette felt the reverberations of the early growth of both American Abstraction Expressionism in New York and Art Informel in Paris at first hand. After the vibrancy of her experiences in America and her ten exhibitions in Europe (Milan, 1958; Florence, 1958; Florence, 1959; Paris, 1959; Paris, 1961; Florence, 1963; Milan, 1964; London, 1964; Rome, 1965, Rome, 1966) Audette’s return to Sydney in 1966 was clouded over by what she calls “intellectual loneliness” - those who remember those times will sense the leaden weight of those words. However, to her lasting credit she continued to cling to what she had found both artistically convincing and aesthetically stimulating in Paris, Milan, Florence and London. Nonetheless, for Audette, the return to her native Sydney heralded a time of solitary endeavour. Her painting The Jugglers of 1967 was created during that intense period of concentrated consolidation. One must add that this directed concentration was partly supplemented by the spirited new ideas discussed at the NSW Contemporary Art Society and those that were written about in the regular NSW Broadsheet publications in Sydney. She felt for the pulse and vital signs of the time: Audette is Australia’s first female Abstractionist and the first to successfully fuse the spirit of Art Informel with the verve of Abstract Expressionism. During this invigorating period, Audette’s abstract paintings developed a pronounced visual variety that arose from an internally dictated and unregimented response to her immediate surroundings and the manual processes of her paintings. She claims that her creative interest and activity during this timeframe enabled her to create paintings that moved beyond “calligraphy, which is a form of writing, to that of forms and colours in and out of space, just as a juggler does with objects”. The aesthetic aim, most especially in the present painting, was to “create a movement of objects portrayed by colour and forms to dance back and forth in a space of light”. 2. Audette’s sophisticated painting, The Jugglers of 1967, is a prime example of her use of a new pictorial vocabulary; one whose flashing flows of forms and colours were suggested by feelings that arose from observed events of rich visual interest – by simple everyday things of perceivable wonder; perceptions that, when condensed and captured in paint, might embody the head-turning beauty of visual arrest. KEN WACH 1 Conversation with the artist – 23 February 2022. 2. ibid.
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Estimate:A$120,000 - 160,000
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Realised Price:
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Category:Art
This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.
