Yvonne Jacquette has a preference for high places, a circling plane, a penthouse window, an aerie from which to watch the world. Her work has often depicted the city and man-made landscape from the vantage of angels. It is a privileged perspective, long loved by photographers, who were perhaps the first to recognize the geometric grandeur of the city below. That grandeur structures Jacquette's images but is not its full content. Her work attempts to resolve the visual and emotional pardoxes of the modern metropolis. Only from the tower is there the possibility of order and context. And unlaced beauty.
Yvonne Jacquette was born on December 15, 1934 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence from 1952 to 1955, when she moved to New York City. Her late husband was photographer Rudy Burckhardt, and the couple were part of a circle of artist friends that included Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, and Mimi Gross. She continues to live and work in New York City, as well as in Searsmont, Maine.
A flight to San Diego in 1969 sparked Jacquette’s interest in aerial views, after which she began flying in commercial airliners to study cloud formations and weather patterns. She soon started sketching and painting the landscape as seen from above, beginning a process that has developed into a defining element of her art. Her first nocturnal painting with an aerial perspective, East River View At Night (1978), inspired an ongoing exploration of the effects of bright lights, reflections, and indistinct objects set against surrounding darkness.
The city of New York is a special focus of Jacquette’s. In the 1980s and 1990s, she chartered planes from Teterborough Airport in New Jersey to circle the city while she sketched the scene below. She has also worked from the Empire State Building, and, from 1974 through early 2001, often used empty offices or an enclosed deck at the World Trade Center.
Jacquette has painted aerial landscapes across the country, as well as city views in San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Vancouver, Tokyo, and most recently, New Orleans. After a trip to Hong Kong in 1990, she began incorporating composite viewpoints into her work, realizing that she could better express the city’s many layers of complexity by creating new spatial configurations through multiple perspectives. Since then, she has continued to base her paintings on pastels made from direct observation, while frequently enlivening compositions through heightened color, repetition of certain elements, and manipulation of light, scale, and perspective. As she approached the rendering of space with greater freedom, her paintings became both more inventive and disjunctive, combining aspects of observation, memory, and imagination.
Jacquette participated in her first group show in New York City in 1962 and has been exhibiting steadily since. In 1965 she had a one-person exhibition at Swarthmore College, PA. In 1983, the St. Louis Art Museum organized her first major museum exhibition. A comprehensive retrospective, Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette, originated at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, CA in 2002 and traveled to Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City; and the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY. In 2008, the Museum of the City of New York organized Under New York Skies: Nocturnes by Yvonne Jacquette, which was shown concurrently with Street Dance, an exhibition of photography by her late husband, Rudy Burckhardt.
Jacquette’s work is included in the collections of over 40 museums, such as the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.