Yvonne Audette (born 1930) is a leading Australian abstract artist.
Audette was born in Sydney in 1930 and after attending art classes whilst still at secondary school she and her parents were persuaded to have her trained as an artist. She enrolled at the Julian Ashton School but she became tired of the uninspiring teaching. The main teacher was Henry Gibbons who was nearing retirement. In 1951 his duties were taken over by John Passmore who was returning to Australia.[1]
Passmore became the main teacher at this private school. One of his favourite students was Audette. She compared his return to the school as "like Moses" returning with the tablets of stone. He taught her to look at the subject of their paintings as not only a connection of rods, but also as a collection of facets and as a creation of basis mathematical shapes. The workaholic Passmore enthused about Cezanne and passed his, and Cezanne's, views on tone and structure onto Audette. Audette however found Passmore a difficult person. He worked hard on his own work but it was kept in a separate room and his students were not allowed to see it.[1]
Passmore would play the male students off against Audette playing psychological games. Audette was not part of the main artistic group. This was partly due to her parents who supplied her with her own flat.[1] Audette did some work as a model for the Australian photographers David Moore and Max Dupain.[2]
In 1955 she started to study in New York gaining influence from Mark Rothko, Louise Nevelson, Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner.[2] Audette created her own studio in Milan after a brief period in Florence. She travelled to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Greece and Germany before returning to her home city in 1966.[3] Her first exhibition was with Robert Klippel. Her portrait of Klippel is in the Australian National Portrait Gallery.[4] From 1969 she was working in Melbourne.[3]
Audette's profile was raised by a major exhibition in 1999 in Queensland and the publication of a book about her life and works.[1] The National Portrait Gallery has quoted a description of her as "Australia's greatest living abstract painter".[4]
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, MELBOURNE YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 Birds by Moonlight 1989 gouache, ink and collage on paper 30.0 x 40.0 cm; 57.0 x 64.0 cm (framed) signed with initials and dated lower right: ya 89 signed, dated and inscribed verso: Audette/ "Birds by moonlight"/ 1989/ Gouache/ink/collage
YVONNE AUDETTE, PORTRAIT SKETCH 1992, CHARCOAL ON PAPER, SIGNED AND DATED LOWER RIGHT, 29 X 20CM, FRAME SIZE: 46 X 36CM PROVENANCE: JAN MARTIN ART DEALER; THENCE BY DESCENT
YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 Composition in Blue 1985 oil on composition board signed and dated 'Audette / 1985' lower right; signed dated and inscribed 'Composition in Blue / (Caligraphic [sic] Series) / 1984/85 / Audette' verso 95 x 80 cm PROVENANCE Yvonne Audette, Victoria Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne Private Collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above
YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 The Tree Fern 1990 gouache and ink on paper 28.0 x 38.0 cm signed with initials and dated lower right: ya/ 90 signed, dated and inscribed on backing verso: Audette/ "The Tree Fern" 1990/ Gouache/INK/ 28 x 38 cm
§ YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 Cantata No. 22 1984 oil on composition board signed and dated 'Audette / 84' lower right; signed, dated an inscribed '1984 / Audette / Cantata No. 22' verso 76.5 x 91.5 cm PROVENANCE Yvonne Audette, Victoria Quarterly Fine Art Auction, Lawson-Menzies, Sydney, 8 August 2013, lot 60, illustrated Selwyn and Renata Litton, Sydney, acquired from the above
YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 Railway Signal at the Crossing 1970 oil on composition board signed and dated '1970 YA' lower right; signed, dated and inscribed 'Railway signal at the crossing / 1970 / audette' verso 92 x 122 cm PROVENANCE Yvonne Audette, Victoria Metro5 Gallery, Melbourne Private Collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above
YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 Southbound Flight 1986 oil on board signed and dated '86 Audette' lower right 91.5 x 122 cm PROVENANCE Yvonne Audette, Melbourne Lyttleton Gallery, Castlemaine Private Collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above 1987 EXHIBITED Yvonne Audette, Lyttleton Gallery, Castlemaine, 1987 LITERATURE Christopher Heathcote, Bruce Adams, Kirsty Grant, Gerald Vaughan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2003, p. 165
Yvonne Audette (born 1930) Untitled, 1960 signed and dated lower right: 'Y. Audette 1960' gouache and ink on coloured paper 19.5 x 16.5cm (7 11/16 x 6 1/2in). For further information on this lot please visit the Bonhams website
YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 CANTATA NO. 17, 1968 – 69 oil on composition board 102.0 x 86.0 cm signed and dated Iower right: Audette/69 signed, dated, and inscribed with title verso: Audette / 1968-69 / Cantata No. 17 /… Audette PROVENANCE Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above May 2001 EXHIBITED Audette’s Audettes: Works from the Private Collection of Yvonne Audette, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 8 – 27 May 2001, cat. 3 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Heathcote, C., and Adams, B., Yvonne Audette Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 125, p.194 – 195 (illus.) ESSAY Well-heeled, well-travelled, and well-connected with influential members of the New York Avant Garde, Yvonne Audette cut an unusual figure in the Sydney art scene of the late 1960s. Returning to her hometown of Sydney in 1966 after many years living in New York and Italy, Audette had matured as a painter, working now in a subtle and nuanced abstract style derived from the ambiguous mark-making of European Art Informel. She would spend three years in Sydney before moving permanently to Victoria. During this time Audette established her overseas credentials and began to carve a spot for herself amongst her largely male peers. While some of Audette’s works of the early 1960s incorporated calligraphic markings influenced by the sgraffito technique of Cy Twombly, who also lived as an expat in Italy, Cantata #17, 1968-69 stays resolutely geometric. Governed by a densely woven lattice of cumulative blocky brushstrokes and shapes, its vertical composition is reinforced by dense and layered vertical lines. The arrangement of iterated strokes, hatchings, and scumbled squares jostle against each other with sometimes startling colour contrasts, layered upon one another in noisy and dense palimpsests. In 1968, James Gleeson wrote ’perhaps the closest analogy with her [Audette’s] art is the palimpsest, for both are an accretion of written shapes on a surface stirring with earlier writings vanquished by time or by deliberate, though imperfect, erasure. These phantoms flicker palely among the living signs and there are many degrees of fading.’1 Indeed, Audette’s paintings are often more than the sum of their parts, not clean edged and decisive, but ambiguous and edging closer to a resolution that is built up over time in small accretions and subtractions. The artist is well-known for holding the majority of her works in her studio for review and revision over many years, and while this work was completed in a relatively short span of one year, it was not exhibited until 2005, in an exhibition of works from the artist’s own personal collection.2 These lyrical abstract compositions reflected the multilayered histories Audette encountered in Europe: ‘When I went to Europe in the mid-50s … my work responded to the layering of society itself – the remnants of murals on walls, the frescoes, the whole antiquity of the civilisation.’3 Some marks are sharp and clear, in the uppermost stratum of paint, while others are wiped clean away before being further obscured by super-imposed shapes and competing hues. In this swarming surface, one can discern the bright tones of Sydney harbour, particularly in comparison to Audette’s dark Italian works. Cantata #17 plays on the idea of musical harmony and invention, as hinted by the title of this series. Drawing inspiration from the ’mystical joy’ the artist found in the polyphonic genius of J.S. Bach’s compositions, this series explores variations on a theme, weaving together independent melodies and harmonies of colour.4 The history of art in Australia is indebted to Audette’s choice to return. For all of her thrilling globe-trotting, the pull of the Australian landscape was too strong to ignore. She returned to these shores convinced that the country’s comparative isolation presented a strong opportunity for Australian artists to forge their own path in abstract art, one that was an expression of national identity rather than one opposed to it. Within this milieu, Audette holds a unique place as one of the few female artists of her generation to have maintained a long and successful career working in an abstract mode. 1. Gleeson, J., ‘Elating Shaking Yvonne’, Sydney Sun Herald, 25 February 1968 2. Audette’s Audettes, Metro 5, Melbourne, 2001 3. The artist quoted in McCulloch-Uehlin, S., ‘Abstraction’s Forgotten Generation’, The Australian, 23 April 1999, p.9 4. The artist’s notes, 1999, cited in Heathcote, C., et. al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 170 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 CANTATA NO. 14, 1963 – 64 oil on composition board (diptych) 120.0 x 184.0 cm overall signed and dated lower right: YA 64 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Cantata No 14/ Y Audette/ 1963/64 PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORK Cantata no. 12, oil on composition board, 130.2 x 192.2 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne ESSAY Yvonne Audette holds a unique position in twentieth century Australian art as one of the few female artists of her generation to have maintained a long and successful career working in an abstract mode. She left Australia to further her studies in late 1952, however unlike most of her peers, headed to New York, influenced by her American-born parents’ agreement to provide financial support if she went there rather than to Europe. While her training had been traditionally academic, with an emphasis on the figure, Audette’s first-hand exposure to the work of artists including Willem de Kooning (whose studio she visited in 1953), Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey brought her face to face with the burgeoning New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting and she began to move confidently towards abstraction, developing a unique visual language that merged a lyrical use of colour with dextrous mark-making and the textural layering of line and abstract form. After travelling in Europe Audette settled in Florence, establishing a studio there in 1955.1 Against the backdrop of Italy’s rich culture and artistic past, she was welcomed into a community of professional artists (including Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana) who encouraged her and provided an aspirational example. Focussed and determined, Audette worked hard, holding commercial exhibitions in Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome and London. While Audette’s work was rarely seen in Australia during her expatriate years, it has since been recognised for her important contribution to the history of twentieth century art in this country. Acquisitions by major public galleries were followed by a series of institutional exhibitions – Queensland Art Gallery (1999), Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000), National Gallery of Victoria (2008), Ian Potter Museum of Art (2009) and the Art Gallery of Ballarat (2016) – and the publication of a major monograph in 2003. Audette was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the June 2020 Queen's Birthday Honours List for significant service to the visual arts as an abstract painter. 1. Audette lived in Florence until 1963, relocating to Milan before returning to Australia permanently in 1966. KIRSTY GRANT ‘I am interested in the musicality of the abstract mark. I tried to achieve in paint what I experienced in music, particularly the Bach Cantatas. Bach’s Cantatas breathed for me a kind of mystical joy.’1 Yvonne Audette’s striking painting Cantata No. 14 of 1963-64 was created by the then thirty-three-year old artist in her studio in Milan during her lengthy period in Europe. Significantly, this major painting has never before been exhibited or illustrated during the fifty-six years since that time. The best things in life are abstract. Abstract nouns strive to codify an intangible world of ideas, emotions or mental states to outline those core attributes that are the most human of all – beauty, love, hope, emotion and a host of other conceptualised refinements. Audette’s paintings aim to capture and convey such refinements. She addresses and gives pictorial shape to such states of mind – she ‘keeps revealing the inwardness of our being’ in Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s pinpointed phrase.2 It was this artistic internality that occasioned her noteworthy mention in the New York Guggenheim Museum’s major exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 of 2009, as curated by its Senior Curator, Dr. Alexandra Munroe.3 In other words, Audette’s paintings are prompted by a ’call and response’ interaction with the world of felt sensation. Her unique artistic ’voice’ and its interactive mode have long been recognised by discerning collectors and curators – from the very first of her thirty-nine solo exhibitions (Gallery Schettini, Milan, 1958) through to her equal number of group exhibitions. Certainly, in Audette, the results of such a mode produce refined paintings with optically seductive richness and compositional finesse, but the sustained power of its prime effect upon the viewer lies in the ways that her paintings induce what might be called an empathetic mentation – that is, the eye wanders over layered surfaces, takes in subtle colours and modulated lines; the mind loosens and is led inwards toward an opened-out and aestheticised self-talk. Clearly, Audette’s paintings are about something rather than of something. The ‘aboutness’ of Audette’s Cantata No. 14 resides in her heartfelt love of J. S. Bach’s music, which she studied as a young student of classical piano and violin at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music. Bach’s aural flows and contrapuntal harmonies remain supreme marvels and it’s best to think of Audette’s painting as an artistic ‘reverberation’ of his music – it certainly is not a ’visualisation’ or an ’interpretation’. The matter runs deeper and might usefully be considered as her visual emulation of Bach’s artistic example – that is, as a personal correlative that creates and sets down painterly elements in abstract compositions in ways that might best draw out inner sensation. The artist, in her private notes, puts it more movingly: ‘I tried in my paintings to isolate the vibrations of tone and colour to musical sound. … the textural beauty created by combinations of stringed instruments playing the choral melody, and the utterly different vocal parts, send images and messages to me of contrasting colours and a dynamic spatial structure. I tried to create those combinations of two or more independent melodies in line and colour and to create harmonic textures equivalent to counterpoint. … it became an underlying structure that I chose to develop.’4 Given all of the above, Yvonne Audette’s Cantata No. 14 stands as a hallmark painting that represents the artist at a pivotal phase in her notable life. 1. Personal notes in the possession of the artist 2. Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G. and Grant, K., Yvonne Audette Paintings and Drawings 1949-2014, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p.20 3. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009, pp. 153-154. Audette’s painting The Grey Wall with Lines, 1957 in the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane was requested to be shown in the New York exhibition. Two factors prevented this: the costs associated with international transportation and the lapsing of Audette’s previous American citizenship. 4. Personal notes in the possession of the artist. KEN WACH
YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 Bathers No. 2 2001 oil on plywood signed and dated 'Audette / 2001 'lower right; signed, dated and inscribed 'Bathers No 2' / 2001 / Audette' verso 117 x 152 cm PROVENANCE Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne Private Collection, Melbourne acquired from the above EXHIBITED Works from the Private Collection of Yvonne Audette, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 8-27 May 2001, no. 21 LITERATURE Christopher Heathcote and Bruce Adams, Yvonne Audette Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 216 (illustrated)
YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 FLOODED LAND, 1990 oil on plywood SIGNED: signed with initials and dated lower right: YA 1990 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Audette / The Flooded Land A156 / 1990 DIMENSIONS: 114.0 x 153.0 cm PROVENANCE: Private collection, Melbourne, acquired directly from the artist in March 2010
Autumn Winds in the Ranges, 2002 oil on plywood, signed and dated l.r.c. 'Y.A. '02', titled, dated and signed verso 'Autumn Winds in the Ranges, 2002, Audette'
