Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

THE LYRICAL EXPRESSIONISM OF YVONNE AUDETTE Yvonne Audette Allegro Serata Christopher Heathcote Facing page Yvonne Audette Australia b.1930 Allegro Serata 1957 Oil on board 122x110cm Purchased 1994 Godfrey Rivers Trust Queensland Art Gallery Below The artist in her Florence studio, 1957 Photograph courtesy Yvonne Audette / Ilegro Serata (Queensland Art / % Gallery) is the culmination of a JÉL. JL search for artistic fulfilment. Painted by Yvonne Audette in 1957, over months of deliberation and exploratory work, nothing like it had been seen by Australians before. Lively, fresh and animated with good cheer, it is unmistakably a young persons painting. But it is also a mature, quite knowing painting. Lingering before it, one is touched by a poignant stillness. Stylistically, Allegro Serata marked the resolution of a quite personal struggle to escape from orthodox ways of thinking — a journey that had led Audette to attempt to define the 'inner music' that stirs the viewer's soul, confronting the dilemma of what exactly we value in art. Born in 1930 and raised in Sydney, Yvonne Audette began formal studies at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School in 1948. The teaching was rigidly conservative, although Audette was stimulated by the arrival of a new instructor, John Passmore, in 1951. He primed his students with Cézannist ideas about form and colour, teaching them to construct figures and scenes from carefully rendered marks. By this time Audette had also briefly attended classes at the East Sydney Technical College, as well as taking private painting and drawing sessions with the transcendental abstractionist Godfrey Miller, and some life classes in the studio- school of the Hungarian modemist Desiderius Orban. Her aim was to try to extract what was valuable from each teacher — Twas avid to learn as much as I could', she recalls1— but the staff at Julian Ashton's found out and demanded that she cease studies elsewhere. Audette continued classes with Miller in secret, trying to find a personal path between his mystical approach and the visual empiricism of Passmore. She did so by gathering partly clothed figures in beach scenes reminiscent of Cézanne's 'Bathers' series, although she had a tendency to emphasise the individual brushstrokes from which each image was formed. The decisive turning point in Audette's artistic path came in October 1952 with the opportunity to travel to America, her father's birthplace. This was considered an eccentric destination; for most Australian artists, Europe was the true seat of artistic creativity. But Audette arrived in NewYork at an opportune moment. A forceful new movement, Abstract Expressionism, was on the rise. Quickly spellbound by the bristling postwar art scene, the young Australian attended classes at the Art Students League, read art magazines, visited studios, and attended an ongoing sequence of astonishing exhibitions by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock and others. Nothing had prepared her for such energised work; she remembers that the idiom hit her as 'a divine shock'. Contemporary art was exciting and difficult, the studio talk alone being charged with an unexpected depth and seriousness. Some painters insisted that contemporary art should deal with myth, metaphysics and archetypal imagery; others wished to refine a universal pictorial language; still others believed that the canvas was a theatre upon which one played out a series of existential acts; while many wished to make pictures that refined certain formal imperatives. Painting was not an idle pursuit, but something urgent, vital and necessarily connected with a search for meaning in the world. Audette was especially jarred into admiration by an alarming, almost brazen show of de Kooning's latest 'Women' paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery. The exhibits were curiously ambiguous, appearing to be two quite different things at once. Each painting could be understood as a picture, as the recognisable representation of a figure, and yet it was also an abstract accumulation of hotly expressive marks. Importantly, neither element was given priority over the other; figure was not subordinated to line, nor was line to figure. De Kooning forced the viewers attention to shuttle between subject and execution, between content and form. For Audette, the 'Women' series seemed to offer a leap beyond the creative parameters set out by her former mentors Passmore and Miller, both figurative painters who stressed the primacy of the drawn line. 258 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965