Early Spaces:
A Window on Yvonne Jacquette’s Artistic World
by Vincent Katz

Artists make art in relation to other artists.  They fight to distinguish themselves from artists of the previous generation, whom they may admire, and to some extent they must find affinities in contemporaries.  An artist with few parallels may find his struggle overpowering or at worst irrelevant.  In examining some of Yvonne Jacquette’s relationships with other artists, we find keys to understanding the development of her own art.

Jacquette came of age in the late 1950s in a generation that could already foresee an art not based in gestural abstraction.  Growing up in Stamford, Connecticut, and studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, she had often visited New York.  In 1956, she decided to jettison her last year at RISD and move there.  She supported herself making decorations for Macy’s, doing drafting for helicopter manuals and textile design.  As with certain other artists of her era, Jacquette thought to take her commercial experience into fine art:  “I had this technique of ruler, pen, and ruled lines, and I tried to turn that into a means for fine art by doing drawings of interiors, concentrating on the proportions of shapes and so forth.”    Unlike other artists who brought commercial subject matter along with their technique, Jacquette opted for high-art, perceptual subject matter, but it is remarkable how alive she was to the aesthetic possibilities in her bread-and-butter work: “I supported myself with a number of jobs that somehow had an effect on the painting.  The drafting did.  The textile design did.  There’s something about the structure of textiles and the way colors mix that became important as a background for painting.”
            From her earliest mature pieces, Jacquette has always made images of observed reality from unusual points of view.  She spent the 1960s working from a strictly limited viewpoint.  She would look up and see the corner of a movie marquee against a bright blue sky or a traffic light suspended among fragments of distant buildings.  Or again, indoors, she’d look up and see the edge of an open door protruding into a glimpse of decorated tin ceiling.  These snatches of daily life were never mere patterning.  They recorded little truths, tiny details that, when zoomed in on, to use an apposite cinematic metaphor, provide a glimmer of recognition in the viewer, a pleasant surprise.  For the artist, these early paintings must have been like gulps of air to a swimmer, successful attempts to forge imagery that was, first, realistic, and second, able to take as its subject -- albeit in extremely fragmentary form -- if not the first then definitely the second most painted city in the world.
            When, in the early 1970s, she wanted to change her view, to arrive at a vision that would stamp her art as something undeniably her own, she pulled out for practically the longest view imaginable, that of the landscape seen from an airplane thousands of feet above.  These two views -- the extreme close-up and the extreme long shot -- tell of the determination of an artist to provide alternatives to the standard realist genres of portrait, still life, nude, and even landscape.  By attempting to show the smallest fragment or the widest entity, Jacquette was stretching the concept of landscape itself.
            Jacquette began painting realistically, directly from nature, and she quickly got hooked into the New York art scene.  “I was painting landscapes,” she remembers.  “I actually went to Maine a couple times on my summer vacations from jobs.  I went out to Monhegan, and I was working with the rocks and cliffs.  I was influenced by Joan Mitchell.  I was trying to find a form of semi-abstract representation based on landscape and city things, when I was in New York.  It was kind of vague.  I just didn’t feel I knew how to focus it very well.  Then I started doing still lifes of plants in my studio.”
            Ever since her first forays into the big city, Jacquette had been an avid gallery-goer, particularly following de Kooning in the mid-1950s, then rapidly expanding her interests as she gathered a circle of painter friends who were moving in various directions.  “I saw Nell Blaine quite a bit, and I played poker with Bob De Niro, Sr.  I was following the second generation abstract expressionism as well as whoever was still around in the first generation.”  One locus was the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, a commercial gallery which -- along with artists’ co-operatives like the Tanager -- provided an outlet for artists who wished to show work that was not toeing the Ab Ex line.  At Tibor, Jacquette saw work by Jane Freilicher, Robert Goodnough, and Larry Rivers.  At the Tanager, she saw paintings by Lois Dodd and Alex Katz.  Jacquette consciously did not want to follow in the footsteps of any master, no matter how revered.  At the same time, she enjoyed the experience of plein air painting, and the lifestyle of artists such as Blaine and Katz, who left the city every summer to paint in nature, appealed to her.
            In [month] of 1961, Jacquette met Rudy Burckhardt, a Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker who was part of her ever-widening circle.  Burckhardt had made films in the ‘50s with Freilicher and Rivers, as well as Fairfield Porter, and he knew the poets of the New York School, through his great friend and lifelong companion, the poet and critic Edwin Denby.  Jacquette’s special friendships with Burckhardt and Denby influenced her art; the effect also worked in reverse.  Denby would frequently invite Jacquette to the ballet, often surprising her the day of a performance with news he had received complimentary tickets.  With him, she came to love the choreography of Georges Balanchine and to know modern choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Douglas Dunn.  Through Burckhardt, she met many painters whose work she knew from her perspicacious attention to the contemporary scene.  This pattern held true in her meeting with Burckhardt himself:

I had already seen a beautiful photograph of Rudy’s done in the late 1930s and a painting a week later of Deer Isle.  There was a little catalogue done by Poindexter Gallery about the Depression, and they used one of Rudy’s photographs of empty storefronts, all black with a few little signs tucked in the corner, not with an obvious social consciousness but having a feeling of empty spaces.  The proportions were beautiful.  So it was classical, and it also had a hint of expressionism.  The painting was different.  It was a quite elaborate hilltop view of pine trees from Deer Isle, looking out toward the sea, and quite skillful in a slightly naive style.  Right after seeing those two things, my mind had picked up the name to remember, and then I met him at a party for Nell Blaine.  Shortly after that, he turned up in a drawing class I was going to.  It was an open class anyone could go to on Eighth St.  I was going to that regularly, and he started going to it regularly.  Mostly it was a smattering of people in different artistic endeavors, but there was a good model, and it was carefully run.  I started going out for coffee with him after a while.

            Shortly after meeting Burckhardt and Denby, Jacquette met two other artists who altered her life and art.  Red Grooms and Mimi Gross had just returned from Italy, where they had traveled across the country on a horse, presenting a puppet show.  Grooms had already made a splash as part of the group that did the first Happenings in the late 1950s.  That scene attracted a lot of attention, and artists associated with it, like Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg, rapidly rose in the international pantheon of Pop Art.  Grooms, by absenting himself from New York, took a different path.  When he made his huge Chicago and New York installations several years later, it was on his own terms.

Right after I met Rudy, Red and Mimi had just come back from Italy, and Alex introduced us somewhere, at a party.  They lived close to where Rudy and I lived, so soon after that, we got together, and the idea came to do a film, which ultimately became Shoot The Moon.  I did the costumes.  Here was a situation where I had to work in black and white, in a much more Expressionist style than I’d ever worked with, and I had to get into somebody else’s style.  I couldn’t use my own style, and I found that very liberating, to suddenly be a different person.  The film was in black and white, and all the costumes and sets were done in black and white.  Most of the faces of the actors were white make-up, clown white.  I was amazed at how much color there is in black and white.  Two whites are not the same.  Two blacks are not the same.  The textures are broken up.  Black and white can be very interesting.  That had a big impact on me.  I hadn’t really done any collaboration before that.  It was very exciting.  I didn’t realize it could be so much fun to work in a group.  We started out thinking we were going to make this movie in a weekend, and then it turned into a year!  The first costumes I made were out of paper, and of course they ripped the first time we tried to do something! 

            Both Shoot The Moon (1962) and the film on which it was based -- Georges Méliès’ pioneering Voyage à La Lune (1902) -- use animation to envision a trip to the moon, but Grooms’ and Burckhardt’s movie, which was made with no script or budget and ended up being 25 minutes long, is much more slapstick, while paying homage to the French master.  The contemporary moment, when rockets actually were going into outer space, made the rough-hewn sets and props of Shoot The Moon seem ludicrous, a quality the filmmakers desired.  
            The familial nature of the collaboration affected everyone concerned, making it feel like a troupe on an extended project.  This particular troupe would stay together for the next four years.  The freedom with which Burckhardt allowed other people to contribute ideas to his films and the speed with which Grooms and Gross turned ideas into three-dimensionality reality both influenced Jacquette.  Working this way fostered a confidence in spontaneity, which would serve her well when she began making pastels from plane windows.
            In the summer of 1963, Burckhardt and Jacquette spent a week in Maine, visiting Lois Dodd and Ada and Alex Katz, who all shared a house on Slab City Road in Lincolnville.  Burckhardt had spent summers in Maine before, on Deer Isle with his first wife, the critic and painter Edith Schloss.  Deer Isle in those days was a little isolated, though; life in Lincolnville was more genteel.  As Jacquette describes it, “I saw for the first time what it could be like.  We should get a house, near Alex, near a lake, probably that lake, but we had to find another one.  Our whole idea of what you need to be in Maine was based on that week -- a good place to swim, where you don’t need to get in a car to drive to it, a barn to work in as a studio.  It didn’t matter too much about the house, but hopefully it wasn’t too ugly.  Just some space down a dirt road, away from traffic.  And hopefully, close enough to friends.”
            The following summer, the Shoot The Moon company rented a small house up a dirt road from the Katzes’ bright yellow farmhouse.  The house they rented was owned by a fastidious man named Fred Dean, who had painted the moldings in bright, unpredictable tones and kept everything in ship shape.  So they moved in -- Rudy and Yvonne and Red and Mimi and Rudy’s son Jacob, along with Thomas, who had just been born.  Edwin Denby stayed in a blacksmith’s shack down the road that belonged to the painter Jean Cohen and came for dinner every night.
            It was one of those summers when a feeling of camaraderie overpowers any deleterious impulse.  Alex Katz, who is known for documenting such fleeting moments of togetherness, made two large group portraits of the contingent.  Both paintings take Yvonne, Rudy, Tom, Jacob, Red and Mimi as their subjects, and both have the setting of a blueberry field between the Dean house and Katz’s own.  In one, Ives Field number ? [1964, oil on canvas, dimensions] the figures are all seen in the middle distance, arranged on the granite protrusions typical of the region; Grooms has a pail for picking blueberries in one hand; Rudy and Jacob play catch in the distance.  In the second painting, Ives Field number [1964, oil on canvas, dimensions], it is as though the same exact instant has been re-configured, re-framed.  The faces of Gross, Jacquette, and Grooms have been zoomed in on, to produce huge close-ups, while Rudy and Jacob remain in the distance as full figures between the large heads, still playing catch.
            Rudy is wearing a baseball cap and t-shirt, an outfit he also appears in in several portraits of him painted by Red Grooms that summer.  In one of them,
Slab City Rendezvous (1964, medium, 56 x 60”), Rudy is painting at an easel on the roof of the Dean House, while Edwin walks down the dirt road in front of the house, and Jacob, Yvonne, Tom, Red, Mimi, Alex, Ada, and their son Vincent disport themselves on the lawn.  This scene has a basis in fact, as the painting Rudy made from the roof survives.  Grooms also made that summer an ambitious three-dimensional depiction of the interior of the house they stayed in, complete with all the personages.  Maine Room (1964, medium, 12 x 23 x 23”) shows, as Grooms describes it, “Mimi reading, Edwin at the table writing on a typewriter, Rudy playing cards with Red, Yvonne spoonfeeding Tom, Jacob reading a comic book, and under the table Lupa, Rudy’s black dog, crazy linoleum on the floor: checkerboard blue and yellow, bits of floral patterns, goofy furniture, a radio, baroque floral wall paper, a totally furnished summer house.”

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