YVONNE AUDETTE

Private collection, Melbourne

Bruce Adams, 'Art, Music and Spirituality: Audette's Journey into Light', in Christopher Heathcote, et al, Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillam, Melbourne, 2003, pp.169-172

Good condition.
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Construction in Colour, Cantata Series by Yvonne Audette is from that richly creative group of paintings inspired by the music of J. S. Bach dating from 1957 onwards. Trained as a pianist in Sydney, Audette also studied the violin in New York. She has a deep appreciation of classical as well modern music, often listening to music as she paints. This is revealed in the titles she gives her works as well as in the paintings themselves, the formal elements of colour, shape and technique in her paintings echoing those of music. In Construction in Colour, Cantata Series, the tone and pitch of Bach evoked images and colour movement, the liveliness of the painting in harmony with the vibrant mood of similarly titled passages of Bach. One of the earliest, Cantata No.8 (1957-59, National Gallery of Australia) is a highlight in Audette's current exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Yvonne Audette/Different Directions/1954-1966, where it is joined by the Gallery's own splendid painting, Cantata, No.12, The Journey (1963). The musical references in her paintings are numerous as in such paintings as Violin Concerto, No.2, from 1967, Cantata, No.17 (1968-69, private collection, Melbourne), or E Flat Major, Divertimento for String Trio, 1975 and Rock and Roll 1976-77. As has been noted, 'it is the ongoing Cantata Series that best exemplifies the musicality of Audette's methods, as the artist herself maintains: 'Bach's cantatas breathed for me a kind of mystical joy and I tried in my paintings to relate the vibrations of tone and colour to the sound. Musical pitch and tone reverberate to me in colour... . Vivid tone-pictures. Infinite variety of colours and textures. The melody is woven into both the instrumental and vocal lines. The musicality of the abstract mark is what I aimed at. I studied the counterpoint in Bach, having played the piano myself ... . I tried to create these combinations of two or more independent melodies in line and colour, and create in line and colour harmonic textures equivalent to this counterpoint.' ¹

Audette is an artist of international stature with successful solo exhibitions in Paris, Milan, Rome and London to confirm her position. Today, her art offers us a rare combination of American drive and European sophistication, blended with the youthful cultural freshness of her Australian background. Construction in Colour, Cantata Series and related abstract paintings single her out as an artist of major talent. Above all her work has a subtlety and elegance that places it above much Australian art, as seen in this painting, which has not been shown in public before.

1. Bruce Adams, 'Art, Music and Spirituality: Audette's Journey into Light', in Christopher Heathcote, et al, Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillam, Melbourne, 2003, p. 170