Yves Gaucher 1934 - 2000

Martha Jackson Gallery, New York

Private Collection, New York

Gaucher's early achievements in art were in printmaking - etching, aquatint, and increasingly complex processes involving multiple sheets of paper, deep relief (see lot 19), overlays, and eventually both male and female plates. Finally, in 1963-4, he turned to painting as well, and Square Dance: Blues for Green was created in 1964, when he had just completed three great prints: Homage to Webern, #1, 2, and 3.

Most of Gaucher's work had a tight relation to music and this is reflected in his titles as well as in the composition and structure of his images. In this case, Gaucher has used the small squares and short straight lines from the Webern prints to create sparse, pinging, and brilliant colours against a saturated red background.

Gaucher's development from this style of work in the early sixties was steady and flowed almost logically, or so it seems in retrospect, to the symmetrical line paintings of the mid-sixties and then into the subtle, austere, and haunting, asymmetric gray paintings of the later sixties, a series that ran for quite a number of years.