Important Australian Art

/

Lot 19
  • 19

YVONNE AUDETTE Australian, B. 1930

Estimate
20,000 - 30,000 AUD
Log in to view results
bidding is closed

Description

  • Yvonne Audette
  • CANTATA VIVACE NO. 21
  • Signed and dated 1982 lower right; signed, dated 80/82 and inscribed with title on the reverse

  • Oil on composition board

  • 76.5 by 91.5 cm
  • Painted 1980-82
Please note this lot is subject to G.S.T.

Provenance

Private collection, Melbourne

Literature

Christopher Heathcote et al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, illus. pl. 137

Catalogue Note

Yvonne Audette was born in Sydney of American parents and studied there from 1948 to 1951 before travelling to New York. As a student at the National Academy of Design, she met de Kooning, Franz Kline, Clement Greenberg and other protagonists of Abstract Expressionism just as the movement was reaching its peak. After extensive travels in Europe, she settled in Italy in 1956, where she held a number of successful one-person exhibitions. She returned to Sydney in 1966; moved to Melbourne three years later; and has come to be regarded as one of Australia’s most significant abstract artists.

As Bruce James has written, ‘Audette positioned herself at several of the key flashpoints around the world in the fertile period from the early 1950s to the late 1960s… Arguably no other artist of her generation, female or male, managed such intuitive forays into the epicentres of advanced art’. 1

A classically tutored pianist herself, Audette has always painted whilst listening to music. The titles of her paintings frequently reflect a unique sensory combination of colour, texture and implied musical harmonies. She regarded her Cantata series, begun in the 1950s and continued in later years, as perhaps her most important: evoking the music of Bach but equally a response to improvisational jazz.  Cantata Vivace No. 21 is typical of the series in its orchestrated brushwork and highly tactile, layered surface.  As she has explained, ‘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 for me in colour’. 2

1.  James, B., Constructions in Colour: The Work of Yvonne Audette 1950s-1960s, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 2000, p. 6.
2.  Quoted in Heathcote, C. et al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 170.