YVONNE AUDETTE

The artist
Private collection, New York; purchased from the above in the early 1960s

Christopher Heathcote, Bruce Adams, Gerard Vaughan & Kirsty Grant, Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan, Melbourne 2003, pl. 64, illus.

Good original condition. Original framing nail holes and attendant small losses around all margins. These and scuffing of rebate are visible between work is now flat mounted. Some previous bowing in support. No associated losses or fractures. Torsion corrected by secondary supports. Most nail holes are noticeable in catalogue illustration. Catalogue illustration is slightly brighter than work. Signature is blurred by thumbprint (original).
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Construction in Oil, No. 21, 1958 comes from Yvonne Audette's richly productive expatriate period of the late fifties and early sixties, considered by many to be unrivalled, and endorsed by her paintings in the collections of Australia's leading public galleries. These many riches include The Grey Wall with Lines, 1957 (Queensland Art Gallery); Cantata No.12, 1963, (National Gallery of Victoria); and Cantata No.8, 1957-59, (National Gallery of Australia). Opening next September, the National Gallery of Victoria will present an exhibition of Audette's work featuring these vintage fifties and sixties paintings.

The year 1958 was a particularly important one in Audette's career. Having first settled in Florence, in 1958 she also established a studio in the elegant northern city of Milan, maintaining an interest and exhibiting in both cities. Her first solo show was held that year at Milan's Galleria Schettini. Construction in Oil, No. 21 was among the works on show, where it was bought by its New York vendors. It was also an important time for Audette for new connections, establishing a life long friendship with Arnaldo Pomodoro, and meeting Lucio Fontana and the American Cy Twombly, who was to have a valuable influence on her later painting.

Both the Milan and following exhibition in Florence were well received, Audette combining an Antipodean youthfulness with her experiences of the vibrant art world of New York and European sophistication to produce works of striking individuality and authority. For two years previous she had been experimenting with colour values and their spatial relations, developing her 'construction' series of gouache and ink studies into the mature works to which this handsome painting belongs. 'Construction' had a dual meaning - referring to the way she worked her paintings as well as to their architectural associations. As an artist well familiar with the eloquence of paint, Audette engaged all the painterly qualities at her command in the application of vertical and horizontal hues with square headed strokes of the brush, scumbling and palette knife. The short, rectangular touches of colour, directions of the strokes, and textures evoked associations outside the paintings themselves, reminiscent of the abstract delights of music, which Audette had studied in both Australia and the USA.