Yvonne Audette: Australia’s First Abstract Expressionist

Yvonne Audette was a pioneering local artist, one of the first to bring the radical ideas of Abstract Expressionism to Australia.

This article is part of an ongoing series covering paintings in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Audette’s ‘Il Miralco’ hangs on level 3 in the St Kilda Road building, a colourful welcome right at the entrance to this part of the gallery. Click here for the full catalogue of NGV articles.

Yvonne Audette was born in Sydney, in April 1930. Her father was a successful businessman, originally from America, her upbringing was comfortably privileged.

Audette’s parents were interested in the arts, from an early age she showed artistic inclinations. Attending the prestigious Ascham school in Edgecliff, after hours she studied music at the State Conservatory.

Later, she turned her attention to painting.

Enrolling at the Julian Ashton Art School in 1948, she studied under established painters Henry Gibbons and John Passmore. These two provided instruction that highlighted two distinct paths in the art world of the time: Gibbons was older, a traditionalist with a conservative style, Passmore younger, and more experimental.

Audette showed considerable promise, and became a favourite of Passmore’s. After several years of study, her parents agreed to fund an extended trip overseas, to help complete her artistic education.

A ‘grand tour’ style sojourn was common in this period for young people of means, this would usually focus on Europe. Europe was still seen as the world leader in arts and culture.

But Audette’s father was keen for his daughter to see some of his home country as well. The trip that was planned would see her go to America for a spell first, before continuing to Europe.

Audette left Australia in October 1952, and arrived in New York a month later. Her timing was auspicious: the New York art scene was bubbling with creative radicalism.

From the late 1940s, a group of New York based artists had begun experimenting with painting form and technique. Known originally as the ‘New York School’, they were not really a collective, but were linked by their radical sensibility.

The leading members of the group were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and William De Kooning, all on their way to becoming world famous. Their style was abstract, but unique.

Abstract art, art that is non-representational, had first appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. These works abandoned people and places in favour of geometric shapes and patterns; early practitioner Wassily Kandinsky saw it as a kind of symbolic language, communicating philosophical and spiritual ideas.

The New York School were different, using abstraction to channel their ID. Their works were explosive: large canvasses covered in thick slashes of paint, or slabs of bright colour, created vigorously, often in a kind of creative frenzy.

The idea was to expose the artist’s emotions, and their impact on a viewer could be marked. Others found them simply baffling,

As the work found an audience the style was given a new name: Abstract Expressionism.

A few weeks after her arrival, Audette attended an exhibition of De Kooning’s, held at the Sidney Janis Gallery on East 57th Street. De Kooning had produced a new series of paintings for the show, each centred around the image of a woman.

The exhibition would be controversial.

Some of De Kooning’s supporters were upset that he had abandoned his non-representational approach, returning to a clearly recognisable image. More traditionally inclined viewers were not satisfied either: the women depicted were alarming to look at, grotesque, with deliberately misshapen bodies and threatening expressions.

It was like nothing Audette had seen before. Later, she would tell an interviewer that the show shocked and confused her, and left her feeling ‘overwhelmed’.

Despite her initial reaction, Audette found herself drawn to these unusual paintings.

De Kooning had shared his creative process with ‘ArtNews’ magazine; they published an article showing the works being developed, complete with photos. Audette studied this carefully.

Enrolled at the conservative New York Academy of Design, she began to incorporate some of De Kooning’s ideas into her own work. But it was not until she completed her course, 18 months later, that she attempted a full Abstract Expressionist style piece herself.

In 1954 she produced ‘Overpass 1’ and ‘Overpass 2’, abstract works featuring chunky slashes of paint, applied with broad brushes and painting knives. The works reflected her environment.

‘Audette worked the viscous pigment into broad expressive marks and gestural scrapes, composing structured forms of interweaving roadways, apartment buildings and elevated railways, evoking the inner-city experience.’

  – Dr Christopher Heathcote, Art Critic

Her time in New York was almost up, but it had been a formative experience; Audette had been thrilled by the energy and audaciousness of the city’s art scene, and it made a lasting impact on her life and work.

Audette then continued on to Europe as planned, arriving in 1955. She toured Spain, England and Italy, before settling in Florence; there she set up a studio, and poured herself into her work.

She brought the ideas she had seen in New York with her, and they found a ready audience: the artistic community in Italy was enthusiastic to see some of this new art firsthand. At the same time, Audette was modifying the Abstract Expressionist approach, altering it into something more personal.

Eschewing the creative frenzy of many of the New York artists, her process was patient, and thoughtful. Rather than develop one canvas at a time, she often set several in motion at once, picking them up and putting them down as inspiration struck.

She also moved away from heavy lines and thick layering of paint, instead making smaller, more fluid marks on a lightly painted surface. Reflecting her early interest in music, she thought of her own style as ‘lyrical’, her finished works as having a musical quality.

The New York artists produced blunt, forceful paintings, designed to provoke their audience. Audette’s work had a lighter touch, while still communicating her inner thoughts and feelings.

Audette had her first solo exhibition in Florence in 1958; the NGV’s ‘Il Miralcolo’ was painted during this period.
The work is large, 1.5m high by 1.2m wide, predominantly blue-green in colour, with patches of white and yellow.

Lines and squares are marked at irregular distances across the piece, with a white area in the bottom right largely clear. Audette painted the background in several layers of different colour, then used a painting knife to scrape these back and forth, allowing the hazy shapes to appear.

Like all Abstract Impressionist art, the meaning is open to interpretation. But the title, ‘The Miracle’ in English, provides a clue.

Audette was 28 when this work was produced, it is easy to imagine her feeling well satisfied with her circumstances. She had witnessed firsthand some of the most important art that the 20th century would produce, then been able to settle in a famously cultural city to explore and develop her own version of it.

She was young and free, enjoying her independence.

To me, the painting has a kind of tranquil happiness to it. The way it was crafted, shapes emerging from colourful layers, seems a perfect metaphor to describe the artist’s own development.

Audette would remain in Italy until the mid 1960s. Her work was well regarded and she found success, exhibiting annually in Florence, while also showing her work in Milan, Rome, Paris and London.

Her former teacher, John Passmore, visited her in 1964.

In 1966, she returned to Australia. She was often vague about her reasons, but in one interview said it was, ‘the call of the soil’.

Audette settled again in Sydney, to be close to her parents, and found a studio in Rose Bay. But having lived in some of the world’s most artistic cities, it is unsurprising that she found her old hometown somewhat limited.

After one year, she relocated to Melbourne, and took up residence in a house in the Dandenong Ranges. The location was remote: on the city’s fringe, the house was perched on a hillside, only accessible by dirt track.

‘I chose the Dandenong Ranges where I could be close to nature, surrounded by the landscape. Having travelled and moved since 1952, I had never lived in the bush, never allowed myself the luxury to wake up to the sounds of nature at my doorstep.’

– Yvonne Audette

Inspired by her surroundings, Audette would again lose herself in her work. But she was now far removed from Australia’s artistic centre; while she exhibited occasionally in the 1960s and 70s, her name would fade from view.

Dr Christopher Heathcote, then Melbourne’s ‘Age’ newspaper art critic, would vividly recall the first time he saw Audette’s work. The year was 1994.

‘One wet afternoon I came upon an exhibition that took my breath away. Ten authoritative Abstract Expressionist paintings from the 1950s and 60s, displayed around two rooms in North Melbourne. Nothing since has compared with the thrill of spotting this overlooked talent.’
 – Dr Christopher Heathcote

The subsequent rave review would rekindle Audette’s career.

Heathcote was immediately contacted by curators from the NGV and the National Gallery of Australia. In the following years, both would give Audette major retrospectives, as would the Queensland Art Gallery and the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Heathcote would subsequently write a book on her career.

By the 2000s, Audette was re-established as one of Australia’s most important abstract painters, a pioneer in her field. She continued to paint, until late in her life.

Now retired, 94 at time of writing, Yvonne Audette lives quietly in Sydney, occasionally still giving interviews.

‘The over-intellectual faculties are put aside. The more knowledgeable thing is substituted for an inner vision, giving out its own logic. Painting is a way to commune with the essential mystery behind all things.’

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