Yvonne Audette: Oblique Angles

After five days this January of chronically obstinate and desiccating heat arrogantly perched over 40 degrees, and with the still vivid memory of the climax to the fierce 2009 summer when – beneath an apocalyptic black and burning sky – firefighters had banged on her front door to warn of evacuation, Yvonne Audette quietly packed a bag and got out. This time the large studio attached to her house secluded in forest high in the picturesque Dandenong Ranges had already been emptied, its prolific stock of new paintings trucked down to safe storage in Melbourne to wait for her next exhibition, in May at Mossgreen Gallery. Hearing of the fire-front taking its toll, even way off to the east, she decided to follow the work down to the city.

“Every summer there are fires up here, often lit by arsonists,” she stoically reflects, “but I fell in love with this place as soon as I first saw it – the patchwork of light and colour, the extent of space and its transparent depth. I can see south all the way down over the Mornington Peninsula.” Liaison with countryside that can open onto remote silence or ignite with the aggressive thunder of a solar furnace is more usually the bait for artists drawn to an untenanted outback. Even with the annual flames, Audette’s enviable inspiring view across outer metropolitan bushland is, however, hospitably urbane and long-term conjugal. It was love at first sight back in 1970, only a few years after she returned to Australia, freighting back an expatriate career decisively forged in the cosmopolitan régimes of the international modernist vanguard.

Audette started this career in Sydney as a teenager when, upon leaving a comfortably prosperous family nest in 1948, she migrated into the bohemian coterie of Kings Cross (and a lifestyle that included modelling for photographers Max Dupain and David Moore). During this time she was mentored artistically by the reclusive Godfrey Miller, whose ascetic theosophical quest to transcribe an abstracted, scintillating cosmological form (implicated even within a domestic view onto a harbourside park), would provide a meditative if not metaphysical orientation for her own work. Her art was also, in this germinal stage, inflected with a traditional but enduring discipline in life drawing (she still teaches drawing today); and although from early on she makes non-objective analogies between visual and musical composition, primed by her own training at the piano, her painting’s mission is more like the recording of a secular sort of illumination (if written with an unsettled, toothed and inquisitive script like that of another of her artistic spurs, Paul Klee) rather than the distilled modulation of feeling and form.

Under this impetus, but going in the opposite direction to most young Australians at the time, Audette moved at 22 to New York, studying first at the Art Students’ League and then, having been awarded a prestigious Fogg Scholarship, at the National Academy of Art and Design. She quickly found an affinity and also a buoyant fluency with the style of spontaneous and spacious gestural abstraction then, in 1952, on the boil in New York, mixing confidently as a peer with artists such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning and later with that high priest of modernist art criticism Clement Greenberg.

Then, again in a direction seemingly opposite to the popular tide, in 1955 Audette sailed out of New York for Europe where, apart from odd visits back to the States and Australia, she stayed until 1966. Europe – and notably Florence, Rome and Milan, in which she lived and worked most of this time – fuelled her with a vivacious cocktail of chic as well as patinated old world tradition, but it was also undergoing bracing economic reconstruction and audacious cultural innovation. Intelligently and ambitiously conversant in the European trends of modernist abstraction, Audette briskly got involved with the Milanese avant garde faction of arte concreta, sought out Cy Twombly en route to the Venice Biennale and the radical Lucio Fontana (who was stabbing and slicing canvases of flat colour), and by the 1960s was competitively contributing through a string of solo exhibitions to the emergence a distinctive Italian dialect of art informel. Don’t think of her work of this period, as some critics do, as an ethereal musical sensation; it’s more like an elegant noise: a material bustle of abraded history and fresh collisions, of flaking stucco and graffiti grime.