Painter, was born in Sydney of American parents; her mother Vivienne (Loucks-Berkstrasser, shortened to Berk) and her father Ludovic 'Victor’ Audette. The family lived in Illinois for a few years and then began travelling back and forth to Australia where Victor worked in sales-related enterprises. In the 1920s the family permanently moved to Australia, where they lived in the Sydney area, having four children Bobbie, Camilla, Billy and Yvonne. Victor died died 7 March 1933 when Yvonne was still a toddler, and American-born businessman William Hauslaib became her stepfather.
She studied piano at the NSW Conservatorium of Music and from 1948-1952, painting at the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, initially under traditional tonalist Henry Gibbons, replaced by John Passmore in 1951 whose Cézanniste approach to colour as form inspired her. She also enrolled in Lyndon Dadswell’s sculpture course at East Sydney Technical School, and in the evenings went to Hungarian émigré Desiderius Orban at his Circular Quay studio. These latter taught her abstraction and biomorphism. Attending Godfrey Miller’s drawing classes at the Tech she experienced his abstract works intended to convey big metaphysical and transcendental concepts.
Supported by her wealthy American parents Audette sailed for San Francisco in October 1952. Through introductions provided by Boston railway magnate Gordon Potter-Palmer and his wife Janet whom she met on the ship, she met director James Johnson Sweeney at the Chicago Art Institute, and the Vanderbilts, on her way to New York where she stayed initially on East 69th Street with the family of a concert-singer friend from Sydney. She was accepted into the New York Academy of Design and in her second year there won a Fogg Scholarship and early in 1954 moved to a larger apartment on uptown West 89th Street. Concurrently she attended Art Students League classes under Will Barnett, Robert Beverly Hale, colourist Frank Mason, cubist Vytlacil Vaclev, and calligrapher Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
She studied at the National Academy of Design at a time when Abstract Expressionism was reaching its peak. She became part of the new movement associating with de Kooning, Franz Kline and Clement Greenberg. She also studied violin in New York. Returning briefly to Australia, she brought the Sydney art scene in touch with international modernism, especially influencing her erstwhile teacher John Passmore. There is some speculation that Passmore attempted to discourage her from exhibiting her NY works in Australia.
In 1955, Audette occupied studios in Florence and later in Milan. In Italy in 1958 she met Cy Twombly who was then working with graffiti art and spontaneous mark-making, which was a further influence on her continuing painting practice. She visited England, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Greece and Germany and returned to Sydney in 1966 where she set up a studio in Rose Bay and exhibited in at the Bonython Gallery before moving permanently to Melbourne in 1969. She was the elegant model for advertising photography by Max Dupain in 1948 and portraits by David Moore, one from 1968 being held in Australia’s National Portrait Gallery.
Despite the Queensland Art Gallery’s major show in 1999 of her works from the 1950s and 1960s, and a subsequent successful commercial exhibition, Audette remained relatively unrecognised until the publication of Yvonne Audette Paintings and Drawings 1949–2003 edited by Jenny Zimmer with text by Christopher Heathcote, Bruce Adams, Kirsty Grant, Gerard Vaughan and Chris Wallace Crabbe, followed in 2007 by the National Gallery of Victoria retrospective Yvonne Audette: Different Directions 1954–1966.
McCulloch (in 2006) writes that Audette is “a consistent abstractionist [practicing] some figuration, her works show a great sensitivity and underlying sense of structure and draughtsmanship.” Music influenced many of Audette’s abstract expressionist paintings, as she explained to Jane Clark of Sotheby’s in July 2001. Sotheby’s included her comments in its 27-28 August 2001 catalogue to accompany the auction of Balancing 1978, oil on composition board 86.6 × 101.8 cm (lot 4 ill. est. $20,000-30,000).
Audette was awarded an AM in the Queen’s Birthday 2020 Honours List for significant service to the visual arts as an abstract painter.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
James McArdle
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2023
