The New York paintings and pastels of Yvonne Jacquette, one of America's
most distinguished contemporary painters, and the New York photographs
of her late husband Rudy Burckhardt, whose unconventional art has
spawned a large and devoted following, are the subjects of this
intriguing look at a slice of the New York art world from the 1930s to
the present. Picturing New York: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette and Rudy
Burckhardt explores this remarkable pair of artists whose work
celebrates New York's streets and skyline, capturing both the intimacy
and the expansiveness of the city.Yvonne Jacquette and Rudy Burckhardt
were creative and personal partners for nearly forty years, from the
time of their meeting in 1961 until Burckhardt's death in 1999.
Burckhardt, born in 1914 in Basel, Switzerland, came to New York in
1935, and Jacquette, a Pittsburgh native twenty years his junior,
arrived in 1955. Although they traveled broadly for artistic subject
matter, they were based in New York City, spending most of their careers
in the West 20s, where Jacquette's studio still is. They sometimes
collaborated, usually on films, but mostly each pursued independent work
in photography and painting. Despite this independence, their approaches
to representing the city share visual and philosophical parallels.The
dazzling urban nocturne is Jacquette's primary subject. For thirty
years, she has made night paintings from aerial vantage points of such
cities as Tokyo, San Francisco, Washington, Hong Kong, and Chicago-along
with bird's-eye views of Maine and Midwestern farmland-but her images of
New York City are without question the strongest and most celebrated.
These dramatic and glittering canvases are striking for their bold
compositions, surface richness, and the powerful presence of their grand
scale. Jacquette has described herself as a portraitist of American
cities, and none has been more frequently or more affectionately
depicted than New York-its splendid architecture, neon signage, bridges,
streets, and waterways-and indirectly, the electricity that makes it all
visible at night.Burckhardt, whose photographs and films of New York
have inspired a cult following, made images of the city's architecture,
streets, and inhabitants in a singular style-apolitical and seemingly
uncomposed-that broke with tradi-tion and influenced younger generations
of photographers. From iconic views of New York's skyscrapers, to
close-up architectural details, to storefronts splashed with advertising
signage, to New Yorkers walking their streets and riding their subways,
the variety of Burckhardt's subject matter conveys his never-ending
fascination with the city's scale and diversity. His images convey his
own sense of wonder about New York and invite viewers to share in his
pleasure of the city's unexpected moments and unexplored
places.Coinciding with exhibitions on both artists at the Museum of the
City of New York, Picturing New York: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette and
Rudy Burckhardt offers a unique look at the work of this important
creative couple side by side and the place they hold in the New York art
world.
