Yvonne Audette

Yvonne Audette (born 22 April 1930) is an Australian abstract artist.

Life Audette was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1930 and after attending art classes while still attending the private school Ascham, she and her American-born parents were persuaded to have her trained as an artist as it was considered she showed "promise". She had enrolled at the Julian Ashton Art School but she became tired of the uninspiring teaching. The main teacher was Henry Gibbons who was nearing retirement. In 1951, his duties were taken over by John Passmore, who was returning to Australia.

Passmore would play the male students off against Audette playing psychological games. Audette was not part of the main artistic group. This was partly due to her well-to-do parents who supplied her with her own flat.

In 1952, Audette moved to New York, then the heart of abstract expressionism which in turn became a strong underlying influence on how she styled her art for the future. In New York she became acquainted with Mark Rothko, Louise Nevelson, Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner. Her portrait of Klippel, entered and exhibited in the 1980 Archibald Prize has been gifted to the National Portrait Gallery. From 1969, she was working in Melbourne.

Mid and late career Mid-career may have proven difficult for Audette, especially when the unnamed art critic of the Canberra Times wrote rather disparagingly of an exhibition at the Solander Gallery, Yarralumla in 1975. They described her landscape works as a departure from her usual abstract style, and as being "sentimental" and "dewy and lovely" but felt they were dangerously close to "cheap illustrations and calendar art".

The following year, the Canberra Times art critic Geoffrey de Groen described Audette's works as being "playful, sensitive and enjoyable", and he found her work less decorative. The works exhibited had been painted between 1959 and 1968 and he was quite complimentary on her choice of hard board as a surface for her oil paint which she applied heavily and worked quite hard.

Audette's profile was raised by a major exhibition in 1999 in Queensland and the publication of a book about her life and works.

Her work, The long walk, was shown in Part Two of the exhibition, "Know my name: Australian women artists 1900 to now" at the National Gallery of Australia.