Yvonne Jacquette

Yvonne Helene Jacquette (December 15, 1934 – April 23, 2023) was an American painter, printmaker, and educator. She was known in particular for her depictions of aerial landscapes, especially her low-altitude and oblique aerial views of cities or towns, often painted using a distinctive, pointillistic technique. Through her marriage with Rudy Burckhardt, she was a member of the Burckhardt family by marriage. Her son is Tom Burckhardt.

Early life and education Yvonne Jacquette was born on December 15, 1934, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to William and Helen (née Amrhein) Jacquette. Her father was an accountant and management consultant while her mother was a homemaker. Her paternal great-grandfather, Jacques Hubert Jacquot, emigrated from Châlonvillars, France, with the name being changed upon arrival. Her maternal grandparents were both from Palatinate, Germany. She grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She started studying art at age 10, and by 1947 she attended private instruction by traditionalist painter Robert Roché. Jacquette continued her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (class of 1955).

Career Jacquette taught at Moore College of Art and was a visiting artist at the University of Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1976. She taught at Parsons School of Design from 1975 to 1978 and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1979 to 1984.

Her three-part mural "Autumn Expression" (1980) is in the U.S. Post Office in Bangor, Maine. According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum's online bio, Jacquette held various academic positions and was also honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990.

In an interview with art critic John Yau in The Brooklyn Rail, Jacquette said of the way she came to begin painting aerial views:

Jacquette married Rudy Burckhardt in 1964. She was a visiting artist at the Siena Art Institute in 2012.

Jacquette lived in New York City, and died on April 23, 2023.

Work As noted in The Female Gaze, "Jacquette's works began with direct studies made with pastel on paper or photographs taken from airplanes, skyscrapers, or rented single-engine planes. She often took flights primarily to study cloud formations and aerial perspectives. She has been described as the 'Canaletto of the skies.' Her paintings are intensely colored, elaborately detailed panoramas of cities, and the countryside at various day and night. Unique views and radical angles draw attention to the act of perception, anthropomorphizing the buildings that occupy her urbanscapes." Utah Museum of Fine Arts at Salt Lake City, Utah; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, GA The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH Concordia College, Seward, NE The Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE Farnsworth Museum & Library, Rockland, ME Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), San Francisco, California Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Library of Congress, Washington, DC McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, Lucy Lippard Collection, Santa Fe, NM Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, New York Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA The New York Historical Society, New York, NY North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina Ohio State University, Athens, OH Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State, University Park, Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ The Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Springfield Art Museum, Spring Field, MO Staatliche Museum, Berlin, Germany University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

Personal life In 1961, she married fellow painter Rudy Burckhardt, who was recently divorced and had one son. They had another son, Tom Burckhardt, in 1964. Jacquette died on April 23, 2023, aged 88 in New York City.