In mid-century Manhattan, painter Yvonne Jacquette set out to capture the city from above.
A 1969 commercial flight to San Diego sparked the idea; looking out the window on that flight, Jacquette marveled at the clouds and shifting landscapes below.
By the mid-1970s, Jacquette, who had previously painted still lifes and domestic interiors from odd, tilted, oblique vantage points, was chartering private planes out of Teterboro Airport in New Jersey so she could sketch and photograph the city from thousands of feet above ground. She maintained the process for close to a quarter century and supplemented the journeys with helicopter rides over Manhattan and drawing sessions on the upper floors of the World Trade Center. The artist, who was deeply embedded in the downtown New York art scene, found clarity and inspiration seeing the sprawling metropolis from above.
In her studio, Jacquette transformed these bird’s-eye view impressions into detailed visions of the city, painted in delineated patterns and colors that hovered between hard-edge realism and rhythmic abstraction.
The artist died in 2023 at the age of 88, leaving behind aerial perspectives of Maine’s rugged coastline, cities ranging from Hong Kong to New Orleans, and Manhattan at night.
A selection of Jacquette’s paintings are now on view in “From the Air” at Karma in New York, the gallery’s first solo show of the late artist. The exhibition, on view through October 31st, reintroduces the singular practice of an overlooked downtown figure. “From the Air” brings together paintings and works on paper made between 1971 and 2016, depicting clouds, cities, and fields as interlocking, rhythmic patterns of line and color. They range from the intimately scaled Untitled (1971), a watercolor of clouds billowing from a plane window, to the colossal N.Y. Aerial View from Helicopter (Looking East from Hudson Yards Area) II (2011–12), a panoramic view of Manhattan in the morning light.
While Jacquette may not be a familiar name today, the exhibition underscores her central role in the New York art world. “If you were an artist working in New York in the 1970s, you knew Yvonne Jacquette,” said Brendan Dugan, founder of Karma, on a phone call.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1934 and raised in Connecticut, Jacquette studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before moving to New York City in 1955. In 1961, she met the Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, whom she married in 1964. The painter Mira Schor recalled meeting the couple a few years later, at a night of film screenings at Red Grooms and Mimi Gross’s loft on the corner of Mulberry and Grand. “I still remember the first moment I laid eyes on Yvonne, Rudy, Edwin, and Jacob, standing in a row as they entered the room. They were all so distinctively interesting looking,” said Schor in an email (Edwin being the poet Edwin Denby, part of the same circle.)
Through Burckhardt, Jacquette grew close with poets including John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, and with artists Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher. Her own circle included Alex Katz, Grooms, Gross, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Janet Fish, and Rackstraw Downes, among others; she and Burckhardt kept lofts on East 29th and later 14th Street that doubled as an informal salon for this whole crowd. Burckhardt and Jacquette also purchased a house in Searsmont, Maine, which became a studio base for Jacquette, and there she grew close to Fairfield Porter and Lois Dodd through the regional painting community.
Jacquette belonged to a generation of New York realist painters who turned toward directly observed, everyday subject matter just as Abstract Expressionism was fading from the New York art world. She and her peers shared an interest in making the ordinary—a windowsill, a radiator, the city grid—as worthy of the same rigor and attention as any traditional subject.
As Tom Burckhardt, the artist’s son and himself a painter, described in an email, artists of his mother’s generation were looking for “new ways of reviving depiction…with lessons from the earlier generation such as scale and attitude folded in.” Through the scale and shifted perspective of Jacquette’s aerial paintings, he sees her engaging with landscape “mostly with a radical point of view, first looking up, then looking down from the very modern vantage of planes and skyscrapers. There’s only occasionally a horizon line in her work.”
Jacquette’s works were never meant to be literal reproductions of her aerial views, it’s worth noting, and in the studio she freely adapted from her in-flight sketches and photographs. When she was in the air, her process was fast and physical: She made quick pastel studies on paper, often combining several passes as she circled a site. She only used photographs for structural details, “never as primary references,” according to her son, who recalled “stewardesses scolding her over pulling out her pastels just after takeoff.”
Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who became a close friend during these years, said Jacquette’s studio process allowed the artist “the freedom to invent rather than simply reproduce what she had seen.” That freedom showed up in her brushwork, too: She applied paint in small dabs and dashes rather than continuous strokes, which Tom Burckhardt calls “a refurbished impressionist flickering stroke to make light and color vibrant and even a bit un-solid.” Up close, the compositions look almost abstract.
Beyond painting, Jacquette also worked in woodcuts. She hand-cut the blocks herself and printed them in dense, dark ink on absorbent Japanese Okawara paper. She often spent a year or more on these prints, which featured nocturnal subjects like lit windows, neon, and headlight trails as sharp points of light against black.
Jacquette’s style, however, didn’t fit neatly into the movements of her day, an ambiguity that may have contributed to her semi-obscurity. “When I think of artists working with a similar language,” Dugan said, “I mainly see Jacquette in relation to contemporary artists,” drawing comparisons to artists such as Avery Singer.
Still, her works have maintained a continuous level of interest over the decades. DC Moore Gallery mounted a survey of “Paintings 1981–2016” and, following her death, revisited her earliest, pre-aerial interiors in the 2023 show “Looking Up/Down/Inside/Out, 1962–1976.” “From the Air” now continues.
It’s worth underscoring that Jacquette was never obscure in her own lifetime, even if she never reached the wider fame of some peers. She taught at Parsons School of Design from 1975 to 1978 and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1979 to 1984, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003, and saw a full-career retrospective, “Aerial Muse,” travel from Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center to Colby College, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and the Hudson River Museum in 2002. Today, her work sits in more than 40 museum collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and the Brooklyn Museum. That recognition never quite translated into the market visibility and household-name status afforded contemporaries like Katz—a gap the current show is angling to close.
Tom Burckhardt sees his mother’s large paintings of horizons with slivers of airplane wings at the edge as the work of an artist at her peak. “There’s a kind of fourth wall breaking [as Jacquette places] you inside the plane with the consistent technology framing the various natural or human places below,” he said. “I think they’re very unique paintings for the time, and groundbreaking.”
The exhibition also positions Jacquette as a steady supporter of other artists. Mangold, known for her own transcendent depictions of trees, found inspiration in their relationship. “We were competitive, but in a productive way,” she said in an email. “We encouraged one another, fed off each other’s work, and shared a confidence in each other.”
That same spirit of validation ran through Jacquette’s friendships with younger women artists—Schor recalled Jacquette lending her a book on Rajput painting early in her career, “offering me her validation and a larger arena of cultural influence and support” at a moment when women’s domestic and everyday subject matter was only beginning to be taken seriously as art.
Jacquette’s circle ran beyond the visual arts, too. In 1981, Jacquette and Edwin Denby published the literary journal Aerial, featuring artwork by Jacquette alongside writing by John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Eileen Myles, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, and Peter Schjeldahl, among others. While preparing “From the Air,” the gallery turned up a previously unknown maquette for Aerial’s second volume. Coinciding with the exhibition, a facsimile of Aerial (vol. II) will be published by Karma Books in collaboration with the Estate of Yvonne Jacquette.
For the gallery, the exhibition is only a start. “This is just the introduction,” Dugan said. “She has a much longer story.”
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