Yale University

Above the Grid

Author(s): Susan Greenberg
Source: Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, Recent Acquisitions 2001–2003 (2004), pp. 84-
91
Published by: Yale University, acting through the Yale University Art Gallery
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40514643
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84

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Above the Grid
SUSAN GREENBERG
Much like New York City itself, Yvonne
Jacquette's Southeast View from the World
Trade Center II appears at first to be cool
and impenetrable (fig. i). A wall of bulky
skyscrapers forms a fortress-like barrier in
the foreground, as the buildings push and
squeeze their way into the painting. But also
like the experience of New York, many visual
surprises and delights await discovery below
the glass and steel. A phantom-like ferryboat
creeps into the painting like a caterpillar,
making its way to a dock at lower right. The
boat's lights point to balloons of blue smoke
that dance on a building's rooftop. Cars whiz
along the highway and disappear behind the
tall buildings like hellish little demons. The
round ventilation building of the Brooklyn
Battery Tunnel turns a translucent blue and
emerges ghostlike from the blue-black water.
Phantoms, ghosts, and demons: Jacquette's
night view uncovers the energy and mysteri-
ous presences hidden by the daily routine
and regularized forms of the city. The paint-
ing recalls Vincent van Gogh's comments on
his own painting The Night Café: "I often
think that the night is more alive and more
richly colored than the day."1
Fig. i. Yvonne Jacquette, Southeast View from the
World Trade Center II, 2001. Oil on canvas, 185.4
x 137.2 cm. The Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.
2002.35.1
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Jacquette has lived and worked in New
York City for more than forty years. Born in
1934, she was raised in Stamford, Connecti-
cut, and entered the Rhode Island School
of Design in 1952, where she remained for
three years until leaving to pursue her artistic
career in Manhattan.2 In 1964 she married
the photographer and filmmaker Rudy
Burckhardt (1914-1999). She began to study
the rhythms of the landscape from above in
1973, when she first drew from an airplane;
three years later she painted her first aerial
work after flying over Maine, the Passagas-
sawaukeag I (named after the river of the
same name) , now at the Delaware Art
Museum.
Around the same time, Jacquette began
making aerial views of lower Manhattan
from the World Trade Center, soon after the
two towers opened in 1973,3 beginning with
Air Quality "Acceptable" (1976), now in the
Hirschhorn Collection (fig. 2). Her views of
downtown from the 1980s and early 1990s
are now chiefly in private collections, though
her East River View with Brooklyn Bridge
(1983) can be seen at the Brooklyn Museum,
New York. In 1997 and winter 1998 Jacquette
was invited to participate in the World
Views Program at the World Trade Center,
sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural
Council and the Port Authority of New
York and New Jersey, which offered artists
85
Fig. 2. Yvonne Jacquette, Air Quality "Accept-
able, "1976. Oil on canvas, 137 x 170.2 cm. Hir-
shhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smith-
sonian Institution, The Joseph H. Hirshhorn
Bequest, 1981. Photo: Lee Stalsworth.

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workspace on the 24th and 81st floors of the
South Building, and the 37th and 53rd floors
of the North Building.4 After taking part in
the program Jacquette continued to work
from the World Trade Center, and Yale's
painting began as a preparatory pastel made
in May 2001 from the observatory of the
107th floor of WTC 2 (South Building).5
Jacquette then worked on the final painting
in her studios in New York City and
Searsmont, Maine, in the spring and
summer of 2001, completing the work
around September 1, 2001.
Southeast View from the World Trade
Center His the last in a body of work depict-
ing lower Manhattan that includes fifteen
paintings and many preparatory pastels
and charcoals. Dating from 1976 to 2001,
these works span much of the history of the
World Trade Center until its collapse on
9/11. Though each painting originated as
Jacquette's own personal interpretation of
the landscape, the images now inevitably also
function as precious documents preserving
a view that no longer exists. Completed
shortly before 9/1 1, Yale's painting may for
some viewers revive the emotions and shock
ofthat morning. In my own memory, what
structures my recollection of 9/11 is the phys-
icality of my route to work in Soho that
day- the realness of spaces in the subway
and train station, the presence of the build-
ings around me, and especially the streets
and avenues as I walked back uptown.
The vividness of my memory of the
cityscape suggests how architecture and
space impact our lives and our own histories.
The French theorist Gaston Bachelard has
written that it is not only we who make
architecture, but that architecture in turn
makes us.6 The spaces around us structure
our dreams, memories, and thoughts, and
vice versa. This dialectic has long been evi-
dent in depictions of modern cityscapes by
perceptive artists like Jacquette who process
the changing urban environment. The
Impressionists' views of the capital, for
example, examined Parisians' relation to the
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new boulevards, sidewalks, and apartment
buildings of the recently modernized city,
transformed by the French civic planner
Baron Haussmann during the reign of
Napoleon III. In Place Pigalle at Night
(fig. 3), Pierre Bonnard surveys the seedy
nightlife around Pigalle near Montmartre -
which included the recently opened Moulin
Rouge - through the eyes of a lone woman,
probably a prostitute. Her thin black form
rises before the circular plaza, and continues
in the shadowy front of an apartment build-
ing across the way, suggesting that although
the open street stretches before her, she is
confined to the city's murky interiors - to
the anonymous rooms ahead, illuminated
by a sickly yellow glow. Architecture and
the street also play a key role in the work
of American painter Edward Hopper, as in
his Night Shadows, a compelling rumination
on individual existence (fig. 4). In the image
a lone man's path is edgily uncertain, as a
streetlight ahead casts a deep shadow- long
and menacing, as in a German Expressionist
film - that cuts the sidewalk in half to
create a tension between two realms: what
is known and immediately ahead, and the
uncertainty of what lies around the corner.
The straight, sharp etched lines nevertheless
push him forward. Sheltered in a building
and watching from several floors up, we are
witness to the foreboding signs along his
lonely course.
Soon after Hopper's etching, the rapid
construction of skyscrapers in New York
City and elsewhere provided artists with a
radically changed perspective, with more
dramatic views and a new relationship to
the city. In many of these images, captured
in numerous prints and, especially, pho-
tographs in Yale's collection, the human
figure is now absent - outsized and outper-
formed by the symphonic arrangement of
New York's spectacular buildings. In a 1926
lithograph by photographer and painter
Charles Sheeler, we peer upward at the
recently erected Delmonico (originally the
Viceroy Hotel) on Park Avenue and 59th
87
Fig. 3. Pierre Bonnard, Place Pigalle at Night, street (fig. 5). A severe view juxtaposes the
ca. 1905-8. Oil on wood panel, 57.5 x 68.4 cm.
forms of the buildings into so many squares
Gift of Walter Bareiss, b.s. 1940s. 1955.23. 1
and rectangles, which are precisely rendered,
as if by a machine, through Sheeler's
unblinking, analytical gaze. A decade later,
the photographer Berenice Abbott looked
down on the city from a skyscraper to cap-
ture the now-sprawling modern metropolis
(fig. 6). The city spreads out before her,
its innumerable glowing lights forming an
enthralling view that both humbles and
excites the spectator.
Abbott's view returns us to Jacquette's
painting, which shares the abrupt cropping
of the photograph. But the juxtaposition
between painting and photograph also illu-
minates the degree of composition, fabrica-
tion, and playful imagination manifested in
Jacquette's re-presentation of the city view.
If Abbott's photograph shows us what the
city actually looks like, Jacquette presents a
composite of parts that are only loosely held

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 Fig. 4. Edward Hopper, Night
Shadows, 1921. Etching, sheet 25.1 x
29.8 cm. Gift of Louise Frank
Bernbaum. 1985.109.1

Fig. 5. Charles Sheeler, Delmonico Building,

1926. Lithograph, sheet 40 x 28.9 cm. The
Everett V Meeks, b.a. 1901, Fund and
Fig. 6. Berenice Abbott, New York at
Director's purchase. 1979.46
Night, 1936. Gelatin silver print, sheet 33.2
x 26.5 cm. The George Hopper Fitch,
b.a. 1932, Photograph Fund. 1990.33. 1

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Fig. 7. Borough of Manhattan, ca. 1950. Courtesy together and which require the infusion of
Map Collection, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale
our own emotion and experience to fill in
University.
the gaps. She incorporates mixed perspec-
tives, like a Cézanne still life, which suggest
an active, shifting viewpoint. Some buildings
face us head-on, some are turned at an angle
to one another; some of their roofs are ren-
dered "correctly" while others flip upward
and slant toward us. Some objects are too
large, others too small - a witty play on
scale that echoes the city photography of
Jacquette's late husband Rudy Burckhardt.
Jacquette also creates disjointed paths, as in
the highway that disappears rapidly, but
picks up again across the river, out in Brook-
lyn near the shipping containers. In between
flows the East River, beautifully rendered
with Monet-like strokes, which is then dis-
rupted by the intruding black form of Gov-
ernor's Island. Nature and city alternate as
we move up the vertiginous canvas. Her
alternating composition, multiple perspec-
tives, as well as varied brushwork evoke a
city that is not a timeless entity but rather an
accumulation of parts that shift and change
over time.

Most enchanting, however, is Jacquette's

arrangement of the gem-like lights into ele-

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gant patterns on the buildings' facades, a
type of ornament that transforms the sky-
scrapers, we could say, into a small exhibi-
tion of modernist paintings - this one an
Ad Reinhardt, that one a Mondrian, another
an Agnes Martin. Their appearance recalls
the long history of the grid as a central
modernist trope throughout much of the
twentieth century.7 But Jacquette's facades
also echo the grid of Manhattan, as in New
York City maps (fig. 7), now projected
upward onto the sides of the buildings. In
effect, this projection evokes the process of
transformation from two-dimensional plan
to three-dimensional building, or from
abstract idea to actual object. Projection also
engages space, memory, and history: her
view is both a product of the World Trade
Center and its surrounding skyscrapers,
but, conversely, it also reflects back onto the
now-empty space of the city grid at Ground
Zero, and reconstructs the lost buildings.
Jacquette's Southeast View from the World
Trade Center //not only captures the
wonder of the city that never sleeps, but
also suggests the ongoing transformation
of New York City.
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I would like to thank Yvonne Jacquette for generously
responding to my inquiries, and to Suzanne Julig at
DC Moore Gallery for her assistance. I am also very
grateful to painter Alyssa Phoebus '04 for her stimu-
lating discussions with me about Jacquette's painting.
This article is for Dan Fisher.
1. Letter 533, Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, 2nd
ed., vol. 3 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic
Society, 1959), 28.
2. For Jacquette's biography and an excellent overview
of her career, see Hilarie Faberman, Aerial Muse: The
Art of Yvonne Jacquette (New York: Hudson Hills
Press, 2002). See also Robert Berlind, "Eye in the
Sky," Art in America (March 2004): 104-10. Berlind
discusses Jacquette's work chiefly in relation to Eastern
influences, including Japanese culture and Tibetan
Buddism.
3. In addition to New York City, Jacquette also
painted views of Minneapolis, Hong Kong, Chicago,
Tokyo, and San Francisco. For a detailed discussion
of each subject, see Faberman, Aerial Muse, 2002.
4. Author's correspondence with Yvonne Jacquette, 23
April 2004 and 17 May 2004. All information related
to the genesis of Yale's painting derives from this cor-
respondence, housed in the Department of Modern
and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery
Curatorial Files.
5. The pastel measures 61 x 44.5 cm and is in the
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine.
6. See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans-
lated from the French by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964).
7. On the grid see John Elderfield, "Grids," Artforum
io (May 1972): 52-59, and Rosalind E. Krauss,
"Grids," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994),
9-22.
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