Picturing New York: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette and Rudy Burckhardt [Hardcover]

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 signaglĂB