The Many Views of Yvonne Jacquette

By then she was mostly painting views from above. Though she had studied at the Rhode Island School of Design with a former World War II pilot who did abstract aerials, and who encouraged her to try painting from bridges, it was only on a cross-country flight to San Diego in 1969 that she discovered “a good little studio”—her seat on the plane. “You had a little shelf,” she once told an interviewer, “and if I had watercolors with me, I could just start work.” From the Air begins with early studies of clouds seen from a window seat, the window itself conjured with finely nested strokes of darkening pigment. As she flew more often, first commercially and then on planes chartered for her artistic purposes, Jacquette opted for pastels, with which she made vigorous map-like drawings. These high-altitude views, particularly nighttime scenes of snaking blue and orange highways, tend toward abstraction, whereas her cityscapes made in lofty hotel rooms or tall towers (including the World Trade Center), or from photographs she took in low-flying helicopters, pulse with Cubist rhythm.Jacquette also flew above movements and schools, as did the informal head of her circle, Fairfield Porter, and...