Artist/Maker Yvonne Helene Jacquette (American, 1934 – 2023)

Movie Marquee ll (Afternoon)

1972

Oil on canvas

Unframed: 69 × 69 in. (175.3 × 175.3 cm)
Framed (Shadowbox): 6 ft. 1 5/8 in. × 7 ft. 1 13/16 in. (187 × 218 cm)

Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City

IL2021.51.106

The contemporary artist Yvonne Jacquette is best known for her aerial views of cities sketched and photographed from low-flying planes and high-rise buildings. Before she looked down, however, she looked up. The artist recalls, “I was beginning to do yoga, and I had to look up at the ceiling in my loft, which was stamped tin. So I did paintings of that, and of doorways and so forth for a little while.” Jacquette then moved this upward perspective outside to render traffic signs, street lights, and buildings seen from sidewalk level. “I did some studies and small paintings, and then I’d do the big paintings in the studio,” she explains, “but I used a shopping cart as an easel, because the drug characters were so heavy on 14th Street where we lived at the time. I had to be ready to roll away. I would run around the block and come back when they were gone.” Movie Marquee II (Afternoon) monumentalizes a view of the artist’s East Village neighborhood. It features the canopy of the Irving Place Theater on the southwest corner of East Fifteenth Street and Irving Place, beyond which appear the limestone office blocks and the twenty-six-story neoclassical tower of the Consolidated Edison Building. The hard geometry of the buildings forms an architectonic structure softened—but only slightly—by the arc of a street lamp rising from the bottom edge of the composition, the waving edges and rounded lightbulbs of the marquee, and the swoop of the tower roof. Jacquette creates a startling perspective—one that defamiliarizes the everyday urban environment to make viewers perceive it anew. The ascending sightline finds porousness amid the pressing density of Manhattan, opening to a sky that competes with the City for visual prominence. The atmosphere exerts a strong presence: it is less negative space than a solid wall of cool pale blue pushing against the yellow-tinged structures, the warm red L-shape of the marquee edging, and the slightly humorous traffic sign declaring “NO.” The daring composition attests to Jacquette’s fascination with Japanese ukiyo-e (woodblock prints)—specifically their use of dramatic vantage points, extreme cropping, asymmetry, clean lines, and flat planes of color. Together, they build tension between surface pattern and depth. In her poetic yet precisionist forms, Jacquette has created one of the most distinctive visual languages of the New Realist movement. Since its execution in 1972, Jacquette’s painting has assumed an elegiac quality. The Irving Place Theatre—home during its long history to German and Yiddish plays, burlesque shows, movies, and warehouse supplies—was demolished in 1984. Its replacement—the Zeckendorf Towers—competes for architectural primacy in the City skyline with the once-dominant Con Ed landmark. COMMUNITY VOICE The lights of theater define New York. Brighter than the sun, brighter than the moon, they suggest glamor, excitement, a refuge from the drudgery of everyday life. They promise something wonderful that is about to happen soon when the theater darkens and the lit stage becomes the center of the world for the next couple of hours. Edna Nahshon Professor of Jewish Theater and Drama, The Jewish Theological Seminary

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