Bruce James

When the shiny new word ‘Surrealism’ was first minted, it was easy to find a shower of retrospective applications for it. The congested canvases of Hieronymus Bosch, for one, still spring to mind, though we need retrace our steps no further than that cauldron of economic and philosophical instability – the period between the two world wars – to pinpoint its official beginnings. In 1917, one year before a combat wound despatched him, Guillaume Apollinaire used the term to describe the ‘unleashing of zany creativity’ in the ballet Parade.

There were many players. Some were unsuspecting recruits; others signed up with alacrity. One of the former was Sigmund Freud, whose exploration of the subconscious mind and how it underwrote the inclinations of humanity at large gave a boost to those painters whose strange conjunctions of imagery had been prompted by free association and a dragging of the subconscious seabed to snare the detritus of dreams and nightmares.

It’s something of a shame, I suppose, but an enduring cliché emanating from Sofia Coppola’s critically acclaimed film Lost in Translation is the term itself – used currently to describe social encounters where language really is a barrier to communication, or abused in glib dismissals of ailing relationships or fraught encounters. But this is the term that sprang to mind when I was reading this book and considering the deft ways in which each of the writers has contextualised Yvonne Audette’s art, but has not lost in their translations of her practice the lyricism and understatement in her work, and the ultimately mysterious internal impulses that have driven Audette through five decades of creative enterprise. For some viewers, Audette’s is, or could be, an uneasy art. The pleasant surprise in this book is its balance of scholarship against its evocation of the poetics and introspection of an artist’s vision and visual life.