Anna Held Audette was many things to many people: a revered precisionist painter of the late twentieth century; an admired professor of printmaking and drawing; a cherished mentor to generations of art students; an engaging author who helped other artists find their voices; a beloved wife and mother, and, in the final chapter of her life, an artist whose profound impulse to create transcended great challenge.
Born on July 16th, 1938, Audette was the daughter of Julius Held, an art history professor at Barnard and renowned authority on 16th century Netherlandish art, and Ingrid-Märta Held (née Petterson and known as Pim), the chief of Conservation at the New York Historical Society. Audette grew up in a rarified artistic environment. Her parents’ social circle included leading art historians, critics and intellectuals of their day, from Erwin Panofksy, known for his studies in iconography, to Charles Scribner, the publisher of works by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The walls of the Helds’ apartment were lined gallery-style with paintings and drawings of varied provenance, and it was there that Audette, a young majorette among Old Masters, learned to toss a baton. Her pluck and athleticism also made Audette a good lookout on visits to dimly lit European churches when Julius had to clamber onto altarpieces for a closer look.
In 1940 Julius and Pim bought a small farm in Southern Vermont. The Helds were recent emigrés- Julius had fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and Pim had left Sweden to join him in New York in 1936- and they were drawn to the small community of German-Jewish academics and musicians who found inspiration and solace in the Green Mountains. Vermont’s gentle, wooded landscape reminded Julius of Germany’s Black Forest; Pim painted the farmhouse Falu Red, the iron-oxide based red paint common to Swedish rural architecture, to evoke memories of her childhood country home near Uppsala. The “farm” became a seasonal retreat where Julius could write academic papers and Pim could work on smaller restoration projects. Throughout Audette’s life, the farm was both an idyll and an anchor, an amalgam of her family’s European roots and American lives, and she developed some of her most significant contributions in writing, drawing and painting while spending her summers there.
Audette attended Smith College, and graduated in 1960 after studying under Leonard Baskin, a printmaker, author (and a close friend of her father). As a young girl Audette was deeply affected by Julius’ fruitless efforts to assist family members and friends escape from Nazi Germany, and in Baskin’s work, and that of the German Expressionist printmaker, Käthe Kollwitz, Audette discovered expressions of angst that were acutely relevant to her own family history. The influence of these two artists played a strong role in Audette’s early artistic development, both in her thematic choices and her embrace of printmaking.
With Baskin’s encouragement, Audette entered the Yale School of Art to pursue an MFA in printmaking in 1962. At Yale Audette studied under an exclusively male faculty. In fact, although the university had accepted women to pursue degrees in fine arts for almost a century, the Yale School of Art did not hire a woman for its own faculty until two years after Audette graduated. With the backing of their professors, a cadre of male classmates, such as Chuck Close, Richard Serra and Brice Marden, went on to great prominence in the art world. A smaller number of Yale women like Sylvia Mangold, Janet Fish and Nancy Graves advanced into the favored ranks of contemporary painters, but there was no corresponding opportunity for printmakers. Printmaking at Yale was located literally and figuratively in the Art School’s basement.
For the first fifteen or so years of her professional career as an artist, Audette’s images were typically anatomic, organic and structural studies, often rendered in classical styles and monochromatic palettes. These impulses are especially apparent in the work she completed in 1976-77 when she, Louis and their two young daughters spent a year in Egypt. Audette’s drawings and prints from this period feature a range of subjects, from water buffalo to temples. Rendered in a representational manner, the works expressed both monumentality and the passage of time. While her work was technically proficient and her imagery becoming increasingly striking, major gallery representation was elusive. Besides making art, teaching and raising a family, Audette found little satisfaction in self-promotion and defining her particular niche was frustrating. And then, in 1980, she found her muse.
At first, she developed an interest in machinery and complicated industrial shapes. At the same time she began to produce large drawings using oil pastels. Her first collection of drawings of discarded, abandoned cars was produced with an eye not to their demolition, but to the sad irony of consigning well crafted objects to a process of planned obsolescence. With the first car series she embarked on her lifelong theme of “modern ruins” and the “melancholic beauty found in the relics of our recent industrial past”. Her large drawings evolved into large paintings of industrial scrap yards, abandoned aircraft, ships, trains and neglected factory interiors.
Despite these drawbacks, Audette’s years at Yale were a period of rich artistic development and personal growth. Studies with the color theorist, Josef Albers, and the art historian, Vincent Scully, enhanced her grasp of color and form, and the teachings of Arnold Bittleman, helped Audette come into her own as a draftsperson. Gabor Peterdi’s instruction in printmaking completed Audette’s mastery of intaglio technique. It was also at Yale where Audette met and married her classmate, Louis Audette. While Louis did not ultimately pursue his own career in art, he devoted himself to Audette’s artistic success and legacy; whether building Audette’s frames or her studios, Louis was Anna’s life-long companion and champion.
Audette graduated from Yale in 1965. However, even with her laureled degree, she had limited prospects as a female printmaker in the 1960s. But by good fortune, an influential college administrator, Hilton C. Buley, was in the process of initiating Southern Connecticut State College, a public school in New Haven, into the Connecticut state university system. Buley was recruiting faculty members and was favorably impressed with Audette’s background. With Buley’s backing, Audette was hired to teach drawing and intaglio at what would become Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). In what became a lifetime career at SCSU, Audette ascended the ranks to full professor and became a mentor to generations of devoted students.
Whereas Audette had found inspiration in the dark themes of Baskin and Köllwitz in her youth, she now looked to works by artists who breathed new life into ruins such as Piranesi and Frederic Church. Known for their depictions of the ancient world, Piranesi and Church brought romanticism, vigor and fantasy to their work. Their respective prints and paintings were poetic odes to a vanished world that they venerated. So too were Audette’s paintings of American industrial ruins. Grand in scale, and euphoric in color, Audette’s canvases paid homage to the relics of the mid-century America that had taken in her parents from war-torn Europe. Just as they contained seemingly disparate industrial elements- a carburetor here, a fender there- her paintings manifested Audette’s nostalgia and enthusiasm for a past chapter of American history.
In her efforts to best convey the integrity of her subject matter, Audette followed the maxim of another artist she admired: the precisionist, Charles Sheeler, best known for his paintings of Ford Motor Company’s factories. Sheeler wrote “a picture should have incorporated in it the structural design implied in abstraction and be presented in a wholly realistic manner.” With that ideal, Audette devoted herself to achieving a marriage between abstraction and realism in her work.
As she secured her place among the admired precisionist painters of the late twentieth century, with works in numerous museums and private collections, Audette produced what may have been her most important contribution as a teacher; The Blank Canvas: Inviting the Muse, a guide for students embarking on their own careers, no longer with the support of a teacher’s direction. Published in 1993, the book has become a beloved resource for artists looking to unlock their own creative expression. Later, reflecting on her conviction that standard drawing exercises in most schools had become stale, Audette assembled fresh lessons from a large pool of other teachers and published 100 Creative Drawing Ideas.
Audette retired in 1997 as a full professor of Art at Southern Connecticut State University. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the College Art Association, The Society for Industrial Archaeology, The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences and she was a fellow of Morse College at Yale University.
After retirement, Audette devoted her full attention to paintings of industrial decline. To gather inspiration Audette visited various iconic factories and machinery as they fell into states of neglect. Often accompanied by Louis, Audette’s travels took her across the country, from blast furnace sites in Alabama to retired shipyards in California. She and Louis built a new house and studio, and she enjoyed the most productive and satisfying period of her life.
Around 2006 Audette’s mastery of line and proportion began to show subtle changes. In 2008 she was diagnosed with Fronto-Temporal Degeneration (FTD), a form of dementia, and she stopped working in her studio. After a year of inactivity, Audette was assisted by a former student who re-engaged her with painting, using the extensive field photographs of industrial settings that she had accumulated. All told, Audette made 120 oil paintings and numerous drawings after her return to her studio. Audette’s artistic productivity during her FTD decline was unusual, but not unknown. Artists similarly afflicted with the disease, such as Willem Dekooning, had shown comparable creative drive and activity even after their general cognitive abilities had measurably faltered. For this reason, Audette’s paintings were of interest to her doctors who recognized a distinct correlation between her changing imagery and the stages of her disease.
Audette died on June 9th, 2013. The vast body of work she left behind, a collection of over one thousand drawings, photographs, prints and paintings is represented in numerous private collections as well as pre-eminent institutions, including The Rijksmuseum, The National Gallery of Science, NASA, The National Gallery of Art, The Yale University Art Gallery and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Anna’s work is a trove of late 20th century American Modernism for art historians, a well of insights for the medical community, and a source of inspiration for those who create and love art.