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Joan Mitchell. Ladybug. 1957. Oil on canvas, 6' 5 7/8" × 9' (197.9 × 274 cm). Purchase. © Estate of Joan Mitchell

“The freedom in my work is quite controlled.”

Joan Mitchell

In expansive canvases like No Rain (1976), Joan Mitchell combined assertive, richly textured brushwork with vibrant, lyrical color. “Abstract is not a style, I simply want to make a surface work,” she once said about her approach.1 Born in Chicago, she moved to New York in 1949, where she became actively involved in the downtown avant-garde art scene, establishing herself as a central figure among the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. At a time when women were marginalized in the art world, she captured the attention of the leaders of the New York avant-garde: Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Hans Hofmann all admired her work. In 1951, she was one of only a few women invited to join The Club, the East Eighth Street gathering place where the Abstract Expressionists met for weekly discussions.

Throughout the 1950s, Mitchell developed her signature style: rhythmic counterposed lines and layered fields of color that became a language through which she communicated emotion and life experiences. She said of her work, “That particular thing I want can’t be verbalized. . . . I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.”2 “She could make yellow heavy,” Brice Marden later mused of her uncanny ability to infuse her paintings with mood.3

About her process, Mitchell was unambiguous; it was her memories and their evocations that she sought to capture in her work. In Ladybug (1957), for instance, she set out not to replicate nature but “to paint what it leaves me with.”4 Though seemingly unrestrained, her process was structured. She carefully layered each color, attentive to the relationships between them and to the weight of each brushstroke, often standing far from the canvas between layers to assess the balance of her composition. “The freedom in my work is quite controlled,” she once explained. “I don't close my eyes and hope for the best.”5

Between 1960 and 1964, her style changed, as did her life, with the death of her father and her mother’s cancer diagnosis. Mitchell defined her works of this period as “very violent and angry paintings.”6 A somber palette replaced the brighter colors of the 1950s, and she condensed the vigor of her earlier allover brushwork into central masses, often spread across multiple panels hung side by side, as in Untitled (1964).

Mitchell divided her time between New York and Paris until moving permanently to France in 1959. She first lived in Paris and then, in 1967, settled in Vétheuil, a small town outside the city near Claude Monet’s former estate in Giverny. Her choice to leave the tight-knit community of artists in downtown New York—where de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Kline were among her many close friends—reflected her desire to join her long-term partner, Canadian artist Jean Paul Riopelle, and the connection she felt to the city that shaped such figures as Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Wassily Kandinsky, whose works had first impressed her during childhood visits to The Art Institute of Chicago. She was particularly inspired by their incorporation of abstraction into their compositions and their use of color, line, and gesture to create dynamic visual rhythms, which she strove for in her own work.

In addition to painting, Mitchell worked with pastels and as a printmaker. Her first prints (a series of screenprints) illustrated The Poems (1960), a book of poetry by her friend John Ashbery. She excelled in particular at lush, densely tangled, and brilliantly colored pastels. In 1992, the year of her death, the Whitney Museum of American Art held the first museum exhibition of her drawings, showing 15 large works on paper she had completed the previous year. Known for her sharp wit and irascible, often hard-living ways, Mitchell infused her art with the energy she derived from her ardent dedication to her career, her social restlessness, and the boundless intellectual curiosity that drove her life.

Note: The opening quote is from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum
of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019).

Tara Keny, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, 2018

The research for this text was supported by a generous grant from The Modern Women’s Fund.

  1. From an interview with Yves Michaud, “Conversations with Joan Mitchell, January 12, 1986,” in Joan Mitchell: New Paintings (New York: Xavier Fourcade, 1986), n.p.

  2. John Ashberry, “An Expressionist in Paris,” ARTnews, April 1965.

  3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Tough Love: Resurrecting Joan Mitchell,” The New Yorker, July 15, 2002.

  4. Edward Bryant, Forty Artists Under Forty: From the Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1962), p. 29.

  5. Joan Mitchell, interview by Irving Sandler, “Mitchell Paints a Picture,” ARTnews 56, no. 6 (October 1957).

  6. Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1988), p. 60.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career. Mitchell's emotionally intense style and its gestural brushwork were influenced by nineteenth-century post-impressionist painters, particularly Henri Matisse. Memories of landscapes inspired her compositions; she famously told art critic Irving Sandler, "I carry my landscapes around with me." Her later work was informed and constrained by her declining health. Mitchell was one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim. Her paintings, drawings, and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections around the world, and have sold for record-breaking prices. In 2021, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Baltimore Museum of Art co-organized a comprehensive retrospective of her work. In her will, Mitchell provided for the creation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a non-profit corporation that awards grants and fellowships to working artists and maintains her archives.
Wikidata
Q469934
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Getty record
Introduction
Abstract painter having a successful career spanning five decades. Mitchell exhibited regularly during the 1950s, and moved to France in 1955, where she resided until her death in 1992.
Nationality
American
Gender
Female
Roles
Artist, Painter
Name
Joan Mitchell
Ulan
500000901
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Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

50 works online

Exhibitions

View all 26 exhibitions

Publication

  • Abstract Expressionism at The Museum of Modern Art Ann Temkin, 2010 Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 128 pages
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