Artists & Works |
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| Joan Mitchell American (1926-1992) BEGONIA (1982) oil on canvas 111 1/2" x 80" |
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| ©The Estate of Joan Mitchell |
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Joan Mitchell is often referred to as a "painter's painter."
The phrase could refer to her "virtuoso paint handling,"
as one catalogue writer called it. It could also refer to the fact
that Mitchell does not seem to fall in with contemporary trends.
Begonia was painted in 1982, but Mitchell has remained faithful
to what is basically an Abstract Expressionist style of 50s vintage.
The anxiety to be "new" does not seem to be present in
Mitchell's aesthetic, and this freedom may also account for her
being termed a "painter's painter." |
CRITICAL EXCERPTS |
| Letter to John I.H. Baur, 1958, printed in Nature in Abstraction: The Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture to Nature in Twentieth Century American Art, New York: Whitney Museum, 1958 “I am very much interested in nature as you define it. However, I do not necessarily distinguish it from “man-made” nature—a city is as strange as a tree. My paintings are titled after they are finished. I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and I remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.” |
| Klaus Kertess, Art in America, 12/92, "Joan Mitchell: The Last Decade" "At various moments in her career, she altered the length, duration, direction, color, and physicality of her brushstrokes, seeking out new configurations of color and light that could encapsulate the emotional climate dominating her vision at any given time. The changes were usually more organic than programmatic....Mitchell worked with the canvas mounted to the wall, and almost every stroke was followed by a retreat to the other end of the studio to see and feel what had to happen next. The seeming spontaneity of these paintings was the result of painstaking calculation—a kind of slow-motion combinative play...Like DeKooning and Twombly, Joan Mitchell opened up the tradition of American gestural abstraction. While she occasionally referred to herself as "the last of the Abstract Expressionists," her brave palette, confident consultation of past masters and deep responses to nature were unmistakably her own. ..Hers was an enterprise that, while hardly confined to the personal, was too deeply engaged with the complexities of expression to be much swayed by fashion or convenience. Mitchell's painting continued to grow in lucidity, breadth, and simple daring right up until the end." |
| Judith Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, Hudson Hills Press, Herbert Johnson Museum of Cornell University, 1988 “Inspired by her parents as a child growing up in Chicago, Joan Mitchell developed a love for poetry and painting. Her mother, Marion Strobel, was a lyric poet who imbued her with a love for poetry that has stayed with her through the years and has had a major effect on her life and art...Mitchell herself wrote poetry as a child... ...Mitchell decided to go to New York in 1947 to study with Hans Hoffman...She visited his class and, terrified because she could not understand what he was saying, walked out and never enrolled...During this year in New York Mitchell first saw the work of some of the leading avant-garde artists, including Archile Gorky and Jackson Pollock...She continued to admire Wassily Kandinsky’s early paintings, which she already knew from the [Chicago] Art Institute [where she studied from 1944-46]. ...In the summer of 1951 Mitchell studied art history at Columbia University and French at New York University. Actively involved in the downtown art scene, Mitchell frequented the Cedar Bar. In recognition of her talent, her seriousness as a painter, and her respect for them, the members of the exclusive Artist’s Club invited her to join them...an honor bestowed upon only a few women, including Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner. ...Because of the conscious control and order in the paintings of de Kooning and late Pollock, some historians have likened Mitchell’s art to theirs, citing their common “slapdash: technique that camouflages carefully intuited harmonies. A major difference between her and these older masters lies in her generally slower method of working, her prolonged periods of contemplation before painting. In the tradition of these abstract-expressionists, however, her paintings manifest her exaltation in action on canvas. ...With a few exceptions, Mitchell’s works from late 1975 through 1984 represent the closest that she has come to all-over painting. A renewed vitality and a lusciousness of color emerge from the paintings... ...Mitchell’s remarkable discipline is shown in her working habits. Generally in the studio six hours a day, she works slowly and carefully, studying her canvases before deciding each move...She has often maintained that she ‘paints the same way’ as she did in the 1950s, for her basic approach is essentially the same as it was then. ...For Mitchell, colors, like themes, offer endless opportunities. In her Yellow series of the early 1980s, yellows may be vociferous or quiet, sunny or gloomy...she remarks that people did not perceive her extreme unhappiness during the period of her Yellow paintings because they associated warm colors exclusively with joy.” |
| Marcia Tucker, Joan Mitchell, Whitney Museum , 3/74 "For the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Europe was to be avoided both in terms of art and life-style....However, once American artistic independence was established in the late 50s, a number of artists...either visited or settled in Europe...'I paint from a distance. I decide what I'm going to do from a distance. The freedom in my work is quite controlled; I don't close my eyes and hope for the best.'...Mitchell's obsession with landscape has been deeper and more enduring than that of any of her contemporaries, and it is by virtue of her subject matter that she stands somewhat apart from other Abstract Expressionists...Mitchell has always been concerned with the figure-ground relationships in her work; in fact, this is the only purely formal issue with which she verbally acknowledges a concern...'making the background equal to the subject in weight'...The formal elements in Mitchell's work—...large size, intense and subtle coloristic interplays, virtuoso paint handling, light, multiple format, figure-ground relationships...Mitchell's concern with having light in her work is a classic one for landscape painters...'Light is something very special. It has nothing to do with white.'...An existential exploration of landscape in painting was [and in Mitchell's case, still is] a major facet of Abstract Expressionism...in the act of painting, she is making a new environment rather than interpreting an existing one...Her substantial reputation is based on the fact that her work, brilliantly conceived, flawlessly executed, shows us the extent to which a tradition can be made viable by excellence. What is expressed by her work...are those primal forces found in the natural world which provide us with the metaphors for our own existence." |
| John Yau, ARTFORUM, 2/90 "Joan Mitchell has continued to develop and to paint without relying on critical theory as a buttress for her work. Her development over the past 40 years has been marked by an increasing mastery of line, color, and placement...Mitchell's gestural lines and notations evoke such specific things and forces as flowers and light, while also conveying their own vivid presence. Mitchell understands nature as a struggle in which each thing is fighting for its own survival and place...these paintings offer neither mindless release nor nostalgia for the past...their dauntless lyricism arises out of an honest confrontation with the particulars of existence." |