The Defiant One

Joan Mitchell prevailed in the male-dominated midcentury art world, creating epic canvases in which light and color transmit powerful emotions.

By John Dorfman

In a 1986 interview with the art historian Linda Nochlin, Joan Mitchell said, with characteristic don’t-give-a-damn humor, “I call myself a ‘lady painter’ and AEOH—Abstract Expressionist Old Hat.” Of course, with regard to both those monikers, she was anything but. For certain, Mitchell was a gestural abstractionist, and her highly emotional paintings are what the word “expressionist” was meant to describe, but she evolved somewhat independently of the Ab-Ex scene, choosing to leave New York for France and swim directly against the art-historical current that seemed to be flowing from the Old World to the New during the 1950s. While she is often called a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, her work is so strikingly individual that it is hard to justify lumping it with any cohort, and insofar as “second-generation” connotes an epigone or latter-day version, it sits ill with Mitchell’s vitality as an artist.

Lyric, c. 1951.
© Estate of Joan Mitchell; photo: Chip Porter

And as for “lady painter,” Mitchell had the distinction of being granted more credibility by the sexist, male-dominated art establishment of the ’50s and ’60s than any of the other women abstract artists of her milieu—such as, for example, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, or Grace Hartigan. The reasons for that are not particularly easy to discern at a remove of more than half a century, but perhaps it was the intensity and almost tangible physicality of Mitchell’s painting that made it seem masculine or at least palatable to masculine sensibilities, or perhaps it had something to do with the artist’s famously hard-drinking, hard-boiled, and pugnacious persona. In any case, the art of Joan Mitchell remains a timeless, luminous, and passionate part of the modern-art canon, irrespective of personality, place, and period.

An opportunity to take full account of Mitchell’s oeuvre is being offered right now, in the form of a large-scale retrospective at SFMOMA. Titled simply “Joan Mitchell,” the exhibition, which has been co-organized by SFMOMA and the Baltimore Museum of Art, runs from September 4 through January 17 and features around 80 works by the artist—including rarely-seen early paintings—along with sketchbooks, drawings, letters, and photographs documenting Mitchell’s life and work process. After its run in San Francisco, the exhibition will travel to Baltimore for a March 6–August 14 installation, followed by another version that will be on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in the fall of 2022. The SFMOMA iteration of “Joan Mitchell” features 10 paintings—some of which come from the museum’s own holdings—that will not travel to the other venues. On the occasion of this retrospective, a catalogue is being published in which co-curators Sarah Roberts, Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, and Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Programming & Research Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University, present the results of two years’ worth of research into the Mitchell archives, as well as critical reassessments of the artist’s career. “Mitchell’s glorious paintings radiate with the vitality, feeling and sweeping color we usually experience only in the natural world. On a grand scale, she contended with and remade the possibilities of abstraction, personal expression and landscape,” Roberts says. “After so many months of restriction due to the pandemic and the limitations of art online, Mitchell’s subtle surfaces and moving color will offer visitors a transporting visual experience and remind us of the irreplaceable and overwhelming power of seeing art in person.”

Born in 1925 to a wealthy family in Chicago, Mitchell grew up in a decidedly modernist home. Her father, James Mitchell, was a dermatologist and an amateur painter who conveyed a love of painting and nature to his daughter, while her mother, Marion Strobel Mitchell, was a poet and the co-editor of Poetry magazine, America’s premier organ of modernist verse. Such august figures as T.S. Eliot and Thornton Wilder passed through the Mitchell home, and the young Joan was exposed to avant-garde creativity from her earliest years. She retained a strong affinity for poetry throughout her life, sometimes titling her paintings after poems, especially those written by friends such as Frank O’Hara, with whom she had a mutually inspiring relationship. Mitchell’s first husband, Barney Rosset—to whom she was briefly married, from 1949 to 1952—became the publisher of Grove Press, which specialized in avant-garde writing; it was at her urging that he made the decision to buy it.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled (Merry Christmas Chris), 1973
Private collection, New York; © Estate of Joan Mitchell; photo: Brian Buckley; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of William Rubin, 1960.4.2

As early as the second grade, Mitchell was taking art lessons at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Institute’s collection made her aware of what painting was capable of. The French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on the walls were a particular fascination, but Van Gogh was Mitchell’s “first passion,” as she later recalled, and remained a vital presence in her consciousness throughout her career. When she was 11, her father presented her with a choice—to pursue either poetry or painting; failure to choose would result in mediocrity in both. Mitchell attended the Francis W. Parker School, a progressive private school in the Lincoln Park neighborhood that had a strong art program; the future artist Edward Gorey was a classmate and became a close lifelong friend of Mitchell’s, though the two cordially disliked each other’s work. Amid all her art activities, Mitchell also found time to be a competitive figure skater, partly to satisfy her father’s obsession with athletic competition. After a short stint at Smith College, she returned to Chicago for more studies at the Art Institute, which heavily emphasized French 19th- and early-20th-century painting as models.

After a brief painting trip in Mexico—where she had the privilege of meeting Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, thanks to a letter of introduction from Art Institute director Daniel Catton Rich, arranged through her parents’ influence—Mitchell moved to New York, eager to jump into the postwar art scene there. Visiting Manhattan galleries, she broadened her horizons by viewing the work of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Matta. She signed up for classes at Hans Hofmann’s studio but lasted only a couple of classes—“I didn’t understand a word he said,” she recalled, “so I left, terrified.” In 1948, Mitchell left for France, her first trip to the country that would eventually become her permanent home. There she painted in a Cubist-influenced figurative vein, but on her return to New York in 1950, she made a decisive breakthrough Speaking of her 1949–50 painting Figure and the City, she said, “I knew it was the last figure I would ever paint. I just knew. And it was.” The die was cast for abstraction, and Mitchell soon found herself as an artist. In January 1952 she was rewarded with her first solo show, at the New Gallery in the Algonquin Hotel. The gallery was a project of the young dealer Eugene Thaw, later to be famous as a great collector and scholar of drawings. The show was well received, and one of the consequences was an invitation to join The Club, a regular gathering for passionate art discussion and equally passionate socializing on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. Mitchell spent the next few years getting established in the New York art world, showing regularly at the prestigious Stable Gallery. Her work from this period has a slashing intensity, with densely packed marks made not only with a brush but with a rag and even her fingers.

Weeds, 1976
Collection Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; © Estate of Joan Mitchell; photo: Cathy Carver, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Private collection

In 1959, after several stays in France alternating with periods in New York, Mitchell made the decision to move to France full-time. In Paris, beginning in 1955, she had fallen in with a group of expatriate North American artists including Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm, and Shirley Jaffe, and the French Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle. She and Riopelle became lovers, kicking off a  tumultuous quarter-century-long on-and-off relationship that involved both mutual inspiration and opposition. After her move abroad, Mitchell developed her mature style, in which passages of dense, varied brush marks are set off against much lighter, even white space, some of which are actually bare or nearly bare canvas. Her paintings frequently refer to the landscape or the cityscape, but they are not “views” transformed from figuration to abstraction, but rather expressions of the emotions and impressions that Mitchell experienced and received from these places. Essentially, what she is painting is the feelings generated by the memories of the scenes. Through the 1960s, her style evolved a greater feeling of airiness or lightness, often expressing a passionate, joyful quality that was not so much in evidence in her New York phase.

In the 1970s, Mitchell quite literally expanded her painting by making diptychs, triptychs, or even four or five connected canvases. These very large multi-panel works, almost like murals, not only increase the possibilities of scale, they also exploit the multiplicity of the panels to create a sense of progressive movement. For example, in the 1979 four-canvas painting La Vie en Rose, the purple moves from the background in the far left frame to the foreground by the time the fourth frame is reached, while thickly entangled brushstrokes giving way to pale expanses, only to coalesce again in the end. There is a quality here akin to the development of a piece of music, with theme and variation. In the brightly colorful triptych Bracket (1989), the first and third panels are smaller than the central one, giving the effect of a Renaissance altarpiece with wings. The side panels complement the central panel, which seems to expand or fully develop what is implicit in them.

Petit Matin, 1982.
Private collection; © Estate of Joan Mitchell; photo: Ian Lefebvre

In the early 1980s, Mitchell suffered from cancer, and from then until her death in 1992 was in poor health, exacerbated by a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. Depressed by her illness and preoccupied by mortality, she nonetheless worked continuously through the period, creating paintings that convey hope rather than fear. Sunflowers, a diptych completed the year before she died, bursts into bloom, exuberant in its joy and delight in color. In its choice of subject, it is an homage to Van Gogh, Mitchell’s favorite artist. No Birds (1987) is an explicit answer to, if not a take-off on, Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows, which Mitchell had recently seen at an exhibition at the Met in New York. In Mitchell’s painting, a two-panel work, we see the wheatfield, but the crows have flown away. Is their absence symbolic of the flight of Mitchell’s painting away from figuration, or of life itself fleeing from the artist, from all of us?

Mitchell liked to refer to herself as “une mauvaise herbe” (a weed). A weed grows where it wants to, with a powerful vitality that defeats the gardener’s best efforts, and while some may find it undesirable or at least unwelcome, it has a beauty all its own. Van Gogh’s beloved sunflowers could be considered weeds. In 1976, Mitchell made a painting that she titled Weeds. Dominated by the rich hues of royal blue and orange, it is gorgeous if slightly disorderly. It may be the closest thing the artist has given us to a self-portrait.