Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell 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. The Fondation Louis Vuitton presented an exhibition of the work of Mitchell and Claude Monet from October 2022 to February 2023.
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.
Family
Mitchell's family roots trace back to the Revolutionary War. The dust jacket front inside flap of Joan Mitchell Lady Painter: A Life describes Mitchell as an heiress. Her mother, Marion Strobel is described as an heiress, while her father, Dr. James Herbert Mitchell was an "unpedigreed son of a downstate farmer". They married on December 6, 1922, on North Michigan Avenue.In 1857, Sarah Moore and Daniel Baxter, Marion's maternal grandparents, left "well-established" Quincy, Massachusetts families to settle on Ohio Street in Chicago. By 1871, Daniel Baxter had accumulated $100,000 in the grain business. Joan's grandmother, Henrietta Baxter, was the eldest of their five children. In 1890, Henrietta married Cincinnati-bred Charles Louis Strobel. Strobel was the son of pocketbook factory owner and immigrant, Karl Strobel, and a descendant of Bavarian porcelain merchants. A trained civil engineer, Charles worked for 27 years at Andrew Carnegie's Keystone Bridge Company.
James Herbert Mitchell is from Havana, Illinois where his maternal grandparents, George and Waity Vaugahan had moved to from Vermont in 1839. With a land grant signed by President James Polk they built a farmhouse and raised corn, wheat, horses, sheep and dairy cows. Their ancestors had been British colonists and tannery operators. Joan was known to make claims that her paternal great-grandfather was an American Revolution combatant. These claims were not confirmed. Sarah Felicia Vaughan married a Mr. James Hickman Herndon Mitchell in 1873, having outsurvived both of her brothers and mother. Her sickly father passed in 1874. Mitchell was the youngest of 11 children born to Isaac Mitchell and Frances Stribling Mitchell who had left Virginia to homestead in Kentucky and then along the Illinois River. Her half great-uncle, Henry Harrison Mitchell, was the first casualty of his county in the American Civil War.
Early life and education
Mitchell was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of dermatologist James Herbert Mitchell and poet Marion Strobel Mitchell. Her father served as president of the American Dermatological Association, her mother served as co-editor of Poetry. She enjoyed diving and skating growing up, and her art would later reflect this athleticism; one gallery owner commented that Mitchell "approached painting almost like a competitive sport". Mitchell frequently attended Saturday art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and eventually would spend her summers of later adolescence in an Institute-run art colony, Ox-Bow. She lived on Chestnut Street in the Streeterville neighborhood and attended high school at Francis W. Parker School in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. She was close to her Parker classmate Edward Gorey and remained friends with him in later years, although neither cared for the other's work. When her maternal grandfather, Charles Louis Strobel, died in April 1936, her inheritance was two-thirds of his $500,000, and she would later inherit trusts from both parents.Mitchell studied at Smith College in Massachusetts for two years but wanted be a full-time painter. She then attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her BFA in 1947 and her MFA in 1950. She earned a SAIC scholarship in 1944. She painted during her summers in Mexico. After moving to Manhattan in 1947, she wanted to study at Hans Hofmann's school in New York City but, according to curator Jane Livingston, Mitchell attended only one class and declared, "I couldn't understand a word he said so I left, terrified." A $2,000 travel fellowship allowed her to study in Paris and Provence in 1948–49, and she also traveled in Spain and Italy. During this period, her work became increasingly abstract.
Mitchell married American publisher Barney Rosset in September 1949 in Le Lavandou, France. The couple returned to New York City later that year. Rosset founded Grove Press. They would divorce in 1952.
Early career (New York)
In 1950, Mitchell saw her first Willem de Kooning painting at the Whitney Annual. That year, Mitchell painted what would be her last picture with a human figure incorporated in the work Figure and the City, of which she said later "I knew that it would be my last figure".Then throughout the 1950s, Mitchell was active in the New York School of artists and poets, and was associated with the American Abstract expressionist movement, although she personally abhorred aesthetic labels. Beginning in 1950, she maintained a studio in Greenwich Village, first on Eleventh Street and later on Ninth Street. She would maintain a New York City apartment until 1982, despite being based in France starting in the late 1950s. She was a regular at established artist gathering spots like the Cedar Tavern and The Club, an invitation-only loft space on Eighth Street where Mitchell participated in panel discussions and attended social gatherings throughout the 1950s.
Mitchell maintained a robust creative discourse with fellow New York School painters Philip Guston, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, whose work she greatly admired. As Katy Siegel wrote in Joan Mitchell, "She went to their studios and shows, and they came to hers; she had dinner and drinks with them, in company and alone, talking painting materials and great art." Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Shirley Jaffe, Elaine de Kooning, and Sonia Gechtoff, Mitchell was one of the few female artists in her era to gain critical acclaim and recognition.
In 1951, Mitchell's work was exhibited in the landmark "Ninth Street Show", organized by art dealer Leo Castelli and by members of the Artists' Club; the show also included work by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Hans Hofmann. Joan Mitchell carried her large abstract painting across town with the help of Castelli. Her friends Kline and de Kooning thought her work was excellent and put the painting in good place in the exhibition. Her first solo exhibition was held at the New Gallery in New York in 1952.
By the mid-1950s Mitchell was spending increasing amounts of time traveling and working in France. She continued to exhibit regularly in New York, with numerous solo exhibitions at the Stable Gallery throughout the 1950s–1960s. In an interview with Linda Nochlin, Mitchell admitted that though many of her colleagues were very supportive of her artistic career, because she was a woman in the art field she did have a few setbacks. She said that she was once told by Hans Hofmann that she should be painting, which sounds very nice, but she took it to mean that the male artists were not threatened by female artists so much that they did not care if they advanced their artistic career.
In 1955, while in Paris, Mitchell met Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, with whom she would have a long, rich, and tumultuous relationship. They maintained separate homes and studios, but had dinner and drank together nearly daily. In the same year, Mitchell met the author Samuel Beckett for the first time. Their relationship was both personal and intellectual. Critic Lucy Jeffery writes about their mutual influence and interest in Paul Cézanne, explaining that 'Mitchell and Beckett share a style that, like the pendulum, swings between dynamism and hesitancy, limpidity and obscurity, and, in so doing, obscures meaning to resist reductive pigeonholing. In 'One Evening' and Tondo they created self-reflexive fragments that make us, as wayfarers of the text/canvas, traverse 'n unending ending or beginning light'.'
In 1956 Mitchell painted one of her breakthrough works, Hemlock, named by the artist after it was completed for what she called the "dark and blue feeling" of Wallace Stevens' 1916 poem Domination of Black.
In October 1957, the first major feature on Mitchell's work appeared in ARTnews. In the article, entitled "Mitchell Paints a Picture", art critic Irving Sandler wrote, "Those feelings which she strives to express she defines as 'the qualities which differentiate a line of poetry from a line of prose.' However, emotion must have an outside reference, and nature furnishes the external substance in her work." By the end of the 1950s, Mitchell was included among "the Vocal Girls" in Time.
Mid-career (France)
By 1959, Mitchell was living full-time in France and painting in a studio on the rue Fremicourt in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. Mitchell kept this rental for the most of the 1960s. She was enticed to Paris by her lover Riopelle. During this time, her paintings appeared in a string of high-profile international exhibitions, including the Osaka exhibition International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai; the 29th Venice Biennale; the V Bienal do Museo de Arte Moderna, São Paulo; and Documenta II in Kassel. Along with regular solo exhibitions at the Stable Gallery and group exhibitions at other venues in New York, she began exhibiting in Paris with Galerie Jean Fournier. Fournier would remain Mitchell's Paris dealer for more than three decades.Also in the early 1960s, Mitchell had solo exhibitions in Paris with Galerie Neufville and Galerie Lawrence. She had additional solo exhibitions in Italy and Switzerland. Throughout the 1960s, Mitchell's work was included in the Salon de Mai and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, as well as numerous group exhibitions held at France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, The Netherlands, and other international venues.
During the period between 1960 and 1964, Mitchell moved away from the all-over style and bright colors of her earlier compositions, instead using sombre hues and dense central masses of color to express something inchoate and primordial. The marks on these works were said to be extraordinary: "The paint flung and squeezed on to the canvases, spilling and spluttering across their surfaces and smeared on with the artist's fingers." The artist herself referred to the work created in this period of the early 1960s as "very violent and angry," but by 1964 she was "trying to get out of a violent phase and into something else." For a time, Mitchell rivaled de Kooning as the greatest living abstract painter. By this time leading abstract expressionist at her level such as Kline and Pollock were dead and de Kooning had reverted to figurative work, making room for her to make these radical stylistic shifts in her abstract expressionism.
In 1967, Mitchell inherited enough money following the death of her mother to purchase a two-acre estate in the town of Vétheuil, France, near Giverny, the gardener's cottage of which had been Claude Monet's home. Mitchell bought the house "so she wouldn't have to dogwalk" and that came in useful for her 13 dogs. Situated outside of Paris, she lived and worked there for the remainder of her life. The landscape in Vétheuil, particularly the view of the Seine and the gardens on her property, became frequent reference points for her work. Yet, near her death she spoke as if she acquired the property without regard to the prior owner and as if she did not even know how to pronounce his name, rhyming it with bonnet. Mitchell often invited artist friends from New York to come on creative retreats to Vétheuil. Painter Joyce Pensato recalled, "She wanted to give to young people. Carl and I called it the Fresh Air Fund...The first time she invited me for the summer, it ended up being March to September. I got brainwashed for six months, and that's how I found out who I am."
In 1968, Mitchell became the first artist to have abstract expressionism work in the Smart Museum of Art collection in her home town when Untitled by Mitchell became one of the first donations to the museum. That year, Mitchell began exhibiting with Martha Jackson Gallery in New York; she continued to exhibit with the gallery into the 1970s. In 1972, Mitchell staged her first major museum exhibition, entitled My Five Years in the Country, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. The exhibition, especially Mitchell's "Sunflower" paintings from the late 1960s-early 1970s, received critical acclaim. Writing for The New York Times, Peter Schjeldahl predicted that Mitchell would ultimately be recognized "as one of the best American painters not only of the fifties, but of the sixties and seventies as well." He continued, "This claim will not, I think, seem large to anyone lucky enough to have viewed the recent massive and almost awesomely beautiful Mitchell exhibition—49 paintings, some of them huge, done during the five years the artist has been living in France—at the Everson Museum in Syracuse." The exhibition traveled to Martha Jackson Gallery following the Everson Museum presentation.
In 1969 Mitchell completed her first large scale triptych, the 16.5 foot wide Sans Neige.
Being based in France, Mitchell was not caught up on the New York art shift to pop art, minimalism and conceptualism. Mitchell's haf her first museum exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in 1972. In 1976, Mitchell began exhibiting regularly with New York gallerist Xavier Fourcade, who was her New York dealer until his death in 1987.
In 1979 Mitchell completed two of her best known large scale works, the polyptychs La Vie en Rose and Salut Tom. Tausif Noor in writing for the New York Times says of La Vie en Rose ... "Mitchell juxtaposes energetic — nearly violent — sections of black and blue brush strokes against a haze of lavender and pale pink, warping the viewer's sense of the painting's scale and directing the eye"....