TRACES: Joan Mitchell
Today is the occasion to bear in mind Joan Mitchell (12/2/1925-30/10/1992), she is considered one of the most important members of the postwar movement Abstract Expressionism. This was the case even during her day, when female artists rarely achieved widespread fame. In 1972, critic Peter Schjeldahl, for example, called Mitchell “a master of many oil‐painting techniques who seems always to be pushing her mastery to the limit, willfully throwing it against ‘impossible’ problems. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Born in Chicago on Joan Mitchell attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon graduating in 1947, she was awarded a travel fellowship that took her to France for a year, where her paintings became increasingly abstract. Returning to the United States in 1949, Mitchell settled in New York and became an active participant in the “New York School” of painters and poets. Mitchell was quickly immersed in the local Abstract Expressionist art scene. She was part of the regular gatherings of artists and poets at the Cedar Street Tavern and became friends with painters such as de Kooning and Kline. She was one of the few women artists asked to join the exclusive Artists’ Club. Located in Greenwich Village, “The Club” was a center for lectures and discussion and provided a supportive environment for the Abstract Expressionists. Mitchell was included in their seminal 9th Street: Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, curated by Leo Castelli in the spring of 1951. She divided her time between New York and Paris until 1959, when she moved to France permanently. This bold step moved her away from her success in New York and its burgeoning art world. Paris offered a different atmosphere and a different group of friends and artists including Jean-Paul Riopelle. She lived with Riopelle, a successful French Canadian artist. Their artistically supportive yet stormy relationship lasted until 1979. The late 1960s marked a strengthening of Mitchell’s ties to France. After her mother died in 1967, she purchased a home and studio outside Paris in the town of Vetheuil. The beautiful two-acre property overlooking the Seine was reflected in a renewed focus on nature and landscape in her artwork. Her style of painting changed in the larger studio. Less linear works using blocks of vivid color show the influence of Hans Hofmann. She began to create large multi-paneled paintings of two, three, or four panels. In 1967, she also began her professional relationship with the Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris, which would provide significant continued support of her work. Over her long and prolific career, the defining elements of Mitchell’s world—water, trees, dogs, poetry, music—created images and memories from which she worked. She once said, “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and 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”. She observed her landscape intensely, and her acute visual observations of form, space, and color in life were part of the visual memories she drew upon while painting. Mitchell achieved significant critical and commercial success in her lifetime, exhibiting regularly in New York and Paris throughout the later decades of her life. The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major institutions began collecting her paintings in the 1950s. Her work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1974. In 1982, Mitchell became the first female American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Musee d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. A retrospective exhibition, “The Paintings of Joan Mitchell: Thirty-six Years of Natural Expressionism”, toured the United States in 1988. As an extension of her commitment to sustaining an environment of dedication and camaraderie among artists, Mitchell gave personal support to many young artists and writers who came to stay with her at her home in Vétheuil, sometimes for just one night, sometimes for an entire summer. Correspondence in her papers reveals that this generosity often had a life-changing impact on those who spent time with her. Mitchell died in Paris on 30/10/1992. Her generosity in her own lifetime continued after her death with the formation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, called for in her will in order to create support and recognition for individual artists. In addition, the Foundation’s mission includes the promotion and preservation of her legacy, which includes her remarkable body of work, her papers (including correspondence and photographs), and other archival materials related to her life and work.
