The Paintings Of Joan Mitchell

This exquisitely illustrated volume and the exhibition that it accompanies restore Joan Mitchell to her rightful place in the history of American artists--one of the few women among the first-rank Abstract Expressionist painters. 145 illustrations, 85 in color.

A sweeping retrospective exploring the oeuvre of an incandescent artist, revealing the ways that Mitchell expanded painting beyond Abstract Expressionism as well as the transatlantic contexts that shaped her Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) was fearless in her experimentation, creating works of unparalleled beauty, strength, and emotional intensity. This gorgeous book unfolds the story of an artistic master of the highest order, revealing the ways she expanded abstract painting and illuminating the transatlantic contexts that shaped her. Lavish illustrations cover the full arc of her artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings of the early 1950s to the majestic multipanel compositions she made in France later in her career. Signature works are represented here along with rarely seen paintings, works on paper, artist’s sketchbooks, and photographs of Mitchell’s life, social circle, and surroundings. Featuring scholarly texts, in-depth essays, and artistic and literary responses, this book is organized in ten chronological chapters. Each chapter centers on a closely related suite of paintings, illuminating a shifting inner landscape colored by experience, sensation, memory, and a deep sense of place. Presenting groundbreaking research and a variety of perspectives on her art, life, and connections to poetry and music, this unprecedented volume is an essential reference for Mitchell’s admirers and those just discovering her work.

Between the mid-1950s and the early '60s, the paintings of Joan Mitchell (1925-92) grew exponentially in sophistication and strength. In the summer of 1953 she began to paint outdoors in the Hamptons, developing an engagement with nature, but with a crucial distinction from her male counterparts in the abstract expressionist movement. As the late curator and writer Klaus Kertess wrote, "Pollock's [...] 'I am nature' is very different from Mitchell's being with nature in memory. Pollock is more a shaman, Mitchell more a lover. But both share with van Gogh a high tuned, visceral sensitivity to movement. And both share the quality that [Frank] O'Hara so aptly attributed to Pollock's paintings: 'lyrical desperation.'" This book looks at this period, in which Mitchell began to travel regularly between Paris and New York, and received her first major solo shows in the US and in France.

"Lots of painters are obsessed with inventing something," American painter Joan Mitchell (1925-92) said in 1986. "When I was young, it never occurred to me to invent. All I wanted to do was paint." Throughout her life Mitchell remained committed to totally autonomous abstract painting, always driven by this fundamental love for the craft and technique of painting. In a career spanning more than four decades, Mitchell's painting style married the dynamic gesture of the Abstract Expressionists, her generational peers, to a keen sensitivity to natural phenomena such as light and water. Characterized by an intense color palette and fresh gestural energy, often applied on a very large scale, Mitchell's paintings both sensually seduce and intellectually stimulate viewers. Published to accompany a large-scale survey of Mitchell's painting, Joan Mitchell: Retrospective draws from Mitchell's entire oeuvre, from her early work of the 1950s to her late, multipart works painted in her last years. Both catalogue and exhibition insist on the importance of biography to any retrospective account of Mitchell's work, and a large part of the exhibition is dedicated to the first extensive public presentation of archival materials from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Photographs, correspondence and ephemera from the archives are reproduced here, along with an illustrated timeline that relates Mitchell's life to her work. Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell studied at Smith College before training at The Art Institute of Chicago. After a fellowship in Paris, Mitchell lived in New York, where she became part of the community of Abstract Expressionist painters. She spent increasing amounts of time in France, eventually moving to Paris in 1959, and remaining there until her death in 1992.

Drawing into Painting is a survey of works by Joan Mitchell (1925-92) on canvas and paper from 1958 through 1992, the year of her death. For Mitchell, drawing and painting were related but autonomous activities. Her pastels can be as dense as oil paintings, and her oil paintings can be as light and airy as watercolors. The book includes art from each decade of her career, with a formal range spanning flurried strokes and gestural lines of rhapsodic color, to darkly massed forms and complex, multi-panel formats. Mitchell's move to France in 1959, as Mark Rosenthal writes in his essay, "suggests an aesthetic choice whereby she submerged American artistic developments within a profound embrace of French Impressionism." This decision represented a departure from the influences and goals of her colleagues in the New York School, and harked back to her student days at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Text by Dave Hickey.