Joan Mitchell 1925-1992

By Aliza Wall

Joan Mitchell, Bracket, 1989, oil on canvas, 270.51 cm x 471.81 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/fc.838/.

Although certainly less known than her male counterparts, American painter Joan Mitchell contributed a singular energy to the Abstract Expressionist style. Born February 12, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois, Mitchell’s childhood was both privileged and immensely damaging. Her mother and father, who worked as a poet and a doctor (and amateur painter) respectively, degraded Mitchell emotionally while also expecting academic and social excellence fit for their societal status. Mitchell took up painting at 10 to please her father and found further success as an athlete and poet. After attending Smith College for two years, Mitchell studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she earned a B.F.A. in 1947. She was then awarded a James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship which brought her to France from 1948 to 1949. 

Upon her return to New York in 1950, Mitchell was readily accepted as a promising member of the New York art scene, seeking the guidance of established male artists like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. She was one of the few women to be admitted to the Eighth Street Club, a drinking club of sorts comprised of New York’s foremost (male) Abstract Expressionist painters. Mitchell was also included (alongside countless other iconic artists) in Leo Castelli’s groundbreaking 1951 exhibition, “The Ninth Street Show”. Mitchell’s works of this period are marked by an intense tactility and emotion, exemplified by her 1954-55 piece, City Landscape. This piece is indicative of her thematic focus on landscape, which persisted for the entirety of her career. 

In 1955, Mitchell began to summer in Paris at the advice of her therapist, who had cautioned her to distance herself from the hard-drinking Eighth Street Club. Mitchell’s time in Paris did not directly affect her work as she was incredibly committed to a set of inspirations and working techniques that rarely faltered. Throughout her career, Mitchell cited music, poetry, dogs, and landscapes as her primary sources of inspiration and practised a painting method utilizing charcoal, house painters’ brushes, and her hands. These influences and practices are apparent in her 1956 painting, Hemlock, which takes its name from a Wallace Stevens poem. The piece exemplifies the passionate freneticism of Mitchell’s working style. Mitchell officially moved to Paris in 1957 and finally settled in 1968 in Vétheuil, a small town outside of Paris where she would live until her death. During the late 1960s, she began her “Sunflower” series, which were marked by explosions of vibrant and bright colours. 

During the 1970s, Mitchell focused on creating large, multipanelled pieces that often reflected her interest in nature, like her monumental polyptych, Fields IV (1971). In 1973, Mitchell was awarded a solo exhibition by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where she exhibited twenty-two paintings completed in Vétheuil between 1969 and 1973. Although this period of Mitchell’s life was marked by professional success, the artist was diagnosed with advanced oral cancer in 1984, which only worsened the anxiety, depression, and alcoholism that she had dealt with throughout her life. Following her diagnosis, Mitchell’s artistic output focused increasingly on death, perhaps most emblematically in her 1990-1991 painting, Sunflowers, which serves as a mirror of sorts to her earlier Sunflowers of the 1960s. Mitchell intended for this work to ensure her immortality, wishing to merge with the timelessness and formlessness of nature saying, “I become the sunflower…. I no longer exist.” Mitchell died of lung cancer in Paris on October 30, 1992. However, her singular legacy as both an extraordinarily ornery person and sensitive, emotional painter persists to this day. 

Bibliography

Albers, Patricia. “Joan Mitchell.” Encyclopedia Britannica. February 8, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joan-Mitchell.

Cohen, Alina. “Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell Was Complicated, Driven—and a Genius.” Artsy. July 6, 2018. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-abstract-expressionist-joan-mitchell-complicated-driven-genius.

“Joan Mitchell Bio.” Joan Mitchell Foundation. Accessed February 8, 2020. https://joanmitchellfoundation.org/work/artist/bio.

Stuckler, Patti. “Mitchell, Joan.” Grove Art Online. September 22, 2005. https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000058651?rskey=nICxYx&result=1.