THE BRIDGE, 1956. Oil on canvas, Diptych, 45 x 70 inches
JOAN MITCHELL
American (1926-1992)

Joan Mitchell, recognized as a principal figure and one of the few female artists of the New York School was born in Chicago in 1925. After attending the progressive Francis W. Parker School from 1930 to 1942, Mitchell entered Smith College, where she studied art for two years and from 1944 to 1947, she trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating she was awarded a James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship, which took her to France for a year in 1948-49, and it was there, influenced by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, and Wassily Kandinsky that her paintings moved toward abstraction.

Upon returning to the United States, she settled in New York where she became a part of a close-knit community of abstract painters such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning and became one of the few female members of “The Club.” Mitchell was strongly influenced by the abstract expressionists; however, rather than concerning herself with the expression of emotional states, her aim was to convey her experience of landscape. Her paintings of that period are expansive, often covering two separate panels. She painted on unprimed canvas or white ground with gestural, sometimes violent brushwork. In 1951 Mitchell participated in the famous Ninth Street Show alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Hans Hofmann. In 1952, she had her first solo exhibition at the New Gallery and soon established a reputation as one of the leading younger American Abstract Expressionist painters. Throughout the 1950s Mitchell’s gestural abstractions received wide acclaim. She exhibited regularly in New York throughout the next four decades and maintained close friendships with many New York School painters and poets and was a regular at the famous Cedar Tavern. Mitchell returned to France in 1955 and divided her time between New York and Paris for the next few years. She moved permanently to France in 1959, working in a studio in Paris until 1968, when she moved to Vétheuil, on the Seine near Monet’s Giverny.

During the almost 50 years of her painting life, as Abstract Expressionism was eclipsed by successive styles, Mitchell’s commitment to the tenets of gestural abstraction remained firm and uncompromising. Summing up her achievement, Klaus Kertess wrote, “She transformed the gestural painterliness of Abstract Expressionism into a vocabulary so completely her own that it could become ours as well. And her total absorption of the lessons of Matisse and van Gogh led to a mastery of color inseparable from the movement of light and paint. Her ability to reflect the flow of her consciousness in that of nature, and in paint, is all but unparalleled.”

Joan Mitchell died on the morning of October 30, 1992 at the American Hospital of Paris on the eve of a full-scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work has been of increasing importance and popularity in the last decade with major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Galerie Nationale de Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; IVAM, Valencia, Spain; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC and dozens of other museums. A biography of Joan Mitchell was published in 2011, written by Patricia Albers and titled Lady Painter: A Life.