Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell was bold and inventive painter, and preeminent member of the “second generation” of Abstract Expressionists. Born in Chicago, she attended Smith College and The Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York in 1950. She participated in the famous “9th Street Show” in 1951, and soon established a reputation as one of the leading younger American Abstract Expressionist painters. She exhibited regularly in New York throughout the next four decades and maintained close friendships with many New York School painters and poets. Influenced by Willem de Kooning (American/Dutch, 1904–1997) and Franz Kline (American, 1910–1962), Mitchell painted striking, animated compositions, but remained somewhat separated from other Abstract Expressionist painters. Mitchell maintained that much of her work was inspired by her reactions to landscapes, rather than by internal emotion and the subconscious, frequently cited as a driving force behind the work of most Abstract Expressionists.

In 1959, after several successful but tempestuous years in New York, Mitchell moved to Paris, and would live in France for the rest of her life. After her mother’s death in 1967, she settled in Vétheuil, a town 60 miles outside of Paris and a previous home of Claude Monet. There Mitchell found ample natural phenomena in the lush French landscapes for her works, which grew larger and bolder later in her life. 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.”

Mitchell had several retrospectives during her lifetime, at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at the Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. She died of lung cancer in 1992, at 66 years of age.