Joan Mitchell was an American artist at the center of the 20th century American scene.
You probably know the name Jackson Pollock. You might know Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. You know Barnett Newman. They all were part of a movement in American art known as “abstract expressionism” that broke out in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Though their work was often hard to make sense of, it was hailed even by mainstream American publications like Life Magazine as the very expression of American energy in the postwar world.
Now let me tell you the name of another artist associated with that movement, one not nearly as well known and widely celebrated. Her name was Joan Mitchell and she was as good as any of the names you know. I recently saw a big retrospective of her work and it just blew me away. I came away realizing that if I didn’t know Joan Mitchell, I really didn’t know American art at all.
Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 and moved to New York City when she was 22. Soon she had fallen in with painters like de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline and could be found at the famous artist hangout the Cedar Bar, debating and arguing about painting. In 1951, her work was featured in a show curated by famed gallery owner Leo Castelli. Her first solo show came the next year at the New Gallery. She moved to Paris in 1959 and would live in France the next 30 years.
Sarah Roberts, associate curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—one of the institutions that assembled this show—said Mitchell created “compositions of unparalleled beauty, strength, and emotional intensity,” that sometimes straddle the line between abstraction and landscape.
You’ll see this when you work your way through the paintings in this exhibit. Some of the paintings that Roberts would characterize as being on the landscape side of the balance make me think of what John Marin’s landscapes would look like if they’d been painted by an abstract expressionist.
It’s a very big exhibit and you’ll get a thorough overview of Mitchell’s work throughout her life. A lot of the famous painters of mid-century modernism have similarities. But the deeper you look here, the more you realize you’re looking at the work of one singularly distinctive artist’s vision.
Now, I saw this exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and unfortunately, it closes there today. But if you’re not in San Francisco right now there’s good news: in early March it opens in Baltimore and will run through August. See it there.
