Arts and Letters

Joan Mitchell left the New York art scene in the mid-1950s for the small town of Vetheuil, which was Monet Country, near Paris, where she resided until her death [in 1992], but her paintings—recognizable in their abstraction, bold brushstrokes, and dances of vivid color and always refreshing in their lyrical style and emotive power—continued to speak to those of us left behind.

One of the most significant of the second generation Abstract Expressionists, Joan did not depict nature, or even reinterpret it; she conveyed her impression of it, the mood surrounding it, and the feelings it invoked in her. The vividly changing landscapes of Lake Michigan and the East River were memories of her youth which resurfaced in early paintings. The impact of the surrounding countryside she looked out onto from her house in Vetheuil dominated her later works. She attempted, in her work, to freeze-frame an impression of nature amidst the painterly activity she imbued the canvas with. Throughout her career her work has had great spirit, vivacity, and persistence. The task of the artist, Samuel Beckett said, is to "find a form that accommodates the mess." It seems that Joan succeeded in achieving just that.

Words and pictures comprised the world in which young Joan Mitchell grew up. Her mother, a co-editor of Poetry magazine, entertained the poets T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Thornton Wilder, to name but a few, regularly in her home. With her father, a doctor and amateur artist, Joan wandered the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago to contemplate the works of old Masters. He took her to the zoo and the Museum of Natural History on weekends, encouraging her to draw alongside him as they watched the animals. Perhaps not surprisingly, she began writing poetry at the age of 8 or 9—and sold her first landscape painting while still in the eighth grade.

The last line of her first poem reads: "And the bleakness comes through the trees without a sound." Her career as a poet was short-lived, as she turned instead to capture such fleeting impressions of nature in choreographed phrases of texture and color rather than text. Her paintings were lyrical and poetic. As one critic wrote, "An actual landscape with clamberings of foliage and sun is more likely to call up one's memories of a Mitchell painting than the other way around." She would capture the bleakness, the soundlessness, and surprise of the trees.

After briefly attending Smith College, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then moved to New York City, where she swiftly became an active member of the downtown art scene. She mingled with her contemporaries at the Artists' Club (she was one of few women to gain admission), at Hayter's New York studio, and at venues like the Jewish Museum, where she participated in the 1957 show Artists of the New York School: Second Generation, curated by Meyer Shapiro. A traveling fellowship took her to France in the early 1950s and a romance held her there. Soon Joan was to identify more and more with life in France and her returns to New York City became less and less frequent.

Joan was an action painter, an ecstatic and inventive colorist engaged in sensuously tactile painting throughout her career. She was always striving to achieve a balance of chaos and order. Flashes and tangles of paint dance lively and uninhibited across her canvases, but she once pointed out that "the freedom in my work is quite controlled. I don't close my eyes and hope for the best."

Although ill during the last years of her life, she didn't close her eyes and hope for the best then either. Her work had long since displayed a preoccupation with death: her reflections on the illness of her mother and death of her father in the 1960s resulted in a series of "Black Paintings" in which a sense of foreboding, gloom, and bleakness prevail. But as Joan became aware of her own mortality a few decades later, a dialogue with death through an exploration of her own feelings transpires on the canvas. A fight against her own mortality persists, but the gloom subsides and an exuberance, the joy of being alive triumphs and remains as her legacy to us.