Joan Mitchell aims to tell the story of Mitchell’s art as fully as possible without the biographical concerns of most of the exhibitions of women artists of the past.
While the life of Mitchell (1925-92) was full of fascinating details: a privileged childhood in Chicago steeped in 19th century poetry and art; national competitions for young figure skaters; numerous tumultuous relationships with other artists, including Samuel Beckett Mitchell herself was never interested in labels of her genre or lifestyle. This retrospective explores the entire period of Joan Mitchell’s artistic practice, from her spectacular New York paintings of the early 1950s to the magnificent large-scale multi-panel paintings
The 80-piece survey, which opens on September 4 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) and then travels to Baltimore and Paris, aims to dispel those dwarf shadows and allow us to see Mitchell’s art clearly and completely. The curators hope to show what she was like “a woman who managed to make art the center of her life and didn’t let anyone tell her what it meant to be a woman – seeking tenderness, love, etc. beauty, and also sporting prowe
Joan Mitchell was a “second generation” abstract expressionist painter and printmaker who was an important member of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, although he spent most of his career in France. Joan Mitchell was one of the few artists of her time to receive critical and public acclaim. She was born in 1925 in Chicago and has established herself as an outstanding talent in the Avantgarde scene of post-war New York.
There was no return when Joan Mitchell completed Figure and the City in 1950, a painting in which an abstract figure appears on canvas amid many cubic forms. Prior to this breakthrough, Mitchell had worked in a semi-figurative style, creating still lifes and cityscapes in which everything could be reduced to geometric shapes. Mitchell was considered one of the most important contributors to the postwar Abstract Expressionist movement.
So it was in her days, when artists seldom got widespread fame. Mitchell’s ability to solve intractable problems with her innovative drawing techniques will be showcased in a highly anticipated retrospective that opened this week at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was one of her few artists to receive critical and public acclaim. Mitchell was active in the New York School of Artists and Poets in the 1950s and was associated with the American Abstract Expressionist movement [13], though he personally hated aesthetic labels.
In 1951, Mitchell’s work was exhibited at the famous “Ninth Street Exhibition” held by Philip Gaston, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, whose work he greatly respected.
One of the few women participants in 1951, Mitchell was included in the Spring Exhibition on Ninth Street which featured the work of 61 participants and partners. Mitchell began traveling between Paris and New York in 1955 before making France his permanent residence in 1959. His first prints ( a series of screen shots ) illustrated Poems (1960 ), a collection of poems by his friend John Ashbury.
In a 1986 interview, Mitchell informed art historian Linda Nochlin that some works of work he left untitled but gave others lyrical names, referring to his love for lake Michigan as a child, lines of poetry, his pets or scenes from his childhood.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, critics and curators took another look at the artist and his paintings emerged in the context of abstract expressionist exhibitions and “second generation” essays. But as the fortunes of major male figures, including Pollock, DeKuning and Rothko, continued to grow slowly the Joan Mitchell and her work disappeared from the American scene.
She was one of the few artists of her time to receive critical and public acclaim alongside Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Shirley Jaffe, Elaine de Kooning and Sonia Getchtoff.
