Joan Mitchell
1925–1992

Joan Mitchell’s exposure to art began at an early age: her father was an amateur artist, and her mother was an associate editor at Poetry magazine. Mitchell studied at Smith College and Columbia University, and earned degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Influenced by the work of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, Mitchell began working in an abstract mode in the early 1950s, becoming one of the few women—in addition to Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner—to gain notice as an Abstract Expressionist. Mitchell’s paintings are characterized by boldly expressive, varied brushwork; an adventurous feel for color; and a dynamic, often unresolved tension between figure and ground. If such qualities aligned her works with the New York School, their lingering, if tenuous, connection to the outside world, specifically in their evocation of natural sensations such as light and movement, set them apart. The title Hemlock (an allusion to a Wallace Stevens poem), for example, promotes a reading of the work’s imagery as a tree, and indeed the tight central cluster, composed of verdant calligraphic spikes, supports such an interpretation. The color white functions in this work as both foreground and background, flatness and relief, creating an effect of atmospheric lyricism and contributing to the sense that Hemlock is as much about the experience of seeing as it is about the thing seen.

Mitchell left New York for France in 1959 and remained committed to painting abstract takes on landscape throughout the 1960s and 1970s, calling herself “the last Abstract Expressionist.”

Introduction

Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.

Mitchell's emotionally intense style and its gestural brushwork were influenced by nineteenth-century post-impressionist painters, particularly Henri Matisse. Memories of landscapes inspired her compositions; she famously told art critic Irving Sandler, "I carry my landscapes around with me." Her later work was informed and constrained by her declining health.

Mitchell was one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim. Her paintings, drawings, and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections around the world, and have sold for record-breaking prices. In 2021, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Baltimore Museum of Art co-organized a comprehensive retrospective of her work.

In her will, Mitchell provided for the creation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a non-profit corporation that awards grants and fellowships to working artists and maintains her archives.