Background
Joan Mitchell was born on February 12, 1925 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. She was the daughter of James Herbert Mitchell, a dermatologist, and Marion Strobel Mitchell, a poet.
Joan Mitchell was born on February 12, 1925 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. She was the daughter of James Herbert Mitchell, a dermatologist, and Marion Strobel Mitchell, a poet.
Initially, Joan studied at Francis W. Parker School. Some time later, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she attained her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1947 and three years later, in 1950, Joan received Master of Fine Arts degree.
Joan Mitchell also attended Smith College.
Also, a $2,000 travel fellowship allowed her to study in Paris and Provence in 1948-1949.
In 1971, Joan received an Honorary Doctorate from Miami University and in 1987 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Moving to New York in the late 1940s, Joan was introduced to the ideas espoused by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann. In 1951, Mitchell was included in the groundbreaking "Ninth Street Show", curated by Leo Castelli at the Artists’ Club in Greenwich Village. Over the following decades, she divided her time between Paris and New York, developing the style of blocky shapes of lyrical colour.
In October 1957, the first major feature on her work method appeared in ARTnews, an American visual-arts magazine.
After moving to Paris in 1959, Mitchell began painting in a studio on the rue Fremicourt. During the period between 1960 and 1964, she moved away from the all-over style and bright colours of her earlier compositions, instead using sombre hues and dense central masses of colour to express something inchoate and primordial.
In 1972, Joan held her first major museum exhibition, entitled "My Five Years in the Country", at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.
In 1988, Joan's retrospective exhibition, which featured 54 paintings produced from 1951 to 1987, was held. Also, her first solo exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery took place during the period from October 25 to November 25, 1989.
In the final years of her life, Mitchell returned to the subject of sunflowers with renewed focus. In her work "Sunflowers" (1990-1991), she chose to paint the flowers in a state of decay, wanting the work to "convey the feeling of a dying sunflower".
Joan Mitchell was known for the compositional rhythms, bold coloration and sweeping gestural brushstrokes of her large and often multi-paneled paintings.
During her lifetime, Joan attained numerous awards, including $2,000 travel fellowship, Lissone Prize (1961), Creative Arts Award (1973) and Le Grand Prix des Arts (Peinture) de la Ville de Paris (1991). Also, in 1989, she was made a Painter of Year by French Ministry of Culture.
At Christie’s May auction, Mitchell’s 1969 "Blueberry" was estimated at $5 million to $7 million. It drew at least six bidders, including those from Europe, Asia and the United States, selling for a record $16.6 million with fees.
Today, the painter's legacy is remembered through the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which provides grants for sculptors and painters in the United States.
Her works are kept in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and others.
Untitled
Untitled
Merci
Heel, Sit, Stay
City Landscape
La Grande Vallee XIV (For a Little While)
Posted
Untitled
Untitled
La Vie en Rose
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
La Chatiere
Diabolo (neige et fleurs)
Trees
Minnesota
Sunflowers
Untitled
Hemlock
Untitled
Untitled
Salut Tom
Untitled
George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold
Mooring
Untitled
Girolata Triptych
Bracket
Untitled
Le Chemin des Ecoliers
La Grande Vallée XVI, Pour Iva
Untitled
Tilleul
Untitled
Low Water
Untitled
Ici
Blue Territory
Untitled
Trees
River
Edrita Fried
Weeds
The Lot
Tournesols
Untitled
My Landscape II
Tilleul
Little Trip
Tondo
Ladybug
Untitled
Untitled
Grandes Carrières
Champs
Girolata
Riviere
Sunflower III
Untitled
Blueberry
Mitchell rejected the emphasis on flatness and the "all-over" approach to composition, that were prevalent among many of the leading Abstract Expressionists. Instead, she preferred to retain a more traditional sense of figure and ground in her pictures, and she often composed them in ways, that evoked impressions of landscape.
Quotations:
"My paintings are titled after they are finished. I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me — and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed."
"In France I'm an American gestural painter and lyric on top of it, very perjorative, and here I'm Frenchy because I have color and I'm decorative, so you can't win, honey. And on top of it I'm a girl, woman, female...They call me "sauvage" in Europe because I'm direct and I say what I think and you're supposed to be diplomatic and...what I call lying, really."
In the 1950s, Joan Mitchell was a lively, argumentative member of the famed Cedar Bar crowd, alongside Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and other notable first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters.
Quotes from others about the person
"She was one of the first women to provide, as artist, as a painter, a role model. Through the fact that she sustained herself in this brilliant way she made it possible for other people to do that, men and women, who wanted to paint against the grain." — Marcia Tucker, a founder of New Museum in New York
Joan Mitchell married Barney Rosset, an American publisher, in 1949. Three years later, in 1952, the couple divorced. Later that year, she married Alan Greenspan, an economist. But this marital union also was short-lived.
From 1955 to 1979, Mitchell had a relationship with Jean-Paul Riopelle, who was a Canadian painter and sculptor.
