BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA.- The Birmingham Museum of Art presents “The Paintings of Joan Mitchell,” on view through August 31, 2003. The work of Joan Mitchell (1926-1992), whose highly charged, emotionally expressive paintings are among the most radiant works of postwar American art, is the subject of a landmark retrospective at the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA). The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, which includes many key works never before exhibited in this country, will be on view through August 31. Birmingham is the only venue in the Southeast.
The Paintings of Joan Mitchell covers the artist’s entire career from 1951 until her death, featuring nearly 50 works, both intimate and grand in scale. The exhibition was mounted with the full cooperation of the estate of Joan Mitchell, which makes possible the presentation of many paintings that have rarely been seen before and in some cases never publicly exhibited. Included will be several of Mitchell’s monumental diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs.
"Joan Mitchell produced some of the most breathtaking paintings of her time," said Jane Livingston, curator of The Paintings of Joan Mitchell. "She outpaced all but a handful of her male mentors and counterparts, while only Lee Krasner stands as a possible rival among her female counterparts. Mitchell’s commitment to an explosive yet delicate, often lyrically beautiful and sometimes aggressively stormy vocabulary of form, line and color evolved over the decades, but she remained devoutly abstract. Her work resonates with a passion for color, light and landscape."
The exhibition’s initial focus is on paintings from the early 1950s, the artist’s first mature period, when she announced the quasi-landscape motif that she would later develop in a number of directions. Major works from this period include Untitled (1951) and Rose Cottage (1953). These prepare the way for such important paintings as Hemlock (1956) and George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold (1957), all large-scale works that signal Mitchell’s energetic yet controlled mastery of oil paint on canvas.
Mitchell’s work in the early to mid-60s introduced a more finely wrought formal manner, as opposed to the entirely gestural, slashing brushwork of the 1950s. The vortex-like shapes were more self-contained, centered away from the canvases’ edges, and in more complex color schemes than ever before. Examples from this period include Calvi (1964) and My Landscape II (1967).
A decisive shift occurred in her work when she moved in 1968 from Paris to Vétheuil, on the same grounds where Claude Monet’s first garden was established. This environment fostered perhaps the artist’s most lyrical work, the Sunflower series and related paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While these works reflect the atmosphere and palette of the gardens that surrounded her after she had settled in Vétheuil, her painterly space clearly remains the space of Abstract Expressionism -- often disjunctive, yet always grounded in the physical nature of the canvas and the materials deployed on it. Increasingly in the 1970s, Mitchell shows her fundamental connection to the work of Willem de Kooning, while diverging more and more from its actual look.
Mitchell began experimenting with separately stretched, adjoining panels, often in small scale, as early as the mid 1960s. She initially worked this way, apparently, to overcome the problem of the relatively small studio, with even smaller doors, in which she worked. But eventually the polyptychs took on their own highly distinctive character, echoing and yet differentiating themselves sharply from the only other modern polyptych that seems comparable: Monet’s Waterlilies.
One of these monumental multi-panel paintings, Bonjour Julie (1971, owned by the BMA), forms the centerpiece of the show. It was painted at a time when Mitchell had recently moved into a large studio that afforded her the freedom to paint with a scale that was not previously possible. Having also immersed herself in the French countryside, her paintings produced a direct response to her surroundings. Dr. David Moos, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the BMA, adds:
"As one surveys the enormity of Bonjour Julie, one becomes acutely aware of color, balance, composition, harmony, form and gesture. Everywhere on the surface on the canvas, Mitchell describes her decisions, elaborating a vocabulary of brushstrokes that spans from watery drips to thickened impasto."
Another painting, Salut Tom (1979), marks the end point to the 1970s, a period when Mitchell was developing most of her themes -- ever larger scale, bolder references to objects such as trees and bodies of water, and above all an unleashing of sheer chromatic bravura -- that would carry her to the end of her career.
Three works will be shown from the series la Grande Vallée (1983-84), a cycle characterized by a singular opulence of both brushwork and palette. Little known in the United States, these elegiac and heroic paintings, which may be seen as a culmination of Mitchell’s large-scale works, have been exhibited and collected primarily in France.
The exhibition concludes with one of Mitchell’s most compositionally daring, gesturally bold late paintings, the diptych Untitled (1992), which was completed just months before her death. This work is spare, the ground snowy white, with a pair of mostly yellow, echoing passages of almost frenzied brushwork inhabiting the centers of each panel, each emitting an emphatic down-thrusting trail of paint, gestures of decisive bravura.
Independent curator Jane Livingston, who was formerly Chief Curator and Associate Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, organized the exhibition and catalogue for The Paintings of Joan Mitchell for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ms. Livingston, who was a personal acquaintance of Mitchell, also has had access to Mitchell’s notes, letters and other documents as well as the cooperation of her former husband and lifelong friend, publisher Barney Rossett.
The catalogue will include a major text by Ms. Livingston discussing the artist’s work and providing thorough biographical information; two additional essays; an exhibition history; and extensive artist bibliography of related monographs, reviews and filmed interviews; color plates; and a listing of all the works appearing in the exhibition.
In addition, the catalogue will contain a guest essay by the pioneering feminist art historian, Linda Nochlin, who was a friend of Mitchell’s. Discussing Mitchell’s work within the context of her experiences working in a field dominated by men, the essay will be the first time Nochlin has published the contents of her popular lecture on the same topic.
This exhibition is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and is supported by The Florence Gould Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, Andrea and James Gordon, the Dedalus Foundation, Inc., and Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown.
The local presentation of The Paintings of Joan Mitchell has been made possible through the generous support of Jemison Investments Co., Inc., AmSouth Bank, Whatley Drake LLC, and the Birmingham News/Birmingham Post-Herald. Additional support has been provided by Mr. and Mrs. Preston H. Haskell III, Catherine and Bill Cabaniss, James Sokol, Dr. and Mrs. Raleigh B. Kent, Robin and Carolyn Wade, Pauline Ireland, and Rusty and Lia Rushton.
Joan Mitchell was born on February 12, 1926, in Chicago. Her maternal grandfather, Charles Louis Strobel, was a noted structural engineer and designer of bridges, including some on the Chicago River. Marion Strobel, the artist’s mother, became known for her role in co-editing, with Harriet Monroe, Poetry magazine. Poetry published work by such writers as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dylan Thomas, Thornton Wilder, and others whom Mitchell knew as a child. Mitchell’s father James Herbert Mitchell, a lifelong amateur artist, was an eminent physician.
Unlike her older sister, Sally, who attended the conservative Chicago Latin School, Joan attended the progressive Francis Parker School, where she met her future husband Barney Rossett. At age thirteen she was Lake Forest’s junior tennis champion; she also became a championship figure skater and a competitive diver. She then went on to major in English at Smith College. During the summers of 1942 and 1943, she visited Oxbow, an art colony in Saugatuck, Michigan, run by the Art Institute of Chicago, where she first worked in lithography and painted out of doors. The workshops at Saugatuck earned Mitchell credits at the Art Institute, to which she transferred after her sophomore year at Smith, receiving a classical fine art education from 1944 to 1947.
In 1947 Mitchell came to New York and moved into an apartment beneath the Brooklyn Bridge with Barney Rossett, who later acquired Grove Press and became one of the country’s most celebrated vanguard publishers, representing Samuel Beckett in the United States for most of Beckett’s career. He and Mitchell married in 1949 after a brief period in France; they divorced in 1952.
In the early 1950s Mitchell became part of the New York art world, showing in the seminal Ninth Street Show, organized by the Artists’ Club and selected by Leo Castelli. Throughout the 50s she showed at key galleries and gained a presence as a major painter. She frequented the renowned Cedar Bar and became a close acquaintance with many of the leading artists of the day, including Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. In 1955 she met the French-Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, with whom she was to be involved romantically for many years.
In 1959 she relocated to France, first in Paris and then in Vétheuil, a small village an hour to the northwest of Paris. Mitchell continued to exhibit regularly in New York, first with Martha Jackson, then with Xavier Fourcade, and finally with Robert Miller. She was also well supported in France, where she exhibited for many years at the Galerie Jan Fournier in Paris. During the 1980s, Mitchell’s health gradually declined, although she continued to paint and to travel to the United States. In October 1992, shortly after visiting the Tyler Graphics workshop in Mount Kisco, New York, to complete a series of prints, Mitchell returned to Paris, where she died at the American Hospital on October 30.
In 1982, the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris mounted a Mitchell retrospective that marked the first one-person show of an American woman artist at that institution. In 1998, Mitchell was named "Commandeur des Arts et Lettres" by the French Minister of Culture. The following year, she was awarded the " Grand Prix National de Peinture" in France and, in 1991, the "Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris" in painting.
