Joan Mitchell (1925–92) was an American Abstract Expressionist renowned for her emotive use of color and dynamic compositions inspired by landscapes, memories, and poetry. Her large, multi-paneled canvases of gestural brushwork and vivid color were painted, Mitchell said, “from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with." As a girl growing up in Chicago, Illinois, Mitchell attended the symphony, visited museums, wrote poetry, and studied painting. Her parents’ social and professional circle (Mitchell’s mother was an associate editor of Poetry magazine) included poets and writers such as T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Dylan Thomas, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Mitchell received a bachelor of fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947. She spent the following year in France on a travel fellowship, before settling in New York City in 1949. Mitchell quickly became a key member of the New York School, the interdisciplinary, avant-garde movement of artists active in New York City in the 1950s and '60s. She exhibited in the seminal Ninth Street Show in 1951, had her first solo gallery exhibition in 1952, and in 1957 was featured in both LIFE and ARTnews magazines. Mitchell began dividing her time between New York and Paris in the mid-’50s, and she bought an estate in Vétheuil, north of Paris, in 1967. She said of Vétheuil, “It’s a secure landscape, not desperate. I’ve chosen one you can live in.”
Mitchell’s work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, and in 1982 she became the first American woman artist to have a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France. In 1988, a retrospective exhibition, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell: Thirty-six Years of Natural Expressionism, toured the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Her work is held in many museums and institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Artizon Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm, Sweden; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; Tate Gallery, London, England; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, among others.
GRAY featured Mitchell’s work in the group exhibition Mid-Century Abstraction, 2018.
