“Clement Greenberg said there should never be a central image so I decided to make one.”
U ntitled from 1964 is a jubilant orchestration that encapsulates the very best of Joan Mitchell’s dynamic gesture in a vibrant symphony of color. Painted in Paris and then exhibited in New York City at the Stable Gallery in 1965 as part of a compelling group of small paintings identified as “14 Stations on Paris Subway,” the present work showcases the extraordinary skill and virtuosity of one the most influential figures of Abstract Expressionism. Mitchell’s work is currently highlighted in a critically acclaimed traveling retrospective now on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which includes multiple paintings which also famously debuted in this 1965 exhibition at the Stable Gallery. Painted at the height of Mitchell’s artistic prowess, Untitled boasts the muscular sweeps of her paint-laden brush which happily coexist alongside delicate, almost calligraphic, trails of diluted pigment. Dominated by electric, cerulean blues, mossy greens, rich raspberries and purples, which contrast vibrantly against thickly applied white passages that highlight the full scale of Mitchell’s chromatic range. Untitled explodes with kaleidoscopic vitality – a stark contrast from her earlier much darker works – and is a testament to Mitchell’s longtime place as a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
“[Joan Mitchell’s work] looks strong and relaxed, classical and refreshing at the same time; it has both the time and the will to be itself. To the strength, the capacity for immediately sizing up a situation, the instinctive knowledge of what painting is all about which characterize the best postwar art in America, the sojourn in Paris has contributed intelligence and introspection which heighten rather than attenuate these gifts.”
Mitchell spent much of the early 1960s sailing along the Mediterranean coast with Jean Paul Riopelle and passing her time with an avant-garde circle of friends including artists Joan Miró and Pierre Matisse as well as collectors and gallerists Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, among many others. During this period, Mitchell’s productivity declined, which coincided with a drop in exhibitions both throughout Europe and the United States – a shift from her spot in the limelight during the 1952 Venice Biennale. In a 1965 interview, Mitchell admitted that her paintings were taking much longer than ever before which likely contributed to suites of works including the “14 Stations on Paris Subway” created during these intermittent spurts of creativity. However, a painting in progress was very much still present in Mitchell’s mind as she would puzzle through compositions on a subconscious level before returning to the unstretched canvases tacked along the walls of her Paris studio at 10 Rue Frémicourt in the 15th arrondissement.
Much like her fellow Ninth Street Women including Helen Frankenthler, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan, Mitchell was forced to confront her status as a “woman artist” alongside her male peers who often received greater critical acclaim. Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, quickly made a name for herself and had her first solo exhibition in New York at the New Gallery in 1952. At the time, critical acclaim for Mitchell’s work was mixed, celebrated by many but also scoffed at by others including Clement Greenberg – one of Abstract Expressionism’s most vocal exponents – who called her work “too perfect” and to Mitchell’s chagrin constantly disregarded her work. Mitchell dismissively recalled Greenberg’s commentary on the structure of paintings saying, “there should never be a central image so I decided to make one.”
"[Mitchell's paintings] are meaning and therefore do not have a residue of meaning which can be talked about.”
Growing out of earlier inspiration from trees, Mitchell’s suite of Paris Subway paintings pushed the artist to create an energetic tension that ultimately sustained the floating central image previously dismissed by Greenberg. Untitled, as well as the Paris Subway paintings exhibited in the artist’s current retrospective (illustrated below), demonstrates Mitchell’s skillful experimentation with scaling down her marks, shifting the weight of the central mass ever so slightly off kilter to dominate the left of the canvas, while alternately compressing or opening up passages with contrasting colors, areas of veiled nuance and dabs of crisp white. These works are in direct dialogue with one another as they were conceived over a period of time as a tightly focused group of works. During her lifetime, Mitchell never actively discussed the subject matter of her paintings – instead letting the works speak for themselves – but it is understood that this suite of works is in response to Mitchell’s time spent traveling throughout the subway stations in Paris. In response to this famed 1965 show, critic John Ashbery powerfully captured the very essence of Mitchell's 1964 paintings by saying works including Untitled “are meaning and therefore do not have a residue of meaning which can be talked about” (John Ashbery, “An Expressionist in Paris,” ARTnews, April 1965).
