Thick rectangles of marigold, violet, and verdant green join feathery, impastoed daubs of paint in Joan Mitchell’s Noon, a masterpiece which triumphantly announces the artist’s full confidence in the medium. Executed circa 1969, Noon emerges from the year after she relocated to Vétheuil, a town in the French countryside once home to Claude Monet. This move would mark a decisive turn in her career, as her canvases became larger and the stimulation afforded by the bucolic splendors of her surroundings proved immensely generative. Shifting away from the academic concerns of her earlier output, by the late 1960s, Mitchell had entered a new era, one which sees her brushwork at its most diverse and self-assured.

Towering at over eight feet tall, Noon’s surface absorbs its viewer into its poetic translation of the landscape into bursting, uncompromising color and form. This is a painting that reveals a mature artist at her absolute height: in 1972, the Everson Museum in Syracuse would organize the first major solo survey of Mitchell’s work – in which the present work was notably exhibited – and just two years later, she would be honored with a monumental retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Undoubtedly among the best examples from this celebrated period, Noon testifies to the profundity of Mitchell’s encounter with the natural world: its wealth of color, space, and light find home on Mitchell’s early Vétheuil canvases with exacting specificity, vestiges of a life shaped by place, directed by gesture, and documented by brush.

In 1968, Mitchell permanently settled on a sprawling rural estate in Vétheuil. There, secluded from the dominant narrative of Abstract Expressionism, her paintings begin to exhibit the same sumptuousness of palette and acute sensitivity to light articulated in the captivating plein air paintings of Claude Monet, who painted the landscapes of Vétheuil years before. “Off in her idyllic exile,” Ariella Budick observed, “…she felt free to indulge in a grand botanical abstraction. She painted canvases of majestic size that didn’t so much copy nature as plumb her sensual, emotional and mythological terroir. When she gazed out of the window or went for a walk, she saw a fiercely animated psychic landscape.” (Ariella Budick, “Joan Mitchell at Baltimore Museum of Art – an immersive symphony of colour,” The Financial Times, 6 April 2022 (online)) In her work, she accepted all of Vétheuil’s offerings: her palette took on the region’s ultramarines, sunny yellows, and tangerines, all of which would comprise her signature palette until her death. Opening like portals into the expansive world around her, doused in rich, exuberant light, her paintings communicated a brightness not unlike Henri Matisse's Open Window, Collioure, which extends the chromatic vivacity of the outdoors beyond the representational and into the experiential. Likewise, her canvases continued to stretch outwards, reaching out to meet the vaulted ceilings of her studio.

Though no longer the young graduate, Mitchell surged forth in France with all the momentum of her first years in New York, now armed with more certainty in her facture. Her compositional structure grew more regimented, as pigment coagulates here into lushly impastoed blocks along the bottom and right registers, crowned by curls of chartreuse and emerald. Liquescent paint rains down onto the surface, pooling into diaphanous drips alongside passages of quasi-Pointillist precision. Asserting the full range and plasticity of oil’s material properties, Mitchell tells the story of each element’s origin, from planar fields, to abundant foliage, to fallen fruit, and rows and rows of sunflowers. As Noon’s cellular forms bloom across the composition, they breathe like organisms themselves, reverberating with all the life so plentifully found and resolutely felt in the countryside.

The paintings that poured out of her initial years in France revealed not only Mitchell’s full chromatic expression but also her rich personal associations with the land and the artists it has inspired. As a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she reveled in the magisterial canvases by Monet and van Gogh housed at the Art Institute’s galleries, artists whom she’d venerated in youth and would go on to establish a kinship through place. Klaus Kertess described Mitchell’s life in Vétheuil as a series of moments rife with “celebrating and declaring her connections to French culture – that of its soil as well as that of its art.” (Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, p. 33)

Her evocations of the world around, however, do not merely situate Mitchell in a lineage of artists in the same pursuit: unlike Mondrian, whose grids systematically distilled the natural world, or Kandinsky, whose resplendent geometries found their inspiration in music, Mitchell concerned herself – or submitted herself, rather – to affect. Dancing between deliberation and immediacy, abstraction and allusionism, her definitively nonrepresentational vocabulary remains encoded with figurative, illusory vestiges charged with feeling. The present work’s title speaks to this – Mitchell, who rose at midday and worked late into the evenings, titled Noon after the earliest, hottest point in her day. At noon, the light is its clearest and most direct, and, befittingly, Noon sees the artist utterly lucid, triumphant in the apex of her creative powers.

“I would rather leave Nature to itself,” the artist reflected, “It is quite beautiful enough as it is. I don’t want to improve it…I certainly never mirror it. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.” (The artist quoted in: Marcia Tucker, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1974, p. 8) Cacophonous yet sonorous, Mitchell exercises the whole of her technical proficiency and derives inspiration from the place she loved most. Noon suffuses its viewer in aqueous, animated glory, and the painterly force contained therein would direct the tenor and cadence of the rest of her prolific years in Vétheuil.

The New York Sales

Sotheby’s to Offer Four Masterworks by Joan Mitchell Spanning Nearly Half a Century

Artist

Joan Mitchell