A jubilant orchestration of gesture, Joan Mitchell’s Garden Party is a celebration of nature in all of its glorious vitality. Executed in 1961-62, soon after Mitchell’s permanent move to France in 1959, Garden Party pays homage to the bucolic appeal of her new home. Beneath her brush, Mitchell transforms her canvas into a performative arena in which she choreographs a brilliant dance of ever-shifting light, color, movement, and texture. Typifying the gestural bravado, sumptuous coloration, and captivating dynamism which distinguish the artist's greatest paintings, Garden Party is a commanding testament to the singular creative vision and painterly virtuoso that define Mitchell’s celebrated oeuvre.

Evoking the beauty, jubilance, and rapturous renewal of a country garden, Garden Party captures the idyllism and abandon of Mitchell’s new home. Amidst a lush and overgrown composition of green pigment, a joyous revelry of color emerges: splashes of pale blue, dashes of crimson, and streaks of gold race across the surface. Describing the present work’s expressive command, Philip Larratt-Smith writes: “Mitchell had that rare gift of looking at the world from a perspective that was not human-centered – from a point of view that gives back to us nature in its radical otherness, that refuses to domesticate it or interpret in terms of human needs…What her paintings make palpable is an immediate presence of feeling. Her Garden Party is a lyrical outpouring of emotion that is inseparable from the close study of ‘nature’s thousand faces,’ its infinite range of appearances.” (Philip Larrat-Smith, "Notes on Joan Mitchell,” in: Exh. Cat., Edinburgh, Inverleith House Royal Botanic Garden, Joan Mitchell, 2010, n.p.) The present work conveys the splendid multiplicity of nature through its variegation of brushstrokes—its drips, long strokes, sharp swivels, and thin washes.

While the gestural exuberance of the present work engages in an intense dialogue with the Abstract Expressionists with whom she is often grouped, Garden Party is rooted in Mitchell’s profound, lifelong appreciation for the beauty of the natural world. It exhibits the same sumptuousness of palette and exquisite awareness of nature articulated in the en plein air paintings of forebears like Claude Monet. However, Mitchell’s kinship with the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists stems not just from her shared appreciation of France’s natural beauty, but also from her attention to its leisurely charm. The present work, with its blithe title, calls to mind works such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, and Claude Monet’s Jardin à Sainte-Adresse. Representing the joy of the dilettante, and a certain pleasure in the change of pace that French society would doubtless have afforded her, Mitchell seems to revel here in the rural idyll to be found mere miles from her Paris studio on Rue Frémicourt.

Indeed, it was the artist’s separation from the relentless urbanity of New York City and associated hegemony of the Abstract Expressionist cult, barely alleviated by frequent trips to East Hampton, that gave her the conceptual freedom to develop a highly idiosyncratic painterly style that marries the ethereal with the physical, the felt with the seen. Judith E. Bernstock writes that Mitchell’s paintings of the early 1960s “may be gentler and more lyrical,” than her previous work, but the paintings are “always to some degree agitated, for example, Garden Party, Bergerie, and Couscous…With their thick tangles of skeins and bold splatters and drips of fluid paint, even the most lyrical paintings of 1960-62 have an air of ferocity.” (Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York 1988, p. 60) Combining these two great influences on Mitchell’s practice, the American and the European, Garden Party is anchored to the natural world by swathes of emerald green paint, the unruly nature of which comes to life in the frenzied brushwork splashed across the canvas. In turn, the fierce slashes and bold lines evince the bravado and painterly command which Mitchell inherited from her friends and forebears such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. In the present work, both elements combine in an orchestration that pays testament to the ineffable power of the world around us.

Ginny Williams’ collection of paintings by Joan Mitchell is one of the core features of her collection. Alongside Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, Mitchell was one of the masterful female artists who Williams collected in depth. Spanning the breadth of her work from the Abstract Expressionist-inspired masterpieces of the mid-1950s to the monumental canvases of the 1970s, this collection constitutes a mini-retrospective of the artist’s work. The below timeline traces the developments in Mitchell’s art and life that led to the production and eventual acquisition of these works, on both sides of the Atlantic.