Joan Mitchell

Robert Miller Gallery, New York

New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Joan Mitchell, October - November 1989, n.p., illustrated in color

Michel Waldberg, Joan Mitchell, Paris, 1992, p. 236-237, illustrated in color

 “Some artists, like Artemisia Gentileschi, Gustave Courbet, and Georges Braque, peak early and are remembered mainly for their youthful accomplishments. Others, like Rembrandt, Cézanne and Monet, continue to grow and achieve lasting fame on the basis of a lifetime of work, often fraught with hardship and struggle. Joan Mitchell fits into the latter category of artists. Although she had achieved recognition by the age of thirty, with each passing year Mitchell’s painting has continued to become more profound and beautiful… Having mastered the techniques of painting and the rigors of life, she is now at the height of her expressive powers.” (Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York 1988, p. 195)

Joan Mitchell’s late pictures of the 1980s represent the apotheosis of her artistic path. Like Willem de Kooning’s powerful late oeuvre from the same decade, where the line of the paintbrush has been reduced to the simplest of gestures and the minimal mixing of colors allows for the clarity and lightness of the brushstroke to be the main focus of the paintings, Mitchell has reduced her vocabulary to the sheer force of pure color strokes, of which Mountain is a superb example.  As Michel Waldberg points out, “the magnificence of painting reaches its zenith, in the already considerable oeuvre of Joan Mitchell, from the 1980s. As if something, in her, had come to surface, as if freedom had at last been conquered … an escalation into boldness, a rise to the top, from where to master all the possible spaces. Never has color been more delicate, more sumptuous; never the gesture more independent, more audacious.” (Michel Waldberg, Joan Mitchell, Turin, 1992, p. 55)

Despite the physical and psychological problems of her later years, Joan Mitchell responded with paintings that constitute an affirmation of life. “Instead of responding submissively to the inevitability of death, Mitchell lashes out in a frenzy at mortality, with powerful strokes and bold colors that attest to her continued and undiminished vigor.” (Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 195)  Executed in 1989, Mountain fully displays Mitchell’s late signature style, characterized by broad, looping strokes of bright colors that weave energetically.

The subject of the painting, like the large majority of the artist’s works, is an impression or memory of a familiar landscape – both physical and mental - which Mitchell explores with an uncommon energy. The memory of forms – as visual memories, but also and more intensely as sounds, sensations, hazy imprints – is the core of how form defines itself, against and within the chaos of feeling around it. The resulting forms are never simply a factual statement, but a chimera of perpetual motion.  As the artist stated, “I am very much influenced by nature as you define it… I paint 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.” (Letter from Mitchell, in John I. H. Baur, Nature in Abstraction: the Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture to Nature in the Twentieth Century American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1958)

Structured as a diptych, Mountain is an emotion-laden abstraction, spontaneous and highly expressive, based on an intimate awareness of nature translated into open, expansive color strokes painted on a white ground. Mitchell’s heavily loaded brush attracts a ‘natural’ rather than constructed rhythm from the composition, a rhythm emanating from the expansiveness of the gesture or from the unrestrained use of color and the pervasive luminosity.