Joan Mitchell

Stable Gallery, New York
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York
Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York
Graham Gund, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Christie's, New York, May 3, 1989, lot 9
Mountain Tortoise Co., Ltd, Tokyo
Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Bucharest, United States Embassy, Art in Embassies, 1966 (organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York)
New York, Xavier Fourcade Inc., Joan Mitchell-The Fifties-Important Paintings, March - April 1980
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, A Private Vision: Contemporary Art from the Graham Gund Collection, February - April 1982

Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 37, illustrated in color
Michel Waldberg, Joan Mitchell, Paris, 1992, p. 68, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Valencia, IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Joan Mitchell, 1997, illustrated in color on the cover
K. Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, pl. no. 11, p. 177, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art [and traveling], The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, 2002, pl. 9, p. 97, illustrated in color

During the years from 1955 to 1957, Mitchell reached her artistic maturity, creating paintings such as King of Spades which proclaimed her mastery of the synthesis of figure-ground tensions with a muscular armature of paint. This lyrical composition of bold color weaving through a brilliant white ground has all the sheer energy, quality and finesse that Mitchell achieved in the great paintings of this period, combining boldness and structural certainty with a delicate subtlety and touch.

The art community in New York in the early 1950s was dominated by the triumphal recognition of American Abstract Expressionism as the primary international force in post-war art. Figures such as Pollock and de Kooning gained wide recognition that extended beyond the art world as they became iconic public figures.  In this atmosphere, Mitchell’s gifts as a young artist working in the contemporary vernacular of Action Painting were recognized by critics and fellow artists. In his review of her 1952 exhibition at the New Gallery in New York, Paul Brach wrote that  Mitchell’s paintings are ``post-Cubist in their precise articulation of spatial intervals, yet they remain close in spirit to American abstract expressionism in their explosive impact’’.  No less an arbiter of Abstract Expressionism than Thomas B. Hess reported that ``one of the Abstract Expressionist elders proclaimed ruefully that it had taken him eighteen years to get to where Joan Mitchell had arrived in as many months.’’  (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, 2002, p. 21-22).

Mitchell interacted with the legacies of her predecessors: the all-over compositions of Jackson Pollock, the loaded yet lightly flicking brush of de Kooning and his retention of figurative elements, and the feathery stroke and chromatic sensitivity of Guston. Yet Mitchell possessed her own distinctive compositional, chromatic and textural qualities that enabled her to break away from the many acolytes of Abstract Expressionism and to establish her own artistic identity in the mid-1950s.  Paintings such as King of Spades proclaim her assurance as a painter of sensuous surfaces in which structure is counter-balanced with fluidity, just as her snowy, white ground interplays with the yellow, blue, green, red and black palette that weaves through the white. Mitchell always acknowledged the influence of nature in her painting, but only as a memory that lingered in her mind.  In paintings such as King of Spades, the character of reverie and memory is beautifully realized through the intricate relationship of Mitchell’s palette with her brushwork.  Like a remembered landscape, the oscillation between what lies near and what is visible at a distance – like the view from a window, which takes in the frame as well as the distant rooftops – continues as a haunting persistence. The awareness of distant or broad horizons is conveyed by the edge-to-edge composition that allows Mitchell’s brushwork to sway and expand across the canvas as musical strains can be carried on a breeze. Mitchell’s remembered landscape is portrayed as an intimate response to a sensuous experience that envelops the viewer.

The lyricism of the paintings of the mid-1950s is enhanced by Mitchell’s use of white as a major component in the figure/ground tensions of her compositions during this period.  ``White begins to play a more integral part in Mitchell’s paintings of 1956. It contrasts with the colors that weave around it and at times takes on tinges of the wet pigment into which it is worked. Mitchell has always had strong negative associations with white: `It’s death. It’s hospitals… You can add in Melville, Moby Dick, a chapter on white. White is absolute horror, just horror….’ Mitchell asserts that none of the frightful memories that white evokes of her past life, however, comes into play when she paints: Painting without white would be like `planting a garden without plants.’ ….[White] is essential to Mitchell’s pictorial goal of figure-ground ambiguity.’’  (Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 39).  While the viewer might at first perceive the white of King of Spades as the background – literally the canvas – on which Mitchell draws with colored pigment, a closer examination of the work finds the pigments co-mingling and overlapping, alternately being applied one over the other or mixed together.  This interplay collapses the dimensional space of the painting, negating any sense of traditional perceptions of perspective, but the sense of light and air that pervades the work allows the composition to imply great expanses of space and lyrical movement. As Judith Bernstock wrote of the present painting, ``In paintings like King of Spades, a mobile, shifting space results, for feathery lines cutting through the white break it up into compartments that appear to be positive shapes in one moment (as in de Kooning’s Excavation and Attic, 1949…), only to be negated by scattered dabs of brilliant color in the next moment.’’ (Ibid., p. 39-40)

Just as there are poets who work with the pictorial quality of language, stressing the manner in which words evoke sensual realities beyond their defined meanings, there are painters who subject their medium to the vast associations that exist beyond the visual. Joan Mitchell is just such a painter, whose structural approach to composition is lyrical in the extreme with a strict control over positive and negative space and chromatic sensibilities.  The freedom of her brushstroke within the framework of her compositions invites comparisons to the poetry of Wallace Stevens: ``not narratives without prose content but instead intense responses to sensuous reality – to objects and landscape.’’ (Ibid., p. 40)