Joan Mitchell

Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris
Collection Jean Fournier and Jean-Marie Bonnet, Paris
Artcurial Briest Le Fur Poulain F. Tajan, Paris, October 28, 2006, Lot 38
Acquired by the present owner directly from the above

Paris, Galerie Jean Fournier, Joan Mitchell Champs, May - July 1990, cat. no. 12

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is not framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Painted in the final years of Joan Mitchell’s prodigious career, Champs 1990 is the quintessential expression of her highly lauded painterly voice. Typifying the artistic tendencies of her later paintings, Champs displays an extraordinary synthesis of Mitchell’s earlier work and a more radical, free, and open configuration of abstract gesture. A celebration of emotion, nature and the physical act of painting, the present work is the embodiment of Mitchell as her most unrestricted, honest, and pure self.

Champs represents the actualization of a long and exceptional artistic evolution. Beginning as a young woman in New York in the midst of 1950s Abstract Expressionist culture, Mitchell carved her place in art history alongside contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. At once deeply influenced by the techniques of her male counterparts and fiercely independent in her own artistic vision, Mitchell gained early recognition, respect and success. Though she received praise and acknowledgement during her lifetime, her works continue to be extolled posthumously due to her particular blend of abstraction and its ability to remain relevant. Powerfully combining allusions to nature, deep and familiar emotions and the physicality of painting, Mitchell’s canvases are a supreme amalgamation of Monet and Van Gogh’s impressionist renderings, Pollock and de Kooning’s expressionist brushstrokes, and her own life circumstances.

Champs, the French word for fields, presents us with large horizontal swathes of color stacked into a vertical column at the center of the canvas. The various permutations of blue, green and brown at once retain their integrity yet seem to merge and blend together as if they were rolling fields stretching out toward the horizon. Consistent with many of her other final paintings, the present work exhibits Mitchell’s fondness for a palette of blue, green, orange, black and white. The use of white is particularly effective as it adds a sense of atmospheric light to the canvas whilst accentuating the deeper colors at the center. Against the stark lightness of the background, the swirls and loops of blue become ever more vibrant while the brilliant orange asserts itself from beneath them. An elegant and subtle yellow hue forms an ethereal aura around the top of the stacked colors, accentuating the sense of endless vertical movement.
Champs expertly highlights Mitchell’s distinctive technique: expansive and thick horizontal strokes combine with expressionistic twists and bursts of energy, and precise calligraphic marks. The effect is awe-inspiring as we immerse ourselves in the emotional depth of the composition, variously experiencing the cheerfulness of the bright orange, the excitement of the swirling blue, the airy lightness of the white and the forceful aggressiveness of the sharp vertical marks. As Mitchell stated: “My paintings aren’t about art issues. They’re about a feeling that comes to me from the outside, from landscape…The painting is just a surface to be covered. Paintings aren’t about the person who makes them, either. My paintings have to do with feelings.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Joan Mitchell, 1974, p. 6)

In the early 1980s illness and death overcame a number of people close to Mitchell. Compounding this difficult time, Mitchell was diagnosed with cancer and underwent hip replacement surgery that left her with limited mobility and a keen awareness of her own mortality. She responded by entering a sustained burst of artistic activity that surpassed her already eminent career in both power and ambition. Mitchell’s paintings in the last decade of her life convey the same spirit as those created by de Kooning at the end of his career. De Kooning’s late works underline the importance that he continually placed on the process of making a painting rather than the subject of that painting. Mitchell also paid careful attention to the formal attributes of her paintings, focusing on scale, proportion, surface composition and physical structure. Champs expertly balances positive and negative space, blurring the distinction between figure and ground – the white pigment in particular seems to fluctuate between being the background on which the other colors are painted and overlapping the horizontal stripes. Considering that the present work was created two years before her death when she was increasingly debilitated, it is remarkable that she was able to produce a work of such tremendous power and physical magnitude while climbing up and down a ladder, wielding a brush laden with paint.

In these valedictory years, Mitchell became increasingly concerned with achieving her ultimate aesthetic expression. She entirely abandoned herself to her paintings, letting go of all constraints and allowing her compositions to exist as pure and unfiltered manifestations of painterly joy and fortitude. The present work is the realization of Mitchell’s final creative impulse, rich in its array of textures and colors, the references to nature and the illustration of human emotion. Mitchell was able to lose herself in her art: “I become the sunflower, the lake, the tree. I no longer exist.” (Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 69) In that way, Champs becomes an actualization of Mitchell’s aesthetic spirit, existing at the epitome of her illustrious career.