Lot 122
  • 122

Joan Mitchell

Estimate
1,500,000 - 2,000,000 USD
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Description

  • Joan Mitchell
  • Untitled
  • signed
  • oil on canvas
  • 49 3/4 by 43 in. 126.4 by 109.2 cm.
  • Executed in 1960.

Provenance

Stable Gallery, New York
The Ciba-Geigy Collection, New York (acquired from the above in April 1964)
Sotheby's, New York, May 11, 2005, lot 163
Private Collection, United States
Sotheby's, New York, May 12, 2009, lot 17
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Exhibited

New York, Juilliard School of Music, November 1969
Yonkers, The Hudson River Museum, February - March 1971
Austin, The University of Texas Art Gallery, Visual R&D: A Corporation Collects, June - August 1973, p.17, illustrated in color
East Lansing, Michigan State University, Kresge Art Center Gallery; Greensboro, University of North Carolina,Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Works by Women, March - April 1974, p. 3, illustrated
Houston, Rice University, Sewall Art Gallery, Ciba-Geigy Collects: Aspects of Abstraction, September - October 1981, p. 20, illustrated
Summit, New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts, Styles of Painting from the New School: Selections from the Ciba-Geigy Collection, November - December 1987, p. 4, illustrated
Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art; Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell: Thirty-Six Years of Natural Expressionism, February 1988 - April 1989, cat. no. 13, p. 58, illustrated
Yonkers, The Hudson River Museum; New York, Hunter College, Bertha & Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Why Collect, January - March 1994
New York, Hunter College, Bertha & Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Paths of Abstraction: Painting in New York 1944 - 1981, Selections from the Ciba Art Collections, September - October 1994, p. 19, illustrated

Literature

Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 38, illustrated in color

Condition

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the edges, including some light hairline craquelure at the pull margins which has resulted in minor pinpoint areas of losses at the corners. The canvas undulates slightly due to the thick paint application. There is scattered hairline craquelure in some of the areas of impasto, all of which appear to be stable. There is a minor pinpoint area of loss towards the center. Under raking light, some minor outward protrusions in the white painted areas are visible. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. 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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

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.” Joan Mitchell

 

Joan Mitchell’s paintings are blessed with a bracing vitality and Untitled is a sublime illustration of such pulsating vigor. Deeply entrenched within the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic of gestural abstraction and action painting, Mitchell developed a highly personal and distinctive approach related to the art of her peers and friends such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. More than any of these artists, Mitchell was highly attuned to the glorious influence of nature. In particular, a visit to France in 1948 opened her eyes to the landscape that had inspired generations of artists before her. In an entirely abstract manner, Mitchell taps into the rhythmic sways and vibrations of nature that inspire sensations and moods. During her trip to France, Mitchell spent many hours visiting the museums of the city to pay homage to the work of great observers of nature such as Monet, Bonnard and Van Gogh. The beauty of the city and urbanity also struck Mitchell as it intermingled with the natural elements such as the River Seine and the many parks of Paris. After becoming sick, she was recommended by her doctor to go to the South of France for fairer weather. Settling in Provence she began to paint the landscapes in the surrounding region with great relish. Returning to New York during the 1950s, she became entrenched in the avant-garde scene at the time with shows at the Stable Gallery and raucous debates with her fellow Abstract Expressionist artists in Cedar’s Tavern. Every Wednesday and Friday, there would be discussions at the Artists’ Club (also known as the Eighth Street Club or simply as “the Club”), which was founded by Conrad Marca-Relli, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, among others. Mitchell became known as one of the more vocal members of the discussion and was heavily involved with the aesthetic considerations at the time. In this cauldron of change that was New York in the fifties, Mitchell fused the influences of the Impressionist masterpieces she had witnessed in Paris with her own aesthetic that came to define Abstract Expressionism. Abandoning almost completely the restraints of representation, Mitchell sought to imbue an unprecedented vivacity through the gestural application of paint to the medium of painting. Specifically, Mitchell’s gift to art history and audiences alike is a renovation of the genre of landscape painting. The feeling of glee and abandonment that Mitchell experiences in front of nature is matched almost symbiotically in the exquisite manner of her painterly technique. Mitchell absorbed the work of the great landscape painters exhibited in Paris and transformed it into an entirely new genre.  Rather than seeking to represent a landscape in defined form, Mitchell sought to give us the energy, freshness, and emotive elements of a landscape in as pure a painterly form as possible. The viewer can delight in the panoply of gestures and strokes of paint in what is a masterly example of Mitchell’s capabilities as a painter, demonstrating the sublime quality of her hand. Encouraged to submerge ourselves in and amongst the multitudinous layers of pigment, we discover boundless passages through which to travel as we consume the majesty of the work’s textural qualities. Mitchell’s paintings provide us with a journey on which we are summoned to imagine the physicality of Mitchell’s creative process all the while experiencing the intoxicating expressiveness of its final form. 

The variety in her application of paint from the broad brushstroke to the almost graphic line is unique amongst her AbstractExpressionist peers. Indeed, Mitchell’s work holds a strong formal relationship to an artist outside of the group. Klaus Kertess notes an affinity between Mitchell and another American artist who lived and worked abroad in Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s: “In these same years, [Cy] Twombly’s expressiveness, like Mitchell’s, blossomed into fullness. The jubilant lyricism of his paintings with its frequent scatological references and discursive writerly markmaking pulsed with subjective metaphorically… Both Mitchell and Twombly played a major role in keeping drawing vividly alive on painting’s surface” (Exh. Cat., New York, Cheim & Read, Joan Mitchell: Frémicourt Paintings 1960-1962, New York, 2005, n.p.). That both of these artists were heavily inspired by poetry is no coincidence and further cements their relationship.

The period of conception and execution of Untitled between 1960 and 1962 saw Mitchell rewarded with a considerable degree of commercial success, a considerable achievement for a female painter in the male dominated time. Still, she refused to be constrained by this success and continued to push the boundaries of her work to new, previously unexplored areas. Patricia Albers identifies this period as a small window of time in the artist's wide and long-lasting oeuvre in which her work displayed a new sense of passion and vigor. The beauty of nature and its irrepressible evocative power is what Mitchell’s passion and vigor is channeled into recreating, "I would rather leave Nature to itself. 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" (J. Mitchell, quoted in J.I.H. Baur, Nature in Abstraction, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1958, p. 75). Or, to quote from the title of the landmark 1989 retrospective of Mitchell’s work, Mitchell gives us a ‘Natural Expressionism.’ This ‘Natural Expressionism’ is Mitchell’s bold single person movement entirely of her own making and cemented into the annals of art history through Mitchell’s sheer force of nature.