拍品 104
  • 104

JOAN MITCHELL | Untitled (Blues Away)

估價
450,000 - 650,000 USD
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描述

  • Joan Mitchell
  • Untitled (Blues Away)
  • signed
  • oil on canvas
  • 20 by 17 in. 50.8 by 43.2 cm.
  • Executed in 1964.

來源

Stable Gallery, New York
Private Collection
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (acquired from the above in 1974)
Anderson Gallery, Buffalo (acquired from the above in 1980)
Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above in 1995)
Sotheby’s, New York, 16 May 2002, Lot 220 
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

展覽

New York, Associated American Artists, Martha Jackson Gallery, 1953 to 1979, September - October 1994, cat. no. 24, p. 14, illustrated in color

Condition

This work is in very good condition overall. There is minor evidence of wear and handling to the edges, including hairline craquelure at the pull margins with a few pinpoint and minor spots of resultant loss. There are scattered, stable drying cracks throughout, inherent to the artist's chosen medium and working method. Under very close inspection, there are scattered areas of unobtrusive small losses in the heavily impastoed passages. The colors are bright, fresh and clean. The colors are bright, fresh and clean. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, a few small areas in the moss green painted areas fluoresce but do not appear to be the result 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.

拍品資料及來源

With the use of melodious color and spontaneous yet controlled brushstrokes that radiate passion, raw emotion and fierce intention, Joan Mitchell’s Untitled (Blues Away) is an exquisite example of the artist’s singular and captivating practice. The intimate canvas is riddled with generous swaths of cypress green and Mediterranean blue mixed with turbulent, forceful strokes of deep crimson and marigold that gather exuberantly towards the center of the canvas. The energetic color both bursts outward from, and recedes into, the outer whites of the canvas, signaling Mitchell’s absolute mastery over her chosen medium. Painted in 1964, Untitled (Blues Away) belongs to a suite of works Mitchell fondly referred to as the "stations on the Paris subway," and of which another example resides in the permanent collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. After splitting her time between the Paris and New York, Mitchell eventually settled in the City of Light in 1959, thus beginning the most turbulent and prolific period in her career. Mitchell’s bold defiance against her contemporaries’ penchant for “all-over compositions” is no more prevalent than in the present work; the deeply pigmented and concentrated center radiates with brooding emotion, only to be broken by hopeful gleams of bright color. Out of the fury of blues, teals, and olive greens comes a hopeful red that, as the title of the work suggests, pushes the blues away. As John Ashbery expertly discerned in a review of Mitchell’s 1965 solo exhibition at Stable Gallery in New York, “Joan Mitchell’s new paintings…continue an unhurried meditation on bits of landscape and air. There are new forms, new images in this new work but no more than were needed at any given moment…the abrupt materialization of [a] shape strikes a few echoes in other paintings, where calligraphy, sometimes flowing, sometimes congealing, continues patiently, as though in a long letter to someone, to analyze the appearances that hold her attention the longest” (John Ashbery, “An Expressionist in Paris,” ARTnews, April 1965, n.p.).

In Untitled (Blues Away), Mitchell’s passion, gestural intention, and emotion behind each brushstroke and passage of color is palpable. Indeed, in Untitled (Blues Away), Mitchell fuses the visual vocabulary of that of her past, the New York Abstract Expressionists with that of her present, the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, in a riotous manner which only she could accomplish. Helen Molesworth echoes this sentiment: “The overall effect of both her use of color and application of paint is that the compositions feel built-up, considered, and intensely achieved. Her deployment of painting’s elemental building blocks—color and stroke—result in paintings that are analogous to poetry. If in poetry language is both sharpened and distilled, both loaded with and emptied of meaning, then in Mitchell’s canvases the elements of paintings—paint, color and canvas—are both themselves and at the same time replete with expressive connotation. This is the dialectic struggle waged by Mitchell’s work” (Helen Molesworth in Exh. Cat., London, Hauser & Wirth, Joan Mitchell: Leaving America, New York to Paris 1958-1964, 2007, p. 9).