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Reflections on the paintings
“There's something in this richness that I hate”, wrote Elinor Wylie in her poem, Puritan Sonnet. This comes to me later, after long looking and reading, when visual hunger is deeply sated, and turns away. But after all, no, I don’t think so. It’s Wylie whose pain has metamorphosed to cold stone, while Mitchell’s anxious, existential self generated lighting, sun flares, and shooting stars with an abundance of richness.
How my eyes delight and my heart leaps up, so quickened by Joan Mitchell’s paintings! Their immediacy fills the room, engagement is so sudden. Then, after that long looking, I’m gasping for breath- she’s worn me out with the relentless pace and intensity. So it’s not her richness that I hate, I wish for more of my own. She won’t let me go, slow down, or take refuge in lesser visions of the natural world. As if she’s caught me slumming, secretly enjoying, say, a Disney forest glade, or a William Wendt California hillside, calling me to task for escaping to the sentimental and seductive. Is charm ever honest? Resistible?
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I see her: Dionysian, Diana-warrior fierce, untempered, renewed by nature’s force and fury. It is as if she saw into the heart of creation, telling a modern story. Not for her the majesty of Genesis, the Spirit moving upon the deep void, a divine adagio of majestic largesse.
Nor does she find horror in its heart. I am compelled to gaze and find wonder and awe, and there will be no possibility of despair, though any consideration of the natural world includes the ineluctable passing of time. It’s no surprise to learn she loved Proust.
Her creation story is orchestrated by a fierce divinity of power and might, one who gives no quarter to those who would deny the mighty work done. None can quail before it, or take refuge in dissembling, gentling, or gloss.
She would probably scoff at the Big Bang theory, seeing it as orderly power, as if it were some cosmic fireworks joke. She knows the chthonic void and she tells of chaos, before and when creation begins. Her defiance is to insist upon my recognition of this. She will not let me hide in pretty, but if I wish, I can possess real compassion, much more painful to own, but authentic in its power.
Joan Mitchell’s intentions were deeply individual and subjective. According to her biographer, Patricia Albers, she had an eidetic memory coupled with an unusual range of synesthetic perceptions. Her paintings, she said, were emotional records of her feelings, but eidetic memories are deeply real and vivid, and coupled with the synesthesia she experienced, must have her interior life most unique and rich.
Albers rejects one my initial ideas about Mitchell, finding it flimsy. But this is it: as a youth she competed at national levels as an ice skater, mostly to please her father. I think I know what it means to skate like that, and I see the dynamics and choreography of skating, its soma, in the energy of the brushstrokes. That white ground she left, if you look down upon the painting, becomes the ice, as if she had skated on the paintings, in a grand feat of notation and artistic levitation. Of course, there’s more.
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Her palette! Though Impressionism needs no more validating, I think Mitchell found one of those seminal strands present in all great art, and pursued it in an authentic and celebratory response to its accomplishments. How far she took it is a marvel, and how easy it is to let it all happen to you. Bonnard, Matisse, Avery - this vivid, chromatic, hyper-intensity, the complements sounding like the bells of Notre Dame.
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Joan Mitchell’s personal story is about a mad lover, deeply driven by her erotic life, a sordid, private hell in which she gave as cruelly as she received. Friends were insulted, degraded, petted and prized as her volatile intellect and emotions drove her.
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Once living in France, her response to the beauty of le paysage and a deepened profound response to Impressionism fused and she created some of her greatest paintings. Family wealth permitted her to purchase La Tour, a country home near Giverney. The forms of nature became her singular subject, in serial and deliberately spontaneous progressions.
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Once living in France, her response to the beauty of le paysage and a deepened profound response to Impressionism fused and she created some of her greatest paintings. Family wealth permitted her to purchase La Tour, a country home near Giverney. The forms of nature became her singular subject, in serial and deliberately spontaneous progressions.
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The richly browned head bends over on its stalk in the painting on the left, its curve poignantly conveying the heavy burden it lifts so high into the summer sky. It seems to see itself reflected in a bright yellow pool.
The late Sunflowers (1991-92) below dissipate like fireworks, or sun flares which have detached and are falling to earth, reversing Icarus’ journey. The petals and hearts are released, floating yet fixed, in a wild unguarded, yet revealed moment.
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Mitchell’s willed meditation upon Van Gogh, and its submission to his vision, seems as fulfilled as Io embraced by Jupiter, or St. Teresa’s mystical ecstasy.
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There’s a great formalism in Mitchell that despite its energy, is still cool at at its core, balancing oppositional tensions to achieve resolution. It’s the title of the her last painting that implies so much more in its briefness, even humility: Merci. Don’t miss the very human maker of these paintings. Thanks for the memory, Sinatra singing, tipping his hat, done it my way. It was, perhaps, her only prayer.
Some Critics Comments:
...abstract knots referencing water, trees, and florals... are emblematic of her relationship to her environment—her physical surroundings were linked to an emotional landscape, as if her observations of nature were filtered through an internal sieve...The last years of Mitchell’s life were marked by the deaths of friends and family. Her own health struggles began in the early 80s with the appearance of cancer and painting quickly became both a refuge and an ally. While the late work still evinces a distinct confidence of gesture and mark-making, it is further characterized by an increased sense of freedom. - Pattern Pulp website
...Often presented in diptych format, Mitchell’s expansive late canvases remain evocative of the landscape, but also provide room to explore a more liberated mark. Brushstrokes are energetic and colors vivid. Punctuated by airy, unpainted areas of canvas, the works express a sensation of urgency and immediacy, as if in rejection, denial and resistance to her failing health. Through her late work, she strived for immortality, for a merging with the timelessness and formlessness of nature: “I become the sunflower, the lake, the tree. I no longer exist.” - from Pattern Pulp website Paris back then still had something real to offer--titans such as Picasso remained in part-time residence; Matisse was alive; Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti in ascendance; and, though we may have smugly condescended, Jean Fautrier, Riopelle, Paul-Emile Borduas, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Alfred Manessier, Georges Mathieu, Jean Degottex (names leap to memory) were painting extraordinarily well. Vieira da Silva, too, with whose work Mitchell's cries out for comparison. Both were women working in sexist bastions, of course, and both were drawn to intricate, meandering compositional armatures interrupted by blasts of color--though Mitchell's chromatic detonations were always the more explosive.
In addition to the parallels already noted, Mitchell's margin-to-margin pastel scrawls on paper may, in their violence, be likened to the long, looping strokes of Hartung's work. Yet, despite this similarity, Mitchell's impulsive motions are also at odds with Hartung's unwillingness to risk le bon ton. Mitchell's harsh attacks in both painting and pastel recall, too, certain tantrumlike whorls to be found in Cy Twombly's graffiti-related work.
To be sure, certain of Mitchell's paintings float free of this enveloping Europeanism. Pour Patou, 1976, for example, and Buckwheat, 1982, are utterly hers. Yet, despite the high pitch of these works, they nevertheless continue to signal attachments to van Gogh and Monet. Such intensely chromatic works are countered by murky sequencings of fogbound abstract rectangles--an echo of Rothko--as seen, for example, in the quadriptych Returned, Canada Series, 1975. The latter type of soft rectangular lateral displacements, when ultimately combined with the painter's van Gogh/Monet propensities, would lead to the large abstract landscapes of Mitchell's last phase--passionate expanses that mark the second apogee of her late career.
Robert Pincus- Witten in Artforum, 2008
Deft strokes luminous color
speed energy substantive
dazzling rich color interminglings
strong tonal contrasts lyrical gesturalism contradictions that energize spaces and create pulsations dense pure hues subtly modulated tightly packed quadrants vaporous pastels impastoed areas juxtaposed with turbulent brushwork chromatic sumptousness complex matrix obviously improvisional, exploding outward, daring the eye to hold them in synthesis
genuine alchemy slashed strokes, blobs with irregularity of interval that challenge easy coherence precarious and dynamic structures overall energy but can’t locate a source
matter becomes energy its alchemy organic gridwork brash, bold breathtaking pace planarity become elastic muscular ectoplasm palpable density and weight perverse grittiness phenomenal poise
The phrase "nature's ecstasy" came to mind at Lennon, Weinberg's gorgeous hothouse of a show, "Joan Mitchell: Paintings and Pastels 1973-1983," a concentrated gathering of nearly 30 mostly small works on paper and canvas.
More than any other painter of the New York School, Mitchell (1925-92) immerses us in nature. She took her cues initially from the calligraphic brush handling of de Kooning, Guston, and Pollock, but ultimately she gave us an oeuvre that, among the Abstract Expressionists, is the most rigorously poetic. Her paintings begin with the premise that each work should be a living, breathing totality. Like the best calligraphers, Mitchell understands that her marks must add up to an animal whole — we must feel bone, tendon, and muscle, the rhythms of breathing, the fluidity of blood, and an inner spirit. Working with the metaphor of the landscape, however, she also imbues her pictures with the singular fullness of a tree or a flower or a field or a storm.
Mitchell is an expressionist, a sensualist, and a romantic, but she is also among the most discerning and pragmatic of New York School painters. Her best pictures, filled with thousands of singular bold strokes, combine into totalities that feel completely natural and self-sufficient — as if, rather than enforcing her own artistic vision, she were bringing us visions she had uncovered or had found.
To stand before Mitchell's large, great symphonic works, especially the diptychs, triptychs, and quadriptychs that spread 20 or more feet across gallery walls, is to be enveloped in a jungle of sensations. Mitchell brings to her work the tingling, color-to-color rub and vibration — a synesthetic, no less than visceral or visual, impression — experienced in Titian, Renoir, Rothko, and Bonnard. She is a poet who distills, conflates, and transforms the world. Sometimes, as in the larger works, she buries us deep within the earth or throws us into the furnace; at other times, as in the small-scale pictures at Lennon, Weinberg, she brings us nature in the palm of her hand.
In these small works, Mitchell gives us heightened sensations of nature — haikus or chamber works as opposed to symphonies. In doing so, she puts our faces in the grass, rubs earth against our skin, bruises and cuts us, and brings us close to the bone. Many of these oils and pastels have the brutal freshness of just-cut flowers, or feel like pieces of cloud or rain or grass or sky.
Only one medium-to-large-scale canvas is on view at Lennon, Weinberg. "Buckwheat" (1982), at just more than 7 feet high and 6 feet wide, holds the end wall in a shrine-like alcove. An abstract homage to van Gogh's wheat fields — but with Impressionist touches relating to Monet's tangles and to Bonnard's heat — "Buckwheat" is a shimmering, bustling flurry of golds and blues. It is an airy yet densely woven stratum — at times infernal and at other times watery and jewel-like — in which buoyant layers of wheat and sky, or fire and ice, mix and merge, rise out of or push in front of one another.
The decade represented by this exhibition, during which Mitchell was living in the French countryside, is not her best (I prefer the earlier and later works to those of the 1970s); but that criticism applies mostly to the large-scale canvases in which Mitchell attempts to wed the rectangles of Hans Hofmann (her former teacher) with her own physical calligraphy. Lennon, Weinberg's show, however, which is a gathering of calligraphic and geometric fragments, works beautifully.
Some snow-scene pictures, such as the long oil on canvas, the triptych "Returned (Canada Series)" (1975), and the charcoal and Conté crayon drawings, all in brick-reds, blacks, whites, and grays, are abrupt, cold, blunt, and raw — registering like stubbed toes and skinned knees. Their rectangles punch with Rothkoesque authority, and those forms, along with the purplish, smoky grays and stucco-rough whites, linger tentatively, dangerously against the dried-blood-reds smeared on the page.
Some works in the show include typed poetry surrounded by and intermingling with Mitchell's painting. In "Sunset (James Schuyler)" (1975), the text hangs in a vaporous gray-white field against an aquatic bluish mist, which is fed by a dense, dark tangle that resembles bonfire and rainbow. The painting is satisfyingly thin, wafting like a spring breeze, its forms and colors evocative of Schuyler's text.
Other works in the show are autumnal in hue or fragrant with summer heat. "Pour Patou" (1976) has the muddy, rhythmic pulse of a hard rain. "Chiendent" (1978), more stem than flower, is violent and melancholy. "Untitled" (1977), a vertical oil made of daubed footprints of cool blue-violets and mossy greens, suggests the shaded canopy of a forest and, with its resemblance to stained glass, the hallowed light of a cathedral.
Three pastels and one painting in the show are from the series titled "Tilleuls" ("tilleul" is French for "linden tree"), a group of works named for a mature linden that crowned the terrace of Mitchell's home overlooking the Seine in the French countryside. These paintings are concentrated and violent upsurges. Their linear tangles and touches of color suggest root, stem, sky, branch, clump, and leaf. They press forward as much as they shoot upward. And their biting lines scratch satisfyingly, like rubbing your back against the bark of a tree. These pictures, homages to the linden, do not look like trees, but that takes nothing away from their "treeness." In her catalog essay for the show, Jill Weinberg Adams reminds us that Mitchell would not mind if one of her abstract paintings of a tree "'looked exactly like a tree, as long as she 'felt' that tree." Like those of Bonnard, Mitchell's pictures evoke nature's essences and transformations — from the formative to the gestational to the ecstatic. This exhibition allows us to "feel" nature, as Mitchell did, from the inside out. -Lance Esplund, NY Sun, 2008
ROBERT ZALLER Broad Street Review
If Van Gogh had had a daughter, she might have been Joan Mitchell. Mitchell, too, was racked, obsessive and sad, and her paintings, also, were too beautiful for joy— a harmony just off-kilter, with a bitter, acidic color (usually a blue or a green) lurking at the edge of Eden’s feast. “Bitter glory,” Dave Hickey calls it in his catalogue essay, and the term seems right enough.
Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925, lived with the French-Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, and died in Paris in 1992. She mixed with the New York School without being of it, and went unserenely her own way. From first to last, she described herself as an Abstract Expressionist, and the startlingly beautiful exhibit of her sunflower series in Chelsea’s Cheim & Read Gallery doesn’t yield much in the way of representation— if these paintings and etchings had been called something else, no one would likely have been the wiser.
Still, the bell-like shapes of the two large diptychs from 1990-91 that dominate the central hall of the gallery are at least suggestively floral, while the orange field of Two Sunflowers (1980), with its aggressive thicket of color (the hint of menace here is purple), seems a garden in riot. Even when something arguably naturalistic emerges, however, it’s still a shape of the mind, a datum of experience processed by thought and emotion. Which might be thought a serviceable enough definition of Abstract Expressionism to begin with.
What seems to appeal to Mitchell in the sunflower is what appealed to Van Gogh: its brief, vivid efflorescence, its rapid decay, its naked ruin. The latter is particularly the subject of the etchings, with their spare, desiccated lines weaving about dejected, bulb-like forms. There’s nothing dejected about the lineation, though, which has a spare, fierce energy.
Indeed, the core of Mitchell’s sensibility is calligraphic. Each form seems built of an essentially graphic impulse, and even the richest, densest knots of color never clot, the skeins remaining distinct. In a deep way, this seems related to Mitchell’s complex sense of integrity, for just as she resists color saturation, so she never settles for the settled structure or statement. Her art, that is, impresses without imposing; you can’t enter it with facile assumptions or easy expectations, and you must be ready to stay awhile. The journey is rich with reward for those who do.
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