1973

 
Mitchell receives the Creative Arts Award Citation in Painting of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, during a ceremony held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Allo, Amélie
1973
Oil on canvas
280,6 x 181,6 cm
Private collection
Sold by Sothebys, March 11, 2022

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/contemporary-curated-5/allo-amelie

 

Allo, Amélie showcases Mitchell’s ability to create highly stimulating compositions. The painting is inspired from Jean-Paul Riopelle's daughter's name, Sylvie, whose daughter, Amélie, was born in 1973, the year the painting was created. It corresponds to another painting of the same era, Bonjour Julie, which celebrates the birth of Riopelle's granddaughter, Julie, in 1971.

 

 

1972
 

Mitchell has her first major museum solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country: An Exhibition of Forty-nine Paintings by Joan Mitchell, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.
She creates a series of seven large-scale etchings with publisher Arte Adrien Maeght, Paris.

Untitled
1972
59 x 59 cm
Private Collection

1971 part 2

Dr. David Moos, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the BMA, about todays painting:
 

"As one surveys the enormity of Bonjour Julie, one becomes acutely aware of color, balance, composition, harmony, form and gesture. Everywhere on the surface on the canvas, Mitchell describes her decisions, elaborating a vocabulary of brushstrokes that spans from watery drips to thickened impasto."

 

Bonjour, Julie
1971
Oil on canvas
281 x 584 cm
Art Fund, Inc. at the Birmingham Museum of Art
Birmingham, Alabama
https://www.artsbma.org/collection/bonjour-julie/

 

 1971


Mitchell is awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Western College (now part of Miami University) in Oxford, Ohio.

Untitled
1971
Oil on canvas
199,5 x 186 cm
Private collection

1970 part 2

Today’s pic’s title comes from a poem by Frank O’Hara: Ode to Joy

<i> We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying
on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs
for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter
over an insatiable sexual appetite
and the streets will be filled with racing forms
and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars
will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms
to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably
as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin
and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg
and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith
that’s sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness
near the grave of love
No more dying
***
We shall see the grave of love as a lovely sight and temporary
near the elm that spells the lovers’ names in roots
and there’ll be no more music but the ears in lips and no more wit
but tongues in ears and no more drums but ears to thighs
as evening signals nudities unknown to ancestors’ imaginations
and the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory
under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters
like a six-mile runner from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold
as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city’s abdication
and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last
and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
whose self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulcher at last
that love may live
***
Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in
and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all
while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds
to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs
that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention
and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs
as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors
pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways
like the ways of gods with humans in the innocent combination of light
and flesh or as the legends ride their heroes through the dark to found
great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time
which wants us to remain for cocktails in a bar and after dinner
lets us live with it
No more dying
</I>
Frank O'Hara reads Ode to Joy (video with text 2:30 m)
https://youtu.be/DiUT7GLl0w8

Ode to Joy
1970
Oil on canvas
280,5 x 501 cm
UB Art Galleries Buffalo, New York 

 1970

Today my absolute favourite of Joan Mitchell.


<i> Novelist Paul Auster contributed a brief essay to the Joan Mitchell retrospective catalogue, developed in collaboration with the exhibition’s co-curator Katy Siegel. Auster reflects on the work of the French poet Jacques Dupin and a painting that Mitchell titled after one of his poems, “La Ligne de Rupture.” Auster writes:
“It was through Jacques that I met Joan Mitchell, at her rue Frémicourt studio. Not long after, I visited her in Vétheuil. There I saw her paintings of the 1970s, among them ‘La Ligne de la rupture.’ This is my favorite period of her work; it was also when she was most involved with French poetry, and it has been largely overlooked…
“Joan liked the line ‘La ligne de rupture’—it spoke to her. Jacques had a startling gift for the pungent phrase… In ‘La ligne de rupture,’ traditional sentences have become fragments… Any one of these fragments alone would be interesting, but the poem—like the painting—is about the interaction in space of the different elements and how they change in relation to one another.”
Paul Auster met Joan Mitchell in Paris in the early 1970s, and they remained close for the next two decades. Auster is the bestselling author of “4 3 2 1,” “Winter Journal,” “Sunset Park,” “Invisible,” and “The Book of Illusions,” among many other works. He lives in Brooklyn. His essay on Mitchell is included in "Joan Mitchell," published by SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300247275/joan-mitchell.
</I>

https://www.facebook.com/joanmitchellfdn/

La ligne de la rupture
1970
Oil on canvas
284,5 x 200,5 cm
Private collection

 1969 part 2

As I said at the start of this summer theme, I have enough paintings selected to go on for three months.
So here two more of 1969. 

A lot of works from this period are my personal favourites.

Sunflower VI
1969
Oil on canvas
260 x 160 cm
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Detail

Blueberry
1969
Oil on canvas
200 x 150 cm
Private Collection

Detail

1969

In 1969 Mitchell completed her first large scale triptych, the 16.5 foot wide Sans Neige (without Snow).
For 1963 I posted an earlier triptych but that one was much smaller. This is as big as a wall.

 

The home that Mitchell lived in at Vétheuil sat up on a hill overlooking the Seine river. "Sans neige" is divided into horizontal bands of color.  It’s easy to see this work echoing the layered landscape she viewed from her window. Mitchell kept a ladder in her studio so she could get to the top of her large works. The huge scale is a measure of her ambition and her attempt to capture the experience of the natural world.

Sans neige,
1969,
Oil on canvas
259.72 × 500.38 cm
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
https://collection.carnegieart.org/objects/4a3a49c7-8181-437f-a079-5620f5c20147

Watch abstract painter Stanley Whitney reflect on Joan Mitchell’s fearless career (6min.): 

https://youtu.be/f_bxpmwYdqg

1968

In 1968, Mitchell began exhibiting with Martha Jackson Gallery in New York; she continued to exhibit with the gallery into the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mitchell

Maple Leave Forever
1968
Oil on canvas
250.825 x 147.32 cm
Private collection

1967

In 1967, Mitchell inherited enough money following the death of her mother to purchase a two-acre estate in the town of Vétheuil, France, near Giverny, the gardener's cottage of which had been Claude Monet's home. Mitchell bought the house "so she wouldn’t have to dogwalk" and that came in useful for her 13 dogs. She lived and worked there for the remainder of her life.

In the foreground Monet's home, above with the turret the "gardener's cottage"

Untitled
1967
Oil on canvas
195 x 130 cm
Joan Mitchell Foundation

1966

On the night of July 24th, 1966, Frank O’Hara was hit by a dune buggy on a beach on Fire Island in New York, dying the following day in hospital of internal injuries. Joan Mitchell later used the date of O’Hara’s death as the title of a suite of paintings dedicated to him.

 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_O'Hara

Series July 25 IV
1966
Oil on canvas
32,7 x 40 cm
Estate of Joan Mitchell

1965

Mitchell gives an interview to Dorothy Seckler for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, in New York, on May 21, 1965.
She speaks of her use of landscapes and color; the relationship between representation and abstraction in her work; her early exhibitions at the Stable Gallery and the New Gallery; her time in Paris; memories of The Club; how the New York art world has changed since the 1940s; comparisons of the gallery scenes of Paris and New York; reception of her work; and her series Calvi. Mitchell also recalls Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and others.

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-joan-mitchell-16086

Terrain Vague
1965
Oil on canvas
116 x 88.5 cm
Private collection

 1964

Between 63 and 66 both Mitchells parents,  James Herbert Mitchell and Marion Strobel Mitchell,  passed away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mitchell

Untitled
1964
194,9 x 114,6 cm
Private collection

Untitled
1964
Oil on canvas
 274,9 x 202,2 cm
Joan Mitchell Foundation

1963

During the period between 1960 and 1964, Mitchell moved away from the all-over style and bright colors of her earlier compositions, instead using sombre hues and dense central masses of color to express something inchoate and primordial. The marks on these works were said to be extraordinary: "The paint flung and squeezed on to the canvases, spilling and spluttering across their surfaces and smeared on with the artist's fingers." The artist herself referred to the work created in this period of the early 1960s as "very violent and angry," but by 1964 she was "trying to get out of a violent phase and into something else."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mitchell

Untitled (triptych)
1963
Oil on canvas
162 x 325 cm
The Museum of Modern Art
New York

 

 

1962

Mitchell has solo exhibitions at Galerie Jacques Dubourg and Galerie Lawrence, both in Paris; Klipstein & Kornfeld in Bern, Switzerland; and the New Gallery, MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mitchell

12 Hawks at 3 O’Clock
1962
Oil on canvas
295 x 200 cm
Private collection

1961

ARTnews magazine reproduces Skyes (1961) on its cover.
The exhibition Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1951-1961, is held at the Mr. and Mrs. John Russell Mitchell Gallery, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchases Ladybug (1957).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mitchell

Bleu, bleu, le ciel bleu
1961
Oil on canvas
99.695 x 65.405
Private collection

Detail
 

1960

Mitchell has two solo exhibitions in Europe: at Galerie Neufville in Paris and Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan.
Tiber Press publishes The Poems, a collabo­ration between Mitchell and John Ashbery which forms part of a four-volume set of artist-poet collab­orations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mitchell

Strata
1960
Oil on canvas
130 x 195 cm
Minnesota Museum of American Art
Saint Paul, Minnesota

 1959

Mitchell moves to Paris and leases a studio at 10 Rue Frémicourt (7e ARR, not far from the Eiffel Tower) with Jean Paul Riopelle.

The painting August, rue Daguerre (1957) is exhibited at documen­ta II in Kassel, Germany.

 

Cercando un ago 

1959

Oil on canvas

160 x 170 cm

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Washington, DC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mitchell

 1958

The Whitney Museum of American Art purchases Hemlock (1956).
The paintings Ladybug (1957) and October Island (1956) are exhibited in the Interna­tional Young Artists section of the Venice Biennale.

Untitled
1958
Oil on canvas
178.435 x 153.035 cm
Private collection

 1957

Mitchell exhibits Color in Space (1956) and Hudson River Day Line (1956) in the important group ex­hibition Artists of the New York School: Second Generation at the Jewish Museum, New York.
The essay Mitchell Paints a Picture by Irving Sandler is published in ARTnews magazine, accompanied by photographs of Mitchell in her studio by Rudy Burckhardt.

Ste. Hilaire
1957
Oil on canvas
160 x 226,7 cm
Private Collection

George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold
1957
Oil on canvas
222,9 x 198,7 cm
Buffalo AKG Art Museum
https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/k195811-george-went-swimming-barnes-hole-it-got-too-cold

George is the name of the Mitchell’s standard poodle, who she loved deeply and who died in 1954

1956

 
It’s time to reveal the name of the artist we will be following whole summer. At least one member knew that we were looking art paintings by Joan Mitchell (1925 - 1992).
 

Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mitchell

Hemlock
1956

Oil on canvas
231.14 x 203.2 cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
https://whitney.org/collection/works/363

The title comes from a poem by Wallace Stevens:

“Out of the window,
 I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the
heavy hemlocks. . .” 

October Island
Oil on canvas
210,8 x 262,6 cm
Private collection

Joan Mitchell in her Paris studio on rue Daguerre in 1956. 

Photo by Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

1954 -1955

I found no artwork online dated to the year 1954. 

I did found a photo taken by her former husband.

So I will skip a year and post one of my favourite paintings.

In 1955 our artist travels to Paris where she meets painter Jean Paul Riopelle, with whom she will live for over twenty years.
She participates in Vanguard 1955, an important group exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Other exhibitions this year include the Pittsburgh International at the Carnegie Institute and the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She has her second solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery.
She also meets Samuel Beckett, who will remain a close friend.

Hudson River Day Line
1955
Oil on canvas
200.66 x 210.82 cm
McNay Art Museum
San Antonio, Texas

 <b>1953</b>


Our artist participates in The Second Annual Exhibi­tion of Painting and Sculpture at the Stable Gallery in New York.
Her solo exhibition with the Stable Gallery opens in April.

Rose Cottage
Oil on canvas
182,56 x 173,99 cm
Private Collection

 1952

After a week I feel it’s time to stop with the they/their most of you will have guessed that the artist is female.

In 1952 the artist has a first solo exhibition in New York at the New Gallery.

Her marriage ends in a divorce and she moves to 60 St. Mark's Place.
She develops a friendship with poet Frank O'Hara and becomes associated with his circle of writers and artists.

Untitled
Oil on canvas
200 x 187 cm
Private collection

1951

Our artist moves to 10th Street and participates in the 9th Street Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture organized by Leo Castelli and the Artists' Club.

They study Art History at Columbia University and French at New York University, and help to estab­lish the avant-garde publishing company Grove Press.

Untitled
1951
165 x 175 cm

1950
 

Our artist receives a Master in Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In New York, they establish a studio on 11th Street, and later 9th Street. They meets Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and become part of the downtown scene, spending time at the Cedar Bar and participating in discussions at the Artists' Club.
The artist has solo exhibitions at the Saint Paul Gallery and School of Art in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Bank Lane Gallery in Lake Forest, Illinois.

Figure and the city
1950
Oil on canvas
102,2 x 124,4cm