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