MY MAGICAL ATTIC: JOAN MITCHELL AT BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART

JOAN MITCHELL AT BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART

MARCH 6, 2022 – AUGUST 14, 2022

JOAN MITCHELL AT BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART

MARCH 6, 2022 – AUGUST 14, 2022

BALTIMORE, MD (February 1, 2022)—From March 6 through August 14, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presents Joan Mitchell, the long-awaited retrospective of the internationally renowned artist who attained critical acclaim and success in the male-dominated art circles of 1950s New York, then spent nearly four decades in France creating breathtaking abstract paintings that evoke landscapes, memories, poetry, and music. This comprehensive exhibition features 70 works spanning the artist’s career, including rarely seen early paintings and drawings, vibrant gestural paintings that established her reputation in New York, and enormous multi-panel masterpieces from her later years that immerse viewers with their symphonic color. Numerous loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe include works that have not been shown publicly in decades and never in a single exhibition. The BMA’s presentation also includes many archival photographs, letters, poems, and other materials from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, providing additional context about the development of the artist’s work and influences.

The BMA is the only East Coast venue for Joan Mitchell. Tickets for the March 6– August 14 Baltimore presentation are available beginning February 7. The exhibition debuted at SFMOMA in September 2021, and a new presentation will open at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in October 2022. In conjunction with the opening, the BMA will begin extending its hours to 9 p.m. on Thursdays starting on March 10. Adding evening hours is among the BMA’s strategic priorities as part of its efforts to increase community access and is supported by a generous gift from the Rouse Company Foundation. Additionally, the retrospective coincides with the final month of the exhibition All Due Respect, which features new work by four artists with ties to Baltimore who have previously received Joan Mitchell Foundation awards. All Due Respect includes installations by Lauren Frances Adams, Mequitta Ahuja, Cindy Cheng, and LaToya Hobbs, and highlights Mitchell’s desire to support the lives and careers of working artists through her foundation.

Co-organized with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Joan Mitchell is the result of more than three years of research and first-hand review of hundreds of paintings by exhibition co-curators Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Programming & Research Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University, and Sarah Roberts, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. They were supported by research teams from both museums and Stony Brook University, as well as a dedicated fellow funded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue have established a new depth of scholarship and understanding about Mitchell’s work as a transnational artist, as well as her profound impact on the trajectory of art.

“Across her life, Joan Mitchell experimented with how painting could embody physical experience and capture a wide range of emotions—including grief, sensual pleasure, humor, joy, and a kind of metaphysical soaring in the face of death—as well as connections to people and places,” said Siegel. “Mitchell also grappled with conflict between the social roles prescribed by her gender and social status and her desire for true creative freedom. She was not simply ‘making it’ in an environment created and occupied by men, she was actively remaking painting and its possibilities. This exhibition is an opportunity to ask what it means to live a life with art at its center and to reconsider the art and narratives of the postwar era.”

Throughout her extensive career, Mitchell immersed herself in color and gesture in her studio, and was also deeply grounded in place and landscape, resulting in a singular style of painting that is at once abstract and connected to the world. Her works share evocations of feeling, as she physically expressed the sensations aroused by relationships; memories; the cities Chicago, New York, and Paris; the countryside of the Mediterranean; and Vétheuil, the French village where the artist made her home. The power of this approach can be seen in her vibrant articulations of urban environments in New York City in paintings like The Bridge (1956) and To the Harbormaster (1957), lush French landscapes like South (1989), and works that engage with the legacy of Vincent Van Gogh, such as No Rain (1976) and Sunflowers (1990-91). Photographs of views and other paintings that inspired Mitchell will be shown alongside her paintings, capturing the way she connected to the natural world and to everyday life.

The exhibition also examines the essential role of music and poetry in Mitchell’s work. Immersed in culture from childhood, Mitchell’s personal and collaborative relationships with writers and musicians in both the U.S. and France are key to her story. As her artistic style developed, the sometimes ambiguous and often personal nature of lyrics, lines of poetry, and musical compositions dovetailed with painting’s capacity to express what cannot be named or explained. Two multi-panel paintings, Ode to Joy (A Poem by Frank O’Hara) (1970-71) and La Vie en Rose (1979), demonstrate the relationships between Mitchell’s passion for the arts across its many disciplines and the way it propelled her practice. The BMA’s exhibition emphasizes this with an immersive soundscape featuring quotes taken from Mitchell's writing and interviews voiced by actor Nadine Malouf, literature significant to the artist read by poet Eileen Myles, and music dear to Mitchell, from jazz standards to opera. The experience is optimized for headphones in the gallery and accessible for visitors through an app on their mobile device or a player borrowed from the museum.

UNTITLED, 1948

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 45 1/4 × 34 3/4 in. (114.9 × 88.3 cm.)

Framed: 51 1/16 × 40 1/2 × 3 3/8 in. (129.7 × 102.9 × 8.6 cm.)

Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York

FIGURE AND THE CITY, 1949-1950

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 40 × 49 in. (101.6 × 124.5 cm.)

Framed: 46 × 54 3/4 × 3 5/8 in. (116.8 × 139.1 × 9.2 cm.)

Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York

Mitchell declared of this work, “I knew it was the last figure I would ever paint. I just knew. And it was.” Figure and the City marks the end of Mitchell’s first stay in France (on an artist’s fellowship from 1948 to 1949) and the beginning of her fresh start in New York. After this painting, “the paintings became the city,” as she put it, with color and form conveying the look and feel of being in the urban landscape.

CITY LANDSCAPE, 1955

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 80 x 80 in.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Society for

Contemporary American Art, 1958.193

HUDSON RIVER DAY LINE, 1955

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 79 × 83 in. (200.7 × 210.8 cm.)

Collection of the McNay Art Museum, Museum Purchase With

Funds From the Tobin Foundation

BELLE BETE, 1973

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 102 1/4 x 70 3/4 in.

Richard and Mary Jo Kovacevich, San Francisco

LA LIGNE DE LA RUPTURE, 1970-1971

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 112 x 79 in.

Private Collection c/o Ekyn Maclean

This atmospheric painting, with its floating geometry, is titled after a poem by Mitchell’s close friend, Jacques Dupin. Painter and poet both play with structure and its disruption. Mitchell fragments her canvas, the gridded forms set off by turbulent dappling and fine-tipped brushwork streaked in contrasting colors, while Dupin breaks traditional sentence structure with sharp shifts of language and subject. The artist made this painting during the period when she was the most intimately connected to French poetry.

WEEDS, 1976

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 110 1/2 × 157 1/2 in. (280.7 × 400.1 cm.)

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1977

Weeding, like painting, is an act of disciplined decision-making: some elements must be brought under control so that others may thrive. Limited vertical strokes and petal-like dabs build energy in this two-panel painting. Paired colors—complementary blues and oranges, pinks and greens—intensify a restricted palette. Mitchell uses color and brushwork to reinforce, or leap across, the boundary between the two panels.

Many of Mitchell’s favorite plants—wild oaks, honeysuckle, daisies, dandelions, sunflowers—might be considered weeds. They are resilient species that are often unwanted, but radiate tough beauty nonetheless. Mitchell herself identified as something of a weed, having resisted social rules to flourish on her own terms as an artist and as a person.

NO RAIN, 1976

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 110 × 158 in. (279.4 × 401.3 cm)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of The Estate of Joan Mitchell

ODE TO JOY (A POEM BY FRANK O’HARA) 1970-1971

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 110 1/2 × 197 1/4 in. (280.7 × 501 cm.)

Framed: 111 1/2 × 198 1/2 × 2 in. (283.2 × 504.2 × 5.1 cm.)

University at Buffalo Art Galleries: Gift of Rebecca Anderson, 1988

Swelling edge-to-edge with broad swaths of color, this multipanel painting emphasizes blocks of paint set in counterpoint rather than the individual strokes that dominated her previous paintings. For Mitchell, structure evoked Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies, and one can imagine that composer’s “Ode to Joy,” as well as the O’Hara poem, as the booming, immersive, and exuberant counterparts to this majestic painting.

SUNFLOWER VI, 1969

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 102 1/4 × 63 1/4 in. (259.7 × 160.7 cm.)

Framed: 103 1/2 × 64 in. (262.9 × 162.6 cm.)

Williams College Museum of Art, Anonymous gift, in tribute to

Linda Shearer and her late husband Hartley Shearer

The towering sunflowers at La Tour, in various stages of bloom and droop, were a compelling subject for Mitchell and remained a touchstone for decades. The Sunflower series evokes the flowers at their peak, bursting with light, color, and energy, reflecting a moment of joyful expansion and optimism as she embraced life in the countryside. Mitchell saw the flowers as individuals: “I don’t like fields of sunflowers. I like them alone, or, of course, painted by van Gogh.”

SANS PIERRE, 1969

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 102 1/2 x 78 1/2 in.

The Long View Legacy LLC

MY LANDSCAPE, II 1967

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 103 × 71 1/2 in. (261.6 × 181.6 cm.)

Framed: 103 7/8 × 72 1/8 × 1 1/2 in. (263.8 × 183.2 × 3.8 cm.)

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson,

Martha Jackson Memorial Collection

ALSO RETURNED, 1969

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 25 1/2 × 21 1/4 in. (64.8 × 54 cm.)

Private Collection

RED TREE, 1976

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 110 3/8 × 63 in. (280.4 × 160 cm.)

Framed: 117 3/4 × 70 1/2 × 2 3/4 in. (299.1 × 179.1 × 7 cm.)

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

AIRES POUR MARION 1975-1976

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 94 × 142 in. (238.8 × 360.7 cm.)

From the Collection of Joan and Preston Haskell

SANS NEIGE, 1969

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 102 1/4 × 197 in. (259.7 × 500.4 cm.) Framed: 103 1/4 × 198 × 1 5/8 in.

(262.3 × 502.9 × 4.1 cm.) 3 panels: L & R 102 1/4 x 63; Middle 102 1/4 x 71

Framed: L & R 103 1/4 x 63 1/2; Middle 103 1/4 x 71

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Gift of the Hillman Foundation, 70.46.4.A.-.C

SKETCHBOOK C. 1948

Graphite Pencil, Fabricated Graphite Pencil, Pen and Ink, Wax Crayon,

and opaque watercolor on paper Overall

Dimensions: (closed): 10 1/4 × 7 7/8 × 5/8 in. (26 × 20 × 1.6 cm.)

Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives, New York

SKETCHBOOK C. 1948

Graphite Pencil, Fabricated Graphite Pencil, Wax Crayon,

Pen and Ink, and Oil Paint on Paper

Dimensions: Overall: 10 1/4 × 7 7/8 × 1/2 in. (26 × 20 × 1.3 cm.)

Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives, New York CUBIST

LA VIE EN ROSE, 1979

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 110 1/2 × 267 15/16 × 4 in. (280.7 × 680.6 × 10.2 cm.) Other (far left panel): 110 1/2 × 70 7/8 × 1 1/8 in. (280.7 × 180 × 2.9 cm.) Other

(center left panel): 110 1/4 × 63 1/8 × 1 1/4 in. (280 × 160.3 × 3.2 cm.) Other (center right panel): 110 3/8 × 63 1/8 × 1 1/4 in. (280.4 × 160.3 × 3.2 cm.) Other (far right panel):

110 1/2 × 70 7/8 × 1 1/4 in. (280.7 × 180 × 3.2 cm.)

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Anonymous Gift and Purchase,

George A. Hearn Fund, by Exchange, 1991 (1991.139a-d)

LA VIE EN ROSE BY KATY SIEGEL

“I love you very much and I treasure your unbribable (UNBRIBABLE) soul.”1 Mitchell’s beloved Edrita Fried wrote her after a visit to Vétheuil around 1980, adding a drawing of Mitchell’s twinned music and spirit (at left). The years 1979 to 1986 swelled with ambition—for art, not career—and the achievement in her work manifested a metaphysical depth born of a life surveyed, prompted, but not determined, by loss and death. These years were shaped as well by her friendship with an electric younger artist, already a true peer, the composer Gisèle Barreau. Their intimacy and mutual support deepened Mitchell’s relationship to music and also to nature, as Barreau’s pleasure and skill with plants forged a more authentic connection to the gardens of La Tour. Mitchell’s paintings reached a new expanse, even as she grew more present in and anchored to the concrete details of her life.

In early 1979, Mitchell flew to New York in the wake of the betrayal by Jean Paul Riopelle and Hollis Jeffcoat, for a “crash-shrink program” with Fried.2 When she returned to Vétheuil in April, she found that Lefèbvre-Foinet had delivered canvas and also cleaned the studio. She reworked and began new pastels, playing her favorite painting music, wanting to want to paint.3 Spring came late that year; “the lilacs just bloomed” in May when Mitchell herself came back to life and began to paint on a daily basis, beginning the enormous quadriptych La Vie en rose (1979, plate 99), whose muted pinks and lavenders play on the “rose” of the title, and perhaps the lilacs as well.4 In the dozens of photos of the panels in progress, one can see that the early version of what would become the far left panel was much more of a Tilleul stroke, vertical and black, and tiered, to be later complicated with blue, masked with white and lilac/gray, and dappled with shorter touches, all of which made it more massed centrally (fig. 9.1). The photos show Mitchell trying out different sequences—in the end, she arrives at what now seems inevitable and would become characteristic: two narrow central panels flanked by slightly wider “side” panels. The painting’s title ironically echoes Mitchell’s long-ago declaration that upon arriving in Paris, “la vie en rose begins”; it also conjures the defiant, tragic image of Édith Piaf—tiny, swathed in black and starkly spotlighted on a grand stage—as Mitchell had seen her perform at Carnegie Hall.5

La Vie en rose was the first painting Barreau saw when she arrived in Vétheuil in late May of 1979—it seems that Mitchell had blazed through the quadriptych in just a few weeks.6 Betsy Jolas had suggested that Barreau—who, like herself, had been a student of Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory7—come to help Mitchell and take care of her dogs. Mitchell had interviewed her in New York and described her in a letter to her sister, Sally Perry: “a very talented young lady composer . . . she’s frighteningly serious but interesting.”8 Barreau had won many prizes—at the conservatory, in France, and in the United States—and was widely regarded as brilliant and intense; Mitchell responded immediately to the kind of artistic and ethical rigor she had earlier attributed to Samuel Beckett.9 In her music, Barreau, like Mitchell, construed the lyric as color, meaning timbre and the range of effects possible with different instruments; she also welcomed experimentation, taking a diploma in electroacoustic music the same year she graduated from the conservatory.10 Scores like Aires pour Marion and Sterne (see pages 292 and 321) are enormous and complex, with many divided parts, and use drawings to specify the spatial positions of musicians, conductor, and audience in order to create particular sonic effects. Sterne made an overall impression of a “very massive sound—very moving,” as Mitchell noted on the program for the concert, where it was performed alongside works by Arnold Schoenberg and Gilbert Amy.11

The seven large quadriptychs Mitchell made between 1979 and 1982 match the immense scale of Barreau’s compositions—as the composer wrote to Joyce Pensato and Carl Plansky in the fall of 1980 (the text in a spiral to form the heart of the sunflower she drew), she and Mitchell “had a bet” about their respective works, due in January, pressing each other onward.12 By late 1980, Mitchell had been invited to have a solo exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, a high-profile promise that also spurred her on; she would eventually show six of these enormous paintings at the museum in her summer 1982 exhibition.13 The first large aintings, La Vie en rose and Salut Tom (1979, plate 100), begin from the broad view of the Seine and the compositional gambits of the late 1960s, but she opened the composition with white and continued the percussive rendering of the late 1970s. Those paintings were a touchstone; as Mitchell complained, “Part of my problem is to make a single pic & I have only really succeeded with ‘Barge’ & the Linden trees before in years.”14 Since the mid1960s, her single panels had all been vertical: they did not have the sweeping landscape feeling of the quadriptychs, which sometimes began as diptychs to which Mitchell added “side” panels whose more vertical, fuller compositions framed a central image.15 In the diptychs she felt a “twoness,” manifested in subtle relationships between the panels: symmetry, continuity, repetition, and difference.16 One striking instance is Cypress (fig. 9.3), in which the motif of doubling takes the very deliberate form of two marks placed on either side of the diptych’s divide. She had different versions of twoness; in Two Pianos (1980, plate 101), made in response to Barreau’s composition Piano Piano, Mitchell did not knit together the divide through repetition or a crossing stroke—the two panels harmonize and respond to each other in counterpoint. The undergirding of deep blue resurfaces across the whole, veiled by lavender and yellow-orange. The two colors are laid on with similar short vertical strokes across the tops of both canvases, but the colors are kept separate; in the center, there is more mixing of the colors, with orange-yellow used to accent the lavender, and vice versa, but the strokes vary—dense on the left, open and broad on the right. The diptych is bound externally rather than internally, with a few late additions of long orange marks on the far edges. Each panel has its own logic, its autonomy, while working in relation to the other.

These relations became more complex and various, even as Mitchell simplified the paintings in other ways. One new vision for the larger works was a diagonal swell that crescendoed from left to right. Less familiar than the river views of La Seine and Salut Tom, this compositional approach had a source in nature: the Vétheuil garden Barreau had taken over. It was “small” in scale and also in the personal, unruly selection of plants made in defiance of Jean Perthuis’s ordered landscaping, with climbing plants, daisies, and other flowers that, like wildflowers and weeds, did not register as valuable in the hierarchy of formal gardening.17 Mitchell delighted in the irony of making this intimate place into a “mural”-scale quadriptych: “She’s redoing ‘her garden’ & it looks beautiful. I titled my big pic for Washington ‘a small garden.’”18 The painting features the colors of flowers Barreau planted in the small garden Mitchell passed on the daily walk to her atelier—white, yellow, the blue of bleuets, the morning glories climbing the edges of the fence—to which Mitchell added black tulips (fig. 9.2).19 The younger woman brought Mitchell into her own grounds, made her feel the gardens did, in fact, belong to her (see page 313), and while Mitchell never worked in the garden to the extent that Barreau did, the artist discovered a litany of specific flowers that she loved: begonias, asters, peonies, roses (fig. 9.4).20 Mitchell learned to attend to the color and feel of types of plants, even the life cycles of individual flowers—a drooping aster, the symbolic rebirth of the amaryllis every year (plate 111). Barreau and Mitchell planted a pumpkin, a plant with a fast life cycle, right outside Mitchell’s studio door so she could see and measure the daily change.

It was only fitting that when Fried died unexpectedly in November of 1981, Mitchell conjured her continued presence in a painting (plate 102) and, with Barreau, in a dedicated garden (see page 312). “She’s certainly alive,” Mitchell wrote to her sister.21 During Mitchell’s absence the following spring, Barreau wrote, “Edrita’s garden will be very pretty in one month—Her peonies are working okay—We had a cup of iced tea together—nice time, près de la petite table de méditation—I would have preferred a Coca-Cola, but so.”22 Mitchell was visiting Perry in Santa Barbara after many years; her sister’s diagnosis of advanced cancer shadowed her all through 1982, even as she was comforted by daily pleasures—a conundrum emphasized in the titles of works, from A Small Garden to the Petits matins (both 1982, plates 108 and 109). Mitchell painted these exquisite small canvases, among the most sheerly beautiful of her career, as she struggled with Perry’s impending death, traveling back and forth to Santa Barbara in fact and in letters, calls, and her thoughts, while also working through the complications around her exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. As she wrote to Plansky and Pensato while installing in the summer of 1982, “Hope you’ll like my late ‘terminal pics’—I didn’t title them that [but] rather ‘Petit matin’ which is when the dawn rises. Guess the show has to do with my life.”23

She was reflecting back on the entirety of her life with her sister as a vast landscape of familial romance— “moitié cachée, moitié pardonée”—and also in great detail: “I can resurrect 190 E. Chestnut in its entirety (recall)—the furniture etc. etc.—& all the walks to the playground . . . Barbara McClurgh’s BD parties & chicken à la king—looking over lake . . . it’s (recall) nice to have in my—imaginary—valise because I can go back to 190 or wherever when I want to” (fig. 9.5).24 The barrage of letters exchanged by the sisters shifts seamlessly between past and present, the latter mostly in the form of highly detailed tales of dogs, particularly Perry’s Malinois, to whom Joan reported she was dedicating a painting, Pour ses Malinois (1981).25 Perry died in the summer of 1982, and among the first works Mitchell painted after her death was a series of nine paintings whose titles, taken from the tune “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” recall childhood, the metaphor of “going down the stream,” and also life as a round, starting over and over (plates 104–7). At almost the same moment, Mitchell’s exhibition opened at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris with paintings from her last twelve years, a third of which had never before been shown, including two for her sister. If most reviewers fell back on invoking Monet and Abstract Expressionism, longtime interlocutor Pierre Schneider raised the stakes, asking whether Mitchell was “la dernière héritière de la grande tradition?”26

Even if the tradition was “grande,” it was the petit that inspired: “Moments of euphoria—epiphany— a poem—a flower—a pic—are so acute.”27 And these moments also comforted. As Barreau typically exhorted Mitchell as the composer was departing for one of her many absences for fellowships, concerts, and teaching, “les reine-marguerites vont être superbes, plus toutes les tulipes a venir, plus narcisses—Go inside and have a look at my primevères—2 sont fleuries—très discrètes—Full of everything—Pick some walnuts—You are not alone.”28 What Fried had called “the artist’s penchant for identifications,” a kind of “pantheism” directed at natural objects, meant something very different from losing oneself in the vastness of water or field: it meant caring deeply for something as small as a flower, which gives back to the caregiver.29 Together with Barreau, Pensato, Plansky, and other friends, Mitchell staged photo sessions in the gardens, treating each sunflower and squash as a model. In a passionate letter to Pensato—somewhat lost herself at the time—Mitchell urged her to put aside the mirror and turn to something “outside yourself.” 30 She was warning against not only the self-regarding gaze of the young artist, but also the current revival of German Expressionist painting, contrasting its harsh blackand-white palette and self-aggrandizement with the colors and external gaze of French painting.31 As an antidote to harsh grandiosity, Mitchell exhorted friends to read Hugo von Hofmannsthal: “He does that spiritual thing with things.”32 She was also reading and rereading Rainer Maria Rilke for his sympathetic view of objects, which transcended the separate entities of nature and self to touch the eternal.33 As he wrote, “External world and vision everywhere coincided as it were in the object; in each a whole inner world was displayed, as though an angel who embraces space were blind and gazing into himself.”34

These years saw Mitchell more open to the spiritual than at any other point in her life. As Barreau saw it, seventeenth-century metaphysicians understood a human’s inner workings long before Sigmund Freud, and her own lyricism had a mystical vein. The libretto for Barreau’s Aires pour Marion, a volcanic composition for chorus and percussion, borrows from the mystical poem Vents (“Winds”) by Saint-John Perse, sung and whispered by the voices. Mitchell was also spending time with Philippe le Thomas, a young doctor in the process of becoming a monk. Recalling a late-night studio visit spent viewing Chez ma soeur (1981–82), a quadriptych dedicated to Perry, the newly ordained Frère Luc wrote:

“And then the wondrous, transcendent moment, mesmerized by reality and the divine emanating from your studio, transported, thrilled by the intensity of the emotion, eyes flowering with color, the gold and the pink veil, and the frisson and the dance, the duet from the Bach cantata. . . . And you spoke of your sister and I spoke of death, God, life, love and . . . ecstasy.35”

He was referring to the duet in Bach’s Cantata no. 78, an expression of gratitude for the liberation from sin brought by Christ’s self-sacrifice, which had spurred their intense discussions.36 Mitchell had lost her sister; 1983 was also the year she began the cycle of La Grande Vallée paintings (as discussed by David Max Horowitz on pages 300–301). Inspired by the longing of a young cousin of Barreau’s to revisit, before his death, the valley that had been their secret place, the cycle (see plates 111, 112, 113) brings together the light-hearted paradise Barreau and Mitchell imagined for Edrita Fried (wined and dined, tended to by two adoring young men) and a powerful vision of eternal life.37 Several of the twenty-one paintings of the cycle were dedicated to friends—Plansky, Frère Luc, Iva (Mitchell’s German shepherd)—human and animal.

In the summer of 1984, Mitchell was diagnosed with jaw cancer and underwent radiation, like her sister and mother before her; the following year she required hip surgery. The titles of the suites she made in the following years note the recurrence of illness and weakness, both in her own life and in more distant memory: Before, Again IV (1985, plate 114) and Between, Then, Last Time. 38 Faded Air I (1985, plate 116) takes a dying sunflower as its subject, lightly, fluidly painted across two panels, combining the single vertical subject with the diagonal composition of A Small Garden and Edrita Fried (1981, plate 102) to create the sensation of droop and drop, a gentle succumbing to gravity.39 Her strokes become longer, curving, calligraphic, a habit of hand that would continue throughout the mid-1980s. The year 1985 was difficult; between the February declaration that she was cancer-free and hip surgery in December, she painted very little, although beautifully. Her mood of reflection, including invocations of Marcel Proust and Rilke (themselves touchstones from earlier moments), was colored by a vivid awareness of the cycle of life and the certainty of endings.40 Mitchell was listening to Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, whose texts by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff, underlined by a musical quotation from Strauss’s early “Death and Transfiguration,” evoke intense experience of nature and gardens in an accepting awareness of death: “We are resting from our travels/ now, in the quiet countryside.”41

In 1986 and 1987, Mitchell returned from her illnesses to paint three significant suites, titled River, Lille, and Chord, amidst ongoing sadness. Iva, “the mother” and her most beloved dog, died in September 1986 after a long, full life. Much more difficult was the knowledge that Xavier Fourcade had AIDS; she may have known in 1985, when she titled a tall, narrow work Xavier, and she certainly knew by the spring of 1986, when she visited New York. As Mitchell described her time in the city, AIDS was “a shadow in the garden”; she was relieved to return to Vétheuil, where “I do cling to the garden to somehow chase away all those horror images I experienced in N.Y.”42 She sought escape, quoting Frank O’Hara’s Ode to Joy: “And there shall be no more dying in the supper clubs.”43 Though the cycle of River paintings returns to a favorite subject, we no longer survey the Seine from a familiar viewpoint, but dive into the rushing waters, evoked by rippling strokes and turpentine-thinned drips that flow across the canvas to create a new kind of space (plate 117). During this grim time, it is easy to imagine that Mitchell was alluding to the sensation of drowning; one painting from this period was titled Ready for the River, and she had long used the fight to keep one’s head above water as a metaphor for emotional and physical threat.44 That fall she spent time with Fourcade in Paris, where he sought treatment; in December they traveled to Lille to see the Henri Matisse exhibition from the Hermitage Museum, which inspired her Lille works. On the way, they stopped to visit the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre in Beauvais, commemorated in the soaring Beauvais (fig. 9.6). 45 These paintings, and the Chord suite that followed, are jewel-toned and white lit, moving between density and openness with ease, evidencing intensity but not struggle. Fourcade died in April 1987.

s always, painting gave Mitchell more than a place to put her feelings. Barreau describes her composition Piano, Piano as embodying the idea of “un monde dans lequel le temps est annulé”;46 Mitchell had always seen painting’s special capacity to elude time, and this quality grew more important to her in the face of so much mortality, her own included.Speaking with Yves Michaud, she told him that in her head she was snapping his picture, a still image that would keep him eternally alive. That she would “frame” him, as she framed her paintings, at first by limning their edges with brushstrokes, and then, later, using side panels to bracket one or two canvases.47 Mitchell put all of this into a late-night note, wisecracking and serious, left for Linda Nochlin to read in the morning at Vétheuil: “I want to see the ‘altar’ piece—honey I ain’t religious—but Catholics think I am—a good pic—held—(not Al Held)—Silent—beautiful—ie—nothing to do with life—death—time—only it’s [sic] edges—frames—still—ie quiet, not Clifford [sic]—lousy painter—existing always—all great pics do this.”48

You may reach the catalog to read whole essays to click below link.

https://artbma.org/exhibition/joan-mitchell/catalogue

THE BALTIMORE MUSEUMOF ART

Founded in 1914, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) inspires people of all ages and backgrounds through exhibitions, programs, and collections that tell an expansive story of art—challenging long-held narratives and embracing new voices. Our outstanding collection of more than 95,000 objects spans many eras and cultures and includes the world’s largest public holding of works by Henri Matisse; one of the nation’s finest collections of prints, drawings, and photographs; and a rapidly growing number of works by contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds. The museum is also distinguished by a neoclassical building designed by American architect John Russell Pope and two beautifully landscaped gardens featuring an array of modern and contemporary sculpture. The BMA is located three miles north of the Inner Harbor, adjacent to the main campus of Johns Hopkins University, and has a community branch at Lexington Market. General admission is free so that everyone can enjoy the power of art. artbma.org

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THE BALTIMORE MUSEUMOF ART

SORBES DE LA NUIT D'ETE, POEM PASTEL WITH JACQUES DUPIN, 1975

Pastel and Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 13 7/8 × 9 1/4 in. (35.2 × 23.5 cm.)

Framed: 17 11/16 × 13 in. (45 × 33 cm.)

Private Collection

DAYLIGHT, WITH POEM BY JAMES SCHUYLER C. 1975

Pastel and Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 14 × 9 in. (35.6 × 22.9 cm.)

Framed: 19 1/4 × 24 7/8 × 1 in. (48.9 × 63.2 × 2.5 cm.)

Collection of Nathan Kernan

BONJOUR JULIE, 1971

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 110 1/4 × 228 3/4 in. (280 × 581 cm.)

Framed: 112 × 230 in. (284.5 × 584.2 cm.) Collection of the Art Fund, Inc. at the

Birmingham Museum of Art; Purchase with funds provided by the Merton

Brown Estate and the Thelma Brown Trust

LA GRANDE VALLE E XVI, POUR IVA, 1983.

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 1021/4 × 783/4 in. (259.7 × 200 cm).

Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York

SALUT TOM, 1979

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 110 1/2 × 316 in. (280.7 × 802.6 cm.)

Each Panel: 110 7/16 × 78 5/8 in. (280.5 × 199.7 cm.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Museum Purchase with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts), 2014.136.135

The sun-washed atmosphere of this quadriptych, a fourpaneled painting, recalls the river Seine as seen from Mitchell’s terrace on a summer day. With such massive, multi-panel works, Mitchell conveyed the sweeping view of the landscape while also exploring painting’s capacity to “stop time, or frame it.”

Mitchell painted this work in memory of her friend, art critic Thomas B. Hess, who had recently died. She felt she could keep loved ones like Hess eternally alive in paintings, their spirit held, framed by the two flanking side panels. Salut Tom is one of seven quadriptychs that Mitchell made as she prepared to fill the walls of her first major French museum show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1982.

BLUE TREE, 1964

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 96 5/8 × 78 in. (245.4 × 198.1 cm.)

Framed: 97 1/8 × 78 1/2 in. (246.7 × 199.4 cm.)

Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, Museum Purchase, 1965.392

MUD TIME, 1960.

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 82 x 78 inches (208.28 x 198.12 cm).

A turbulent swirl of conflicting hues shows Mitchell risking muddiness—the collapse of color and legible marks into chaos— to achieve a new and more challenging kind of beauty. The title references Robert Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” in which a narrator laboriously splits logs during the slushy period between winter and spring, vividly evoking the artist’s struggle with the viscous oil paint.

GIROLAA TRIPTYCH, 1963

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 76 7/8 × 127 5/8 in. (195.3 × 324.2 cm.)

Private Collection

LYRIC C. 1951

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 68 × 72 1/2 in. (172.7 × 184.2 cm.)

Framed: 69 × 73 × 1 1/2 in. (175.3 × 185.4 × 3.8 cm.)

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, gift of William Rubin, 1960.4.2

Controlled as well as explosive, Lyric puzzles together organic forms, often outlined in black, to build on Mitchell’s absorption of earlier abstraction by European modern artists like Wassily Kandinsky. The painting was shown at Mitchell’s first New York gallery exhibition in 1952 and earned immediate attention. This gorgeous whirlwind captivated the young art historian William Rubin, future curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who pawned his oboe to buy it.

TWO PIANOS, 1980

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 110 × 142 in. (279.4 × 360.7 cm.)

Private Collection

UNTITLED C. 1961

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 118 1/8 × 78 3/4 × 1 1/4 in. (300 × 200 × 3.2 cm.)

Framed: 119 3/8 × 79 7/8 × 1 3/4 in. (303.2 × 202.9 × 4.4 cm.)

Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of Anne and John Marion

WATER GATE 1960

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 86 x 84 in.

Private Collection, Courtesy of McClain Gallery

UNTITLED, 1978

Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: Overall: 22 7/8 × 16 5/8 in. (58.1 × 42.2 cm.)

Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York

UNTITLED, 1978

Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: Overall: 22 7/8 × 16 5/8 in. (58.1 × 42.2 cm.)

Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York

VETHEUIL, 1967-1968

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Unframed: 76 3/4 × 49 7/8 in. (194.9 × 126.7 cm.)

Framed: 79 × 53 5/16 × 2 1/4 in. (200.7 × 135.5 × 5.7 cm.)

Private Collection, New York

RUSSIAN EASTER, 1967.

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 78 7/8 x 58 1/8 inches (200.343 x 147.638 cm).

TO THE HARBORMASTER, 1957

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 76 x 118 in.

AKSART LP

This panoramic painting embodies the vast expanse of water between New York and Paris. A range of blues nearly fills the canvas, structured by strong red strokes that cross and contradict earlier marks, dissolving the line between sky and sea. The decisive marks build a clear rhythm, matching Mitchell’s newfound confidence as an artist with deep emotion. For Mitchell, the view of the Atlantic Ocean represented her many departures and arrivals—also the subject of close friend Frank O’Hara’s famous poem, “To the Harbormaster.”

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught

in some moorings. I am always tying up

and then deciding to depart.

—Frank O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster,” 1957

LA LANDE, 1977

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 18 1/2 × 15 in. (47 × 38.1 cm.)

Private Collection

LA GRANDE VALLEE II (AMARYLLIS) 1983

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 86 × 75 1/2 in. (218.4 × 191.8 cm.)

Framed: 88 × 80 in. (223.5 × 203.2 cm.)

Private Collection, Courtesy Guggenheim, Asher Associates

UNTITLED, 1992

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 110 1/4 x 142 in.

Komal Shah & Gaurav Garg Collection

SUNFLOWERS, 1990-1991

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 110 1/4 × 157 1/2 in. (280 × 400.1 cm.)

Framed: 113 3/4 × 161 3/8 in. (288.9 × 409.9 cm.)

Collection of John Cheim

NO BIRDS, 1987–88

Oil on canvas

Dimensions: Overall: 86 3/4 × 156 1/4 in. (220.3 × 396.9 cm.)

This V-shaped composition, structured as a landscape distinctly divided into sky and field, may be Mitchell’s clearest response to Vincent van Gogh’s work. After decades of refusing direct representation, Mitchell channels the powerful themes of death and isolation in van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows—one of his last paintings—into her own meditation on mortality. No Birds also followed the death of longtime New York dealer Xavier Fourcade amidst Mitchell’s preparations for a retrospective museum exhibition. These experiences sparked a reflective mood, tinged with melancholy.

SOUTH, 1989

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 1021/2 × 1571/2 in. (260.4 × 400.1 cm)

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

This exuberantly analytical two-panel painting flickers as a double image—two reflections of a mountain, made and viewed side-by-side. Looking at this work unleashes a process of comparison as the eye of the viewer leaps back and forth, unfolding the drama of painting as a sequence of decisions. Here, Mitchell returns to a foundational source: Paul Cézanne. South springs from Cézanne’s views of Mont Sainte-Victoire to reveal Mitchell’s complex and experimental thought process while she worked.

“LOVE IS THE CONDITION OF ARRIVING AT INFINITY”:

JOAN MITCHELL & POETRY

The first full monograph on Joan Mitchell was written when she was in her early sixties. In preparatory interviews with the curator Judith Bernstock, which stretched over seven days at the artist’s home in Vétheuil, Mitchell time and again returned to poetry as a foundational force in her work. Indeed, the first sentence of the monograph considers the two arts as equals: “Inspired by her parents as a child growing up in Chicago, Joan Mitchell developed a love for poetry and painting.” Her mother, Marion Strobel, was a notable figure among Chicago’s literati, publishing poetry, novels, and reviews, and was an associate editor of Poetry magazine from 1920 to 1925. Mitchell grew up with poets regularly visiting the apartment on Chicago’s North Side. When Mitchell wrote a precociously restrained poem at the age of nine, it seemed entirely logical that Strobel would submit it to Poetry’s editor, Harriet Monroe, for consideration. Mitchell could still remember the poem’s last line more than half a century later, and recited it to Bernstock: “And bleakness comes through the trees without sound.” She liked it, she noted, for the line’s “feeling for sound and silence.”1 Strobel was partially deaf, so Mitchell associated poetry—perhaps surprisingly—with silence. For all her mother’s socializing, it was the look of poetry on the page that moved Mitchell, as did the sight of her mother at her desk, deeply absorbed in her work.2

Beyond a few newspaper reviews at the time of publication, little critical attention has been paid to Strobel’s work. She published two volumes of poetry when Mitchell was very small—Once in a Blue Moon (1925) and Lost City (1928)—both of which contained sections devoted to her children and motherhood. As the jacket to Once in a Blue Moon rather patronizingly put it, the poems capture “all the moods of young womanhood—moods that are in turn gay, tender, capricious, pathetic and defiant—in transparent verses that are as musical and direct as bird songs.”3 They were also lyric poems through and through: short, intensely rhyming, and often focused on an experience of love so strong that it felt like loss. Lyric was a meditation designed to evoke feeling, as opposed to the rationalizations of prose. It created a psychological interiority, a perceiving eye. Though it had been the dominant mode in the Western European tradition since Greek antiquity (suffering a slight decline in England and France in the eighteenth century but enjoying a revival in the nineteenth century with Romantic poetry), it had recently fallen out of favor, dismissed by early twentiethcentury poets like William Carlos Williams as emphasizing melodious language rather than a complexity of thought.4 The characterization was a little unfair—lyric poetry can evoke complex emotion—but lyric does often rely on a sentimentality that confirms rather than extends the reader’s emotional vocabulary. While Strobel was quick to sense this sentimentality as an editor, traces of it appear in her poetry. For example, the last poem of Lost City, “A Cloak for Joan,” turns on a series of self-abnegations. The speaker gifts the child a beautiful cloak and almost immediately anticipates her throwing it away. The protection she has to offer—even the words in the poem—will not hold the child, and the speaker cannot do anything other than end with a facile compliment: the fabric looks “pretty with your hair.”5

Within lyric poetry, this attentiveness to the queasy pleasures of diminishment was (and is) nothing unusual; as Laura Quinney has pointed out, “a disproportionate number of lyric and meditative poems concern disappointment—not just those that address individual disappointments, as for example, disappointments in love, but those that plumb the generalized, chronic condition.”6 Critiquing Strobel’s poetry, one could argue that the leap from the individual to the generalized sometimes falters in her verse, remaining within a very particular understanding of love (well-to-do, heteronormative, feminized) that assumes it is more universal than it is. The same criticism could be made of Strobel’s novels, which all deal with the private scandals of women of means on Chicago’s North Side—namely, with whom they fall in love, and what they decide to do about it.7 A character at the climax of Fellow Mortals (1935) claims, “Every woman’s intent is love”—and is not corrected.8

Mitchell’s allegiance to lyric poetry was not to her mother’s writing but to the promises lyric poetry made as a genre about the self in relation to the world. Lyric poetry was a way to think and access grand ideas, unrepentant in their scale: a love that stretched outward, to encompass nature and the infinite. In her final term paper on the Romantics at Smith College, Mitchell sliced and diced her way through the pantheon of nineteenth-century greats (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Lord Byron, John Keats, and even Charles Dickens), categorizing each of their stances on transcendentalism (“whether the source of faith be in the mind or sense”) with a series of confident, though somewhat impenetrable, declarations. She treated them as philosophers rather than poets, noting their position, but paying little attention to the formal qualities of their poetry. Yet out of nowhere, toward the end of her second paragraph in the essay, she offered a seeming non sequitur: “Love is the condition of arriving at infinity.”9

The sentence is out of place in Mitchell’s essay, flashing out from the page like a lighthouse on a distant point—there is no call for it in the context of what she is actually discussing—but it is entirely at home in the context of Mitchell’s painting career. Her paintings are often engulfing in scale and color and texture; they stretch utterance in the way that poetry stretches past prose, elliptically harnessing the world. Poetry contained a fullness of thought that resisted explanation, and which accessed emotion more directly than prose. To Irving Sandler, she noted that the feelings she strove to express in her painting were “the qualities that differentiate a line of poetry from a line of prose.”10 To Bernstock, Mitchell said that she had never looked for a meaning in a poem: “It seemed perfectly clear. If it’s not spelled out, it doesn’t matter. That’s how I feel about my painting.”11 In lyric poetry, absolutes are often treated like directions without limit: an arrow flying, never hitting. Rainer Maria Rilke, who was one of Mitchell’s favorite poets, is a particularly good example; in his poems, even his memories appear to stand outside time, charged with the platonic potential of each object. He is interested in transformation rather than causality.12 Mitchell’s paintings also aimed at revelation rather than just realization, a swiftness of comprehension. She paid close attention to how lyric poets charted the paradoxes of intuition, of knowledge lagging, then leaping. William Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”13 Comfortable with the quiet contradictions undergirding this definition (Spontaneity and reflection? Overflow and tranquility?), Mitchell hewed close to these terms when describing the subjects of her own painting. Her often-quoted remark that she painted from “remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed” is remarkably precise in echoing Wordsworth, even though the comment was made more than a decade after she had graduated college.14

By the time Bernstock visited Mitchell in Vétheuil, it is obvious that Mitchell had absorbed certain formal elements of poetry—namely, the genre’s ability to move rather than persuade. The space that poetry often gives to words encourages the reader to consider them more closely. Shades of pause (line breaks, indents, stanza breaks) make us better interpreters of what is generally understood as silence. White space both slows and speeds up the reader, and so the constant gauging of distance and intimacy is more pronounced. It seems no accident that Mitchell used white paint as distinctively as she did, creating space and light in ways comparable to a poet’s positioning of a line break. (Hemlock [1956, plate 24], named after “Domination of Black” by Wallace Stevens, is a particularly good and early example of this.) As she noted, painting was a process of perception, the continual observation of the relationships emerging on the picture plane: “The way to do it is relationship, relationship.”15 Multipanel works like Clearing (fig. 2) or Ode to Joy (A Poem by Frank O’Hara) (1970–71, plate 75) could even be paintings of poems about landscapes rather than paintings of landscapes. The panels operate like pages; within each, a series of rectangular or square blocks of color echo one another just as verses do in an open book of poetry held at a distance, the verses aligning and drifting away from one another.

These formal echoes are slight, and it is easy to overinterpret them. To those who know Mitchell mainly for her time in New York in the 1950s, when she was part of a sprawling social circle centered around the downtown abstract art world, it might come as a surprise that Bernstock’s catalogue devotes limited attention to this period. Mitchell emphasized the painters she encountered (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky) and her membership in The Club (launched by a number of first-generation abstractionists in 1948), and she noted her association with other female painters around her age, like Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler. However, Mitchell obviously did not consider the title “second-generation Abstract Expressionist” to be particularly meaningful, nor did she reflect on the collaborative esprit de corps that characterized the scene.

Most New York painters and poets agreed with Baudelaire’s maxim that various art forms might “lend one another new energies,” and one of the first organized discussions at The Club concerned the relationship between painting and poetry. (Other panel topics that year included the relationship between art and architecture and the painter as editor.) It was expected that an artist be well-read in areas other than visual art. Given Mitchell’s upbringing, this would have suited her just fine, but she did not see the need to speculate on what the arts gave each other. To Bernstock, she did not emphasize her collaboration with John Ashbery for The Poems, one of four limited-edition books issued by the Tiber Press.16 These were large, self-consciously beautiful objects, typeset by hand and printed on fine paper, and obviously recalled the tradition of European livres d’artistes, making a case for a shared set of sensibilities between artists and poets. The painter Fairfield Porter, reviewing all four books for Art News, thought the most successful collaboration was Ashbery and Mitchell’s, commenting, “she seems to treat her poet with sensitive understanding and respect. They are both abstract, and her graphic illustrations combine into page designs in which the illustration looks like writing, with Ashbery’s lightness of touch.”17 Mitchell would have likely shared Porter’s skepticism of a collaborative rationale that considered one art form as reducible or directly proportionate to another. Elsewhere, Porter wrote dismissively of Wyndham Lewis’s writing on Pablo Picasso, observing that Lewis “looks at paintings through the spectacles of words and without those spectacles would be blind. He does not know the difference between the pictures and his talk about them.”18 A distinction between forms had to be preserved and respected; without this distinction, any emotion would be flattened, turned into an archetypal paste of creativity that connected artworks by equalizing them. It was significant that Porter noticed—and praised—the ways in which Mitchell respected the self-sufficiency of Ashbery’s verse.

Mitchell also did not recall to Bernstock her collaborative discussion with Frank O’Hara, Elaine de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, and Michael Goldberg, which was recorded over three nights, condensed, and published as “5 Participants in a Hearsay Panel” in It Is (1959). This purported transcript of comments made during an evening at The Club began:

JOAN: We’ll open with a question. Is style hearsay?

FRANK: Well, Pavia says, nowadays everyone talks about you behind your back in front of your face.

ELAINE: Yes, Philip Guston told Andrew Wyeth that Louis B. Mayer told John Huston: Well, if you don’t like it here, go back to Greenwich Village and starve on a hundred dollars a week.19

The obvious joke was that everyone was always quoting someone else. In this emergent scene, a slippery triangulation of authority emerged from aestheticizing gossip. But in the text, Mitchell’s presence was limited: her comments were brief, and often referee-like (for example, “Now, possibly, the panel will discuss the question of craftsmanship”). The social scene in New York caused Mitchell a great deal of anxiety, and she later observed that her relationship with the art world “is distant, and occurs mainly through individuals”—no triangulation necessary.20 It was probably her close friendship with O’Hara that prompted Mitchell’s participation in “5 Participants.”

As the artist Larry Rivers noted at O’Hara’s funeral in 1966, “There are at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.”21 Reading O’Hara’s letters to Mitchell, you can see why. He had a wonderful habit of imagining—in type—what the other was thinking, conducting a conversation on the page well in advance of the reader. This habit of imaginative projection structured his poetry, which made no bones about its epistolic roots. In 1959, for example, he began a letter to Mitchell by noting that he had just come from lunch with Bluhm—and with it, he included a poem (“Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and JeanPaul”) that had obviously been written just before lunch with Bluhm.22 Both letter and poem began by covering the same ground: O’Hara’s forthcoming weekend trip to Southampton, the book of poems he was working on (and how helpful Mitchell’s studio on St. Mark’s Place had been in providing some peace and quiet). In his letter to Mitchell, he imagined her days in Paris, and in the poem, he also wished he were “reeling around Paris/ instead of reeling around New York.” As he noted in his looping cursive at the top of the page, both poem and letter were written under the cloud of a hangover. It was an extraordinary performance. To be invited, so swiftly and gracefully, onto the stage of another’s art making—to witness his regard for her settle into a poem—must have been just as beguiling to Mitchell as it was to the numerous others that O’Hara mentioned in his poetry.

O’Hara is best known for his “I do this, I do that” poems, which (at least in their beginnings) recall the artist Joe Brainard’s description of O’Hara’s walk: “Light and sassy. With a slight twist and a slight bounce. It was a beautiful walk. Confident. ‘I don’t care,’ and sometimes, ‘I know you are looking.’”23 Yet O’Hara’s eye for exhilaration made it easy to overlook the elegiac undertows in his poetry—but Mitchell, raised on a diet of lyric poetry, would have noticed. Consider “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s” (1957), written for a celebration of Jane Freilicher and Joe Hazan’s marriage at Mitchell’s. Midway through the poem, O’Hara pauses, considers the avalanche of details he began with, the coordinates of that moment in time and space (the date, the time, even the weather), then shifts tone: “This poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long. . . . / and I would make it as long as I hope our friendship lasts if I could make poems that long.” It is an impossible wish— for both friendship and poetry—and he knows it. The most he can hope for is that Freilicher and Hazan’s happiness is a “sign that we will be happy too.”24 Similarly, the climax of “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” (1964) also operates as a charm to ward off loss: “the only thing to do is simply continue/ is that simple/ yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do.” But O’Hara does not end here. The last stanza is a list of all things that O’Hara, on faith, assumes are continuing: in Paris, “the Seine continues,” “the Bar Américain continues to be French,” and “Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!).” He asks fellow poets “René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn’t it.” (He had met Beckett while visiting Mitchell and Ashbery in Paris the year before.) The final line concludes: “I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don’t believe it.”25 The poem is so celebratory that it is easy to overlook O’Hara’s refusal, tucked in at the very end.

In an optimistic reading of the disappointments recounted in lyric poetry, one may lose the girl or the boy or one’s self-regard, but that loss is compensated by new self-knowledge.26 O’Hara hewed to this trade-off, or at the very least, to the sense that there was a set of scales to be balanced. Less so did Ashbery, which is perhaps why Mitchell never thoroughly warmed to his poetry, even though they overlapped for almost a decade in Paris, from 1955 to 1965, when they lunched together almost weekly, and although Ashbery sensitively reviewed her work for Art News. In his poetry, Ashbery persistently thwarts the reader’s expectations of an easily legible emotional arc, resolving then questioning, admitting then sidestepping; in general, he was a little suspicious of the swift or singular grace of revelation.27 On a visit to Paris with O’Hara in 1961, the poet Bill Berkson recalled Mitchell reading the page proofs of Ashbery’s experimental long poem “Europe” and remarking, “God! How I worked over that poem!” To her, it was about the “death of culture.”28 More than twenty years later, Mitchell directed Berkson to “early, lyrical” poems of Ashbery’s for them to discuss.29

By then, Mitchell had been painting in earnest for forty years, and had lived in Vétheuil for twenty. She had settled into a working routine in relative isolation, close to nature, with a domestic life populated by the same pleasures that James Schuyler celebrated in his poetry. His long poem “A Few Days”—after which Mitchell titled two paintings (fig. 4)—catalogs many of them (“a Remington Rand, my Olivetti, the ashtray and the coffee cup”) and darts into side valleys of memory, occasionally stepping back, noticing the views beyond: “And there was goldenrod and tattered Queen Anne’s lace and the noble Hudson/ on which just one sailboat sailed, billowing, on a weekday afternoon.”30 These are remembered landscapes as much as Mitchell’s paintings are, the line breaks like well-placed oar strokes moving the reader through the poem at unhurried and elegant speed. The details of these days appear ahistorical, as does Mitchell’s painting in its unwavering intensity of light and color. For Mitchell, this was never a problem. To Bernstock she noted that “lyric” was “now [generally considered] a dirty word,” as was “nature.”31 It is always tempting to understand Mitchell’s painting and Schuyler’s poetry as more universal than they actually are: their sense of scale was far greater than, say, Strobel’s, though it was always bounded by class and a very particular canon. Neither was particularly interested in acknowledging those larger limits; it just did not seem that interesting or profitable. It seemed better to explore “pure” paradoxes of sensation and consciousness as a condition of being rather than to interrogate the historical and political assumptions that undergirded them.

To Mitchell, it was little more than historical accident and art gallery whim that meant Schuyler, O’Hara, Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest were conclusively grouped together as the New York School poets. John Bernard “Johnny” Myers, cofounder of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, coined the phrase in a piece for Nomad magazine in 1962, more than a decade after the poets had met and started collaborating with one another and their artist friends, many of whom were represented by de Nagy. Myers had instigated a number of these collaborative projects, and the poets themselves saw the label as a marketing convenience rather than an aesthetically meaningful title. Mitchell was already skeptical of Myers (painfully, the gallery had not chosen to represent her when she was starting out in New York), but she was also more aware (than many U.S. readers) of other traditions in which she situated her friends’ work. She knew, for example, how important French poets like Char, Reverdy, and Paul Verlaine were to O’Hara (to Koch, O’Hara wrote, “I’d rather be dead than not have France around my neck like a rhinestone dog-collar”32), or how the well-established French tradition of antitraditional poetry could rejuvenate poetry written in English. (The fact that both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot had suggested as much in print in the early twentieth century, entirely independently from each other, suggests how unfamiliar contemporary French poetry was to the general reader of poetry in the United States.33) Mitchell also saw how English poetry tended to emphasize the concrete, and French poetry the conceptual. Paul Auster clarified the difference when he noted Yves Bonnefoy’s observation that English poetry operated like a mirror, and French poetry like a sphere: “the one Aristotelian in its acceptance of the given, the other platonic in its readiness to hypothesize a ‘different reality, a different realm.’”34 Even before she moved to France, Mitchell was predisposed to be interested in spheres as well as mirrors, in platonic realities rather than Aristotelian ones. (In at least one studio, she kept a long-distance mirror so she could take in the overall effect of a painting all at once, rather than in parts. The reflective effect of a sphere is the same.) Mitchell would have been able to sympathize with her friend Beckett (“everything Beckett has ever done” was important to her art, she told Bernstock35) and his frustrations translating Endgame from French to English. In the play, Clov addresses Hamm and says, “Il n’y a plus de roues de bicyclette”; Beckett complained to a correspondent that the English equivalent “There are no more bicycle wheels” did not convey the much larger problem that the line in French did: that bicycle wheels as a category had ceased to exist.36 Mitchell understood these transatlantic crosscurrents: what it might mean, for example, for O’Hara to write in “Flag Day,” “It seems that everything’s merely a token/ of some vast inexplicable feeling.” She understood the value of the inexplicable, in honoring the categorical rather than the specific.

Mitchell’s interest in lyric poetry—sustained over a lifetime—gave her a frame large enough to exist independently of her friends, and distinct enough for her to be particular in her reading (fig. 5). When Bernstock asked about her favorite poets, Mitchell replied, “John Donne, shall we start from there?”37 She saw the value in Parnassus, a crowded hill of poets: Rilke to her left, O’Hara and Jean Genet to her right, Wordsworth chatting to Stéphane Mallarmé, and Baudelaire just beyond. And in 1975, she also embarked on a number of what she termed “color abstracts,” selecting short poems and fragments from longer ones, then framing or overlaying the words with atmospheric washes and lines of pastel, working with texts by Jacques Dupin, J. J. Mitchell, Schuyler, Pierre Schneider, and Chris Larson—all young friends, or close friends of close friends.38 Her choices were remarkably reminiscent of her mother’s verse half a century before: just as brief and emotional, just as attentive to loss and love. The most well-known of these poem-pastels, for example, reproduces Schuyler’s “Daylight” (plate 80): “And when I thought,/ ‘Our love might end’/ the sun/ went right on shining.” She selected poems that recalled the epistolic as well, choosing a poem by J. J. Mitchell (that began “Dear/ Joan”), which was titled “Frank O’Hara’s Birthday.” More than a few were exercises in intimacy; in the pastel Sally Up My Alley, Mitchell listed nicknames for her family members (“Mitchie/ Poondie/ Newtie/ Joanie/ Jimmy”)—though it was J. J. (no relation) who had written the source poem, rather than Joan Mitchell herself. In retyping their words (sometimes meant for her, sometimes not, but always for a particular other), she deflected and reflected the lyric outward, inviting the unknown viewer to listen in on a party-line phone call.

Intimacy functions like a skipping stone in these collaborations, the frames of address widening but never losing focus. In this sense, love could aspire to infinity. O’Hara’s presence is clear, even a decade after his death. In his mock manifesto “Personism”—written in 1959 in an hour, and which retains the sharp improvisatory edge of something written in a rush—O’Hara suggested that one of Personism’s aspects “is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feelings about the person.”39 For O’Hara, affection could act as a kind of creative catalyst, but it shouldn’t be a smooth trade. Your love (for anyone and anything) could—and should—direct the focus of your own art without collapsing into sentimentality. The person and the art were related—even mutually sustaining—but never the same. It was a distinction that Mitchell, who had spent so much of her life working from feeling, would have appreciated. For Mitchell, poetry was a call across water, a model for hailing one another. It gave her a form in which to feel the world.

https://artbma.org/exhibition/joan-mitchell/catalogue

JOAN MITCHELL

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) was an abstract artist whose prolific career spanned more than four decades. She worked in a variety of mediums—including oil on canvas, pastel on paper, and lithographic printing—and is widely recognized as one of the most significant artists of the post-war era.

Born in Chicago on February 12, 1925, Mitchell attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon graduating in 1947, she was awarded a travel fellowship that took her to France for a year, where her paintings became increasingly abstract. Returning to the United States in 1949, Mitchell settled in New York and became an active participant in the “New York School” of painters and poets. She exhibited in the famous “9th Street Show” in 1951, and soon established a reputation as one of the leading young Abstract Expressionist painters. In 1955, Mitchell began dividing her time between New York and France, and in 1959 she settled permanently in France, living and working in Paris. In 1968, she moved to Vétheuil, a small town northwest of Paris, where she worked continuously until her death in 1992.

Over her long and prolific career, the defining elements of Mitchell’s world—water, trees, dogs, poetry, music—created images and memories from which she worked. She once said, "I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with." She observed her landscape intensely, and her acute visual observations of form, space, and color in life were part of the visual memories she drew upon while painting

Mitchell achieved significant critical and commercial success in her lifetime, exhibiting regularly in New York and Paris throughout the later decades of her life. The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major institutions began collecting her paintings in the 1950s. Her work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1974. In 1982, Mitchell became the first female American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris. A retrospective exhibition, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell: Thirty-six Years of Natural Expressionism, toured the United States in 1988, with stops at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

Mitchell’s major awards and accomplishments include: Le Grand Prix des Arts (Peinture) of the City of Paris (1991); the Award for Painting from the French Ministry of Culture (1989); the inaugural Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association of America (1988); Honorary Doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1987) and The Western College, Oxford, Ohio (1971); and the Premio Lissone, Milan (1961).

As an extension of her commitment to sustaining an environment of dedication and camaraderie among artists, Mitchell gave personal support to many young artists and writers who came to stay with her at her home in Vétheuil—sometimes for just one night, sometimes for an entire summer. Correspondence in her papers reveals that this generosity often had a life-changing impact on those who spent time with her.

Mitchell died in Paris on October 30, 1992. Her generosity in her own lifetime continued after her death with the formation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, called for in her will in order to create support and recognition for individual artists. In addition, the Foundation’s mission includes the promotion and preservation of her legacy, which includes her remarkable body of work, her papers (including correspondence and photographs), and other archival materials related to her life and work.

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April 12, 2022

JOAN MITCHELL AT BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART