The Formidable Joan Mitchell (American, 1925 - 1992)
The Formidable Joan Mitchell (American, 1925 - 1992)
2022-07-18
The Formidable Joan Mitchell
American, 1925 - 1992
The legacy of painter Joan Mitchell (American, 1925 - 1992) is one of a formidable creative force. Her work forged a pathway into the nearly impenetrable male-dominated abstract expressionist circles of the 1950s. She garnered critical acclaim and success, as she distinguished herself from her contemporaries through compositions that vibrate with energy and color. From painting, to drawings, to prints, her work elegantly synthesizes landscape, with memory, poetry, and music while retaining the intimacy and emotive potential of the abstractionist movement.
In 1992, her first solo museum exhibition of drawing titled Joan Mitchell: Pastel, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Mitchell lived just long enough to see the closing of the exhibition in June, passing away October of 1992 from lung cancer in a Paris hospital.
Thirty years after her death, SFMOMA, co-organized with the Baltimore Museum of Art, to host an expansive retrospective of works by the artist, aptly titled Joan Mitchell. It featured over eighty distinguished works, including rarely seen early paintings and drawings that established Mitchell’s career, along with large-scale multi-panel masterpieces from her later years that demonstrate her mastery of color. Suites of paintings, sketchbooks, and drawings, as well as an illuminating selection of the artist’s letters and photographs, open a new window into the richness, range, and ambition of Mitchell’s deeply influential and barrier-breaking creative practice.
We have JUST acquired a very special large format color lithograph by Joan Mitchell, titled Flower II (T. 370).
Hand-signed and numbered, Mitchell created this work in 1981. It is an Artist Proof in small edition, numbered 13/16.
Stop in to Kodner Gallery to view our expert's pick of the week Flower II (T. 370) by the formidable Joan Mitchell (American, 1925 - 1992) ...
Plus, inquire about our special summer pricing!
Joan Mitchell (American, 1925 -1992)
Flower (T 370), 1981
Artist Proof
Edition 3/16
Color Lithograph
42 1/2 x 32 3/8 inches
Hand Signed and Numbered Lower Right
"AP 13/16 Joan Mitchell"
Available for Purchase
Both intimate and immersive, Mitchell toys with our preconceptions surrounding notions of beauty and of looking with Flower (T 370), 1981. In the early 80s, Mitchell was living in Seine, France in a home with spectacular views. She became profoundly fascinated with her garden, which became the subject of much of her work at the time. With Flower (T 370), she encourages the practice of close looking, choosing to expand this micro-moment in a large format lithograph. She distills the natural form of a flower into gestures rendered in two tones, orange and black, and then alters the scale from life-sized (small) to her abstraction (large).
In many ways with Flower (T 370), Mitchell plays in to the traditional genre of a floral still-life, only to deftly and elegantly subvert the trope. The removal of representational imagery gives way to Mitchell's affinity for abstraction and its celebration of emotive potential of line. The beauty of the image lies not in the petals, but in the rhythm of the marks traversing the composition. They intersect, overlap, rise upward, and coagulate, to generate energy, a style singular to Mitchell's practice. Compositions such as Flower (T 370), exemplify Mitchell's ability to reconsider and reconstruct beauty, as she enmeshes aesthetics with introspection.
Click here to watch a short video Joan Mitchell in 60 seconds
by the Royal Academy of Arts in the United Kingdom
Joan Mitchell
American, 1925 - 1992
Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Her prodigious oeuvre encompasses not only the large-scale abstract canvases for which she is best known, but also smaller paintings, drawings, and prints.
Born in Chicago and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Mitchell moved in 1949 to New York, where she was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.
In 1951, Mitchell became one of the few female members of the exclusive Eighth Street Club, and, that spring, her work was included in The Ninth Street Exhibition, organized by charter members of The Club with the assistance of Leo Castelli, which helped to codify what became known as the New York School of primarily abstract painters. During her lifetime, Mitchell’s work was exhibited in solo presentations at numerous influential galleries in the United States and Europe, including Stable Gallery, New York (1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1965); Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1961); Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992); Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1968, 1972); Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986); and Robert Miller Gallery, New York (1989, 1991).
Her first institutional solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, was held in 1972 at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Subsequent museum presentations during Mitchell’s lifetime were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974, 1992); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; 1988–1989).
In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective of Mitchell’s work, which traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. In 2010, the Joan Mitchell Foundation organized Joan Mitchell in New Orleans, which included a symposium on her life and work, and three concurrent exhibitions at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. In 2015, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings was presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and subsequently traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Additional recent museum solo presentations include those at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2008; traveled to Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy and Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny, France, 2009); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2010); and Musée des Beaux–Arts de Caen, France (2014). In 2017, Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); and Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc, Landerneau, France (2018–2019).
A comprehensive Joan Mitchell traveling retrospective was co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The retrospective was first on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2022, before traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it will be on view through August 22, 2022. In October, it will open at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, where the complementary exhibition entitled Monet – Mitchell will also be on view.
Mitchell’s work can be found in prominent institutional collections worldwide including:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California
Art Institute of Chicago
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Nakanoshima Musuem of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
The RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka, Japan
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Tate, London
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
American, 1925 - 1992
The legacy of painter Joan Mitchell (American, 1925 - 1992) is one of a formidable creative force. Her work forged a pathway into the nearly impenetrable male-dominated abstract expressionist circles of the 1950s. She garnered critical acclaim and success, as she distinguished herself from her contemporaries through compositions that vibrate with energy and color. From painting, to drawings, to prints, her work elegantly synthesizes landscape, with memory, poetry, and music while retaining the intimacy and emotive potential of the abstractionist movement.
In 1992, her first solo museum exhibition of drawing titled Joan Mitchell: Pastel, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Mitchell lived just long enough to see the closing of the exhibition in June, passing away October of 1992 from lung cancer in a Paris hospital.
Thirty years after her death, SFMOMA, co-organized with the Baltimore Museum of Art, to host an expansive retrospective of works by the artist, aptly titled Joan Mitchell. It featured over eighty distinguished works, including rarely seen early paintings and drawings that established Mitchell’s career, along with large-scale multi-panel masterpieces from her later years that demonstrate her mastery of color. Suites of paintings, sketchbooks, and drawings, as well as an illuminating selection of the artist’s letters and photographs, open a new window into the richness, range, and ambition of Mitchell’s deeply influential and barrier-breaking creative practice.
We have JUST acquired a very special large format color lithograph by Joan Mitchell, titled Flower II (T. 370).
Hand-signed and numbered, Mitchell created this work in 1981. It is an Artist Proof in small edition, numbered 13/16.
Stop in to Kodner Gallery to view our expert's pick of the week Flower II (T. 370) by the formidable Joan Mitchell (American, 1925 - 1992) ...
Plus, inquire about our special summer pricing!
Joan Mitchell (American, 1925 -1992)
Flower (T 370), 1981
Artist Proof
Edition 3/16
Color Lithograph
42 1/2 x 32 3/8 inches
Hand Signed and Numbered Lower Right
"AP 13/16 Joan Mitchell"
Available for Purchase
Both intimate and immersive, Mitchell toys with our preconceptions surrounding notions of beauty and of looking with Flower (T 370), 1981. In the early 80s, Mitchell was living in Seine, France in a home with spectacular views. She became profoundly fascinated with her garden, which became the subject of much of her work at the time. With Flower (T 370), she encourages the practice of close looking, choosing to expand this micro-moment in a large format lithograph. She distills the natural form of a flower into gestures rendered in two tones, orange and black, and then alters the scale from life-sized (small) to her abstraction (large).
In many ways with Flower (T 370), Mitchell plays in to the traditional genre of a floral still-life, only to deftly and elegantly subvert the trope. The removal of representational imagery gives way to Mitchell's affinity for abstraction and its celebration of emotive potential of line. The beauty of the image lies not in the petals, but in the rhythm of the marks traversing the composition. They intersect, overlap, rise upward, and coagulate, to generate energy, a style singular to Mitchell's practice. Compositions such as Flower (T 370), exemplify Mitchell's ability to reconsider and reconstruct beauty, as she enmeshes aesthetics with introspection.
Click here to watch a short video Joan Mitchell in 60 seconds
by the Royal Academy of Arts in the United Kingdom
Joan Mitchell
American, 1925 - 1992
Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Her prodigious oeuvre encompasses not only the large-scale abstract canvases for which she is best known, but also smaller paintings, drawings, and prints.
Born in Chicago and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Mitchell moved in 1949 to New York, where she was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.
In 1951, Mitchell became one of the few female members of the exclusive Eighth Street Club, and, that spring, her work was included in The Ninth Street Exhibition, organized by charter members of The Club with the assistance of Leo Castelli, which helped to codify what became known as the New York School of primarily abstract painters. During her lifetime, Mitchell’s work was exhibited in solo presentations at numerous influential galleries in the United States and Europe, including Stable Gallery, New York (1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1965); Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1961); Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992); Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1968, 1972); Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986); and Robert Miller Gallery, New York (1989, 1991).
Her first institutional solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, was held in 1972 at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Subsequent museum presentations during Mitchell’s lifetime were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974, 1992); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; 1988–1989).
In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective of Mitchell’s work, which traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. In 2010, the Joan Mitchell Foundation organized Joan Mitchell in New Orleans, which included a symposium on her life and work, and three concurrent exhibitions at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. In 2015, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings was presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and subsequently traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Additional recent museum solo presentations include those at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2008; traveled to Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy and Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny, France, 2009); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2010); and Musée des Beaux–Arts de Caen, France (2014). In 2017, Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); and Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc, Landerneau, France (2018–2019).
A comprehensive Joan Mitchell traveling retrospective was co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The retrospective was first on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2022, before traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it will be on view through August 22, 2022. In October, it will open at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, where the complementary exhibition entitled Monet – Mitchell will also be on view.
Mitchell’s work can be found in prominent institutional collections worldwide including:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California
Art Institute of Chicago
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Nakanoshima Musuem of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
The RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka, Japan
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Tate, London
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
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