Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), widely regarded as one of the most important post-war American artists, was a fierce individualist who swam against the tide her entire life. To read her biography—including the many pages devoted to her in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel—is to take a ringside seat at a continuous brawl that unfolded in New York's Greenwich Village, where she moved from Chicago in 1949, as painters of The New York School, along with the poets who joined in the argument, redefined what was the art of painting. In the process they defined what it is to be alive. Above: Joan Mitchell in her Vetheuil studio, 1983 (photograph by Robert Freson, Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives © Joan Mitchell Foundation) 

As one of the small group of women in this elite club of underdogs that included Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler; Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Larry Rivers, Mitchell aggressively determined what and who she was, and what and with whom she lived her own life. In public, she drank and smoked with the boys, and was never intimidated by the machismo that fueled all-night discussions that illuminated the dark and dank Cedar Bar where they gathered.

In fact, Mitchell was given to throwing a punch if she felt it would make her point more clearly than a verbal tussle. More than once, her signature dark glasses hid a black eye received during such a discussion. She was averse to being categorized or compared to other artists—something that even today can be seen in articles such as this recent piece that celebrates her art. Above: Joan Mitchell, La Vie en Rose, 1979. Oil on canvas, 110 3/8 x 268 1/4 inches (280.4 x 681.4 cm). © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Installation view of Joan Mitchell, courtesy of Baltimore Museum of Art, photographed by Mitra Hood 

This year marks the centenary of Mitchell’s birth, with close to 100 works being presented in museums in both the US and France Info. In the last few years leading up to this marker, a major retrospective organized and presented by SFMOMA in 2021, then traveled to The Baltimore Museum of Art and concluded at Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2022.

In 2019, David Zwirner Gallery presented a showing of Mitchell’s multi-panel painting (above) organized in collaboration with the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Titled I carry my landscapes around with me, the show presented these large-scale works, many of which have never been publicly displayed, and some of which measured up to 14 feet wide. The size and presence of these paintings can be appreciated in this video. As the artist stated in 1958, "My paintings are titled after they are finished. 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."

Writing about this show in Hyperallergic, John Yau said, “Three points need to be made here, before discussing individual works. At no time does she accommodate herself to the dominant critical discourses circulating throughout the New York art world. To point out, for example, that these works reify a painting’s essential flatness ignores the obvious: Mitchell knew a stretched canvas was flat long before it became a thing that critics harped on. Above: Visitors to SFMOMA in 2021

“Second, it is more important to note the differences between what she did and what had been done by artists of an older generation. If you focus on the similarities between her work and theirs, you fail to see the specificity of what she attained. Third, as I have previously suggested, with the multi-panel paintings she defined a territory all her own.” David Zwirner Gallery produced a fully illustrated catalog, which includes the following illuminating comments on and by the artist about her work: 

"I am very much influenced by nature as you define it.… 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. All art is subjective, is it not?" —Excerpt from a letter written by Joan Mitchell in 1958, in John I.H. Baur, Nature in Abstraction: The Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture to  Nature in Twentieth-Century American Art

"I don't set out to achieve a specific thing, perhaps to catch motion or to catch a feeling. Call it layer painting, gestural painting, easel painting or whatever you want. I paint oil on canvas—without an easel. Conventional methods. I do not condense things. I try to eliminate cliches, extraneous material. I try to make it exact. My painting is not an allegory or a story. It is more like a poem." —Joan Mitchell in conversation with Yves Michaud, 1986. Above: Joan Mitchell in her studio, Vétheuil, summer 1991. Photo by Christopher Campbell

“These entwined bundles of paint and space convey the sense of matter held together by the tension between attraction and dissolution. Paint scatters and collects, gathers and expands, allowing the forms in Sunflowers to breathe. Throughout her life she referred to sunflowers in her paintings; she said of them, "[they] are like people to me." Mitchell’s late sunflower paintings reflect the feeling of the flower’s life cycle: its immense gathering of energy into the brightly colored flower and its subsequent dissipation. 

In her late works, Mitchell presents us with a kind of certainty regarding paint, color, form and balance that is also a corporeal certainty—that in life and nature, contrasting entities and forces both contradict and agree, and can, through the medium of paint, unify.

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