Vincent van Gogh’s work also loomed large over her oeuvre. Mitchell’s large-scale, multi-canvas paintings often communicated the impact of time on nature, just as Monet’s cathedrals and gardens did.
In 1959, Mitchell took up residence in the French commune of Vétheuil, where Claude Monet had once worked. Many have likened Mitchell’s work to Impressionism-a fitting comparison given that she spent significant amounts of time in the historic stomping grounds of that earlier movement’s foremost names. I look at it all as what I see.” Whether she was painting bridges spotted from her New York apartment window or the vibrant scenery she saw in the north of France, Mitchell always cast an admiring eye toward her surroundings. “Man made a city nature grows,” she once wrote in a letter to Sandler. Nature, too, figured in her work, whether in the form of still lifes or abstracted landscapes. Photo Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock In 1957, for a famed ARTnews profile titled “ Mitchell Paints a Picture,” she told critic Irving Sandler, “I am not a member of the make-it-ugly school.” Mitchell appears to have subscribed to that idea in her work, but unlike some of her colleagues, she also prioritized visual pleasure. Form-the ways materials were wielded and came to coalesce-was believed to be the most important way to make an artistic statement. During the age of Abstract Expressionism, content was considered anathema. But viewers would not necessarily know this just by looking. Only upon further study of Mitchell’s oeuvre would one be able to discover its referent: cypress trees in the Grandes Carrières district of Paris, which the artist frequented.įor Mitchell, trees acted as symbols of mortality and stand-ins for her loved ones. In Grandes Carrières (1961–62), for example, a swirling mixture of burnt umber, mint green, and deep blue looms before the viewer, appearing to float above, or stand before, a messy white background dripped and splashed with yellow.
But trees were among the constants in her oeuvre. The basis for Mitchell’s “central images” changed depending on her locale, her mood, and the company she kept.
“Clement Greenberg said there should never be a central image so I decided to make one,” Mitchell once said, referring to the art critic who was Abstract Expressionism’s most vocal exponent. A number of Mitchell’s canvases stand apart from that style, however, featuring at their core swirling masses that appear to vibrate with life. The greatest defenders of Abstract Expressionism preferred a style that has been termed all-over abstraction-think of the vast drip paintings of Jackson Pollock or the epic, elegiac black-and-white canvases of Franz Kline. ©Estate of Joan Mitchell/Photo Aimee Marshall/Art Institute of Chicago
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