Joan Mitchell

One of the most admired second-generation Abstract Expressionists, Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) came to early prominence with her lyrical abstract paintings at the end of the 1940s. In 1951, at the age of 26, she participated in the groundbreaking ‘Ninth Street Art Exhibitions’ in New York, alongside influential artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline. Mitchell was one of the few female artists of her generation to experience recognition in her lifetime. Settling definitively in the French countryside from 1968, she developed an intense colourful abstraction inspired by natural phenomena, as much as by artists such as Claude Monet and Henri Matisse. Mitchell’s work is characterised by a fresh and spontaneous energy and her commitment to the tenets of gestural abstraction remained firm and uncompromising throughout her influential career.

‘Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space. Style in painting has to do with labels. Lots of painters are obsessed with inventing something. When I was young, it never occurred to me to invent. All I wanted to do was paint. I was so and still I am in such adulation of great painters. If you study a Matisse, the way paint is put on and the way he puts on white, that's painting technique. I wanted to put on paint like Matisse. I worked hard at that a very long time ago. Someone said to me recently with surprise: "But you don't paint in 'series,' you paint pictures, each painting is different." And I thought: no, I paint paintings.’

J. Mitchell in conversation with Yves Michaud, January 12, 1986, in Joan Mitchell: New Paintings, Xavier Fourcade, 1986