Exceptional Works: Joan Mitchell

Sunflowers, 1990–1991

Oil on canvas in two parts
110 1/4 x 157 1/2 inches
280 x 400.1 cm

Featured on the occasion of the gallery’s presentation at Art Basel 2024, Joan Mitchell’s Sunflowers (1990–1991) is a major example of the artist’s elegiac late work. The present diptych is one of a small number of large-scale, multipanel works on the theme of sunflowers made in the last years of Mitchell’s life.

Joan Mitchell

Sunflowers, 1990-1991

Oil on canvas in two (2) parts

110 1/4 x 157 1/2 inches (280 x 400.1 cm)

“Sunflowers are something I feel very intensely. They look so wonderful when young and they are so very moving when they are dying.”

—Joan Mitchell, 1986

Sunflower in Mitchell’s garden in Vétheuil, 1989. Photo by Marabeth Cohen-Tyler

After beginning her career in New York City in the early 1950s, Mitchell began dividing her time between New York and France in 1955. She moved to Paris in 1959, then in 1967 purchased an estate known as La Tour in Vétheuil, a small town northwest of the city. Her primary residence for nearly twenty-five years, La Tour, with its lush gardens, trees, and panoramic views of the river, provided constant sources of inspiration for the artist.

Sunflowers—which Mitchell once said “are like people to me”—grew abundantly in and around her property. Mitchell admired Vincent van Gogh’s depiction of the subject, and she revisited this motif periodically throughout her career, beginning around the time she relocated to Vétheuil.

Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers, 1990–1991 (detail)

“There are also paintings called ‘Sunflowers.’ In … Mitchell's works, blossoms are tossed high into the air, as if by the force of their will to live. They may also come bunched and knotted and go careening through space. In at least one, they form up like acrobats, each eager to outdo the other.”

—John Russell, art critic, reviewing Mitchell’s 1991 solo exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery, New York, in which the present work debuted. New York Times, 1991

Joan Mitchell, Sunflower, 1969. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Joan Mitchell, Blueberry, 1969

Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers VI, 1969. Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers, 1990–1991

Joan Mitchell, Two Sunflowers, 1980. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

The view of Vétheuil’s Notre Dame Cathedral from Mitchell’s garden, 1989. Photo by Marabeth Cohen-Tyler

“The Sunflower pictures … embody Mitchell's final synthesis of her decades of excruciatingly hard-won expertise as a painter. She achieves an explication of all she has mastered in the intricate, ornate, recalcitrant style so coveted … by her peers.”

—Jane Livingston, curator, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002

Installation view, Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me, David Zwirner, New York, 2019

One of the few artists of her generation to embrace polyptych compositions, Mitchell over time refined and expanded her approach to the format, orchestrating a distinctive balance between continuity and rupture both within and across panels. The horizontally oriented, panoramic expanse of these paintings is ideally suited to landscape—an important and enduring subject for Mitchell that she linked directly to memory.

“In the last paintings she would make, Mitchell pared down sunflower and tree figures and placed them eloquently in fields of white canvas. No longer memories of views or captured feelings of the natural world in her grandeur, they are declarations of identity.... With the sparest of means, these paintings crystallize her central concerns at the end of her life. They are about her, but they do not reveal her; they are about sunflowers, Van Gogh, beauty, and death, but convey far more. Singular and uncategorizable, they are neither abstraction nor representation, but beyond both.”

—Sarah Roberts, co-curator, Joan Mitchell, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, 2021–2022

Joan Mitchell in her studio, Vétheuil, summer 1991. Photo by Christopher Campbell

David Zwirner at Art Basel