After surviving one of the confrontations that bound and often ruptured Joan Mitchell's many friendships, I quickly learned you could never say goodbye to her. For Joan, any kind of parting was death; and her deep fear of death fueled many of her lyric furies of paint.
I met Joan in Paris in 1972, when my eyes, like those of many others in the art world, were still tuned to the Spartan rigors and rule of geometry practiced by painters like Brice Marden, Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman, who had come to the fore in the 1960's. Willem de Kooning's vehement gestural abstraction had been exiled to art limbo, as had the work of Joan and others who sought to extend its painterliness, not rebel against it.
Indeed, the survey of Joan's painting from 1969 to 1973 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 was largely greeted with stifling indifference. My own lack of proper enthusiasm earned a powerful slap in the face at a drunken dinner the night before her opening. Now, on the eve of her full-scale retrospective (her first in New York) at the Whitney, perhaps the amplitude of feeling and breath so vividly embodied in her best work will posthumously solidify and increase the acclaim that her painting has been gathering since the 1980's.