"She was a piece of work!" the critic Irving Sandler told me on learning of Patricia Albers's biography of the abstract painter Joan Mitchell (1925-92). This appraisal, from the first critical champion of her work, is among the most restrained comments you'll hear about this famously abrasive, famously foul-mouthed artist. Some people genuinely liked and admired Mitchell, but many, according to Ms. Albers, found her "grossly insensitive" and worse.
The artist's older sister blamed her sibling's "indescribable rudeness" for a near-permanent rift between them. A life-long friend described Mitchell as "meanspirited, grotesque, and humorless." A colleague recalled that battling was her "favorite form of entertainment," and one of her psychoanalysts described her as acting "like a baby who falls into a rage." Ms. Albers supports such observations with examples of appalling behavior and, occasionally, physical violence. New York neighbors, we are told, were once startled by the "fearsome sounds" of Mitchell and her lover of the time, the painter Michael Goldberg, "trying to kill each other," while friends were astonished "when she turned up . . . with bruises and black eyes half-concealed by sunglasses."