A retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is shot through with energy, revealing the painter’s dynamic genius
Rarely have I seen a show that so viscerally engages its audience. In “Joan Mitchell,” a thrilling retrospective of some 80 works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I felt a giddy energy, occasionally expressed through visitors’ spontaneous gapes and gasps, responses more frequently seen at circuses and fireworks displays than painting exhibitions.
The Chicago-born Mitchell (1925-1992), a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, worked primarily in two sizes: symphonic and intimate—both scales of immersion. Among the show’s first 20 paintings are the large, gestural abstractions “Mud Time” (1960) and “Untitled” (c. 1961)—early signature works in which Mitchell’s slashing, calligraphic brushstrokes read as explosive, physical attacks.
Few painters brave Mitchell’s high wire—combining, in single canvases, eruptive, ecstatic color with dense, muddy hues. And few can submerge us in flurries of tangled, swashbuckling strokes evocative of weeds, waves, flames, foliage and rain. In these and other paintings, bold hues—reds, yellows, blues, oranges, greens, violets—crash and burst and advance on us within white fields, themselves bruised by gritty grays. While flung white paint, à la Jackson Pollock, suggests lightning bolts, bird droppings, sparks and fairy dust.
Jointly organized by SFMOMA and the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it will travel next spring, “Joan Mitchell” was co-curated by SFMOMA’s Sarah Roberts and BMA’s Katy Siegel. In fall 2022, it moves to Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Installed chronologically, the survey establishes Mitchell’s well-heeled upbringing and influences. An expressionist and a romantic, Mitchell studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. In New York, she befriended Pollock and Willem de Kooning—both of whom, to my eye, she eventually surpassed as an artist. Mitchell was as devoted to French painting (Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and Pierre Bonnard are ever-present) as she was to the New York School. In 1968, having long divided her time between Paris and New York, she moved permanently to Vétheuil, France, a small village northwest of the capital, and lived on a property with a house once owned by Monet.