A new Joan Mitchell retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art surveys the career of a pioneering Abstract Expressionist painter.
Before Joan Mitchell became a major American painter, emerging as a member of the celebrated 1950s group known as the New York School, she was a teenage figure-skating champion. As an artist, she had the virtues of an athlete: ambition, discipline, technique and an intoxicating sense of bodily freedom. At the same time, a childhood spent among poets—her mother included—gave Mitchell an abiding lyricism. As she put it, she wanted to express in painting the qualities that “differentiate a line of poetry from a line of prose.”
The creative sources of Mitchell’s art spring into focus in “Joan Mitchell,” a retrospective opening Sept. 4 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The exhibition includes some 80 works produced over five decades, including suites of paintings, massive multipanel canvases, drawings and sketchbooks. Following a loose chronology, it is organized around cycles of work—paintings and drawings in which Mitchell explores similar ideas about color, brush stroke and other themes.
“Part of her process is to think about the same idea in different scales,” said exhibition co-curator Sarah Roberts, curator and head of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA. “Often in a body of work there will be very small works—maybe 18 inches—being worked on at the same time as ambitious multipanel paintings.” One section of the show, for instance, features works inspired by sailing trips off the French Riviera in the early 1960s. Ranging from small canvases and charcoal-and-pastel drawings to ambitious, large-scale paintings, each work experiments with a similar composition: a central, densely bundled form against a lighter background. In most of the works, this motif was inspired by the sight of a dark cypress tree against a light wall in brilliant sunlight, glimpsed by Mitchell on one of her Mediterranean voyages.
Born in Chicago to a cultured, upper-class family, Mitchell trained at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York in 1949. There she fell in with an Abstract Expressionist crowd that included rising stars like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. With her appetite for creative risk and decisive eye for composition, she achieved critical acclaim in an intensely masculine milieu.