Joan Mitchell,

by Joan Mitchell

As an artist, Joan Mitchell's talents and significance were often overshadowed by the time and place of her work. While living in New York in the 1950s, for instance, she had to share a stage with such luminaries as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, a feat further complicated by her gender. Second, she chose to live in France for the last decades of her life, causing her to slip from the collective memory of most Americans. Regardless of this undeservedly diminished stature, Mitchell will go down in history as a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement, leaving behind an impressive and influential body of work. Joan Mitchell is very much a labor of love, since, in her will, the artist asked her longtime friend Klaus Kertess to write the text for this collection, a task that he completes with style and skill. Along with revealing her personality and motivations, Kertess does an admirable job of detailing the impressive artistic circles Mitchell ran in while living in Chicago, New York, and Paris. This volume exhibits 120 pieces of her work, as well as a detailed and comprehensive biographical chronology that is sure to help jog some memories.

Genres: Art

47 pages, Unknown Binding

First published February 1, 1997

Reviews

[Kerfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike many in similar books, Kertiss; essay about Joan Mitchell puts the artist and her work at the center. Her biography, friends, influences, and world events spiral out from that center, and it gives both coherence and insight to the many plates illustrating the evolution of Mitchell's work over time. And excellent reference in all ways.

[Myles Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

kertess intro'd me to some new mitchell influences and contemporaries and had some good anecdotes about her brilliant mixture of not-giving-a-damn and complete immersion in emotional landscapes (bjork's "hunter" kept playing in my head when a painting wowed me). but dude was too hung up on where her work stood in relation to others, whether she invented something new, which paintings counted as "masterpieces", adjectives like "majesterial" - which doesn't seem at all right for mitchell's practice or attitude and made me suspicious of the selection. a book that focused on her pastels was more what i was looking for - less intrusive, more focused on her idioms.