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Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter
“Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead.” —New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950sShe was a steel heiress from the Midwest—Chicago and Lake Forest (her grandfather built Chicago’s bridges and worked for Andrew Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American Revolution—Anglo-Saxon, Republican, Episcopalian. She was tough, disciplined, courageous, dazzling, and went up against the masculine art world at its most entrenched, made her way in it, and disproved their notion that women couldn’t paint.Joan Mitchell is the first full-scale biography of the abstract expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s; a portrait of an outrageous artist and her struggling artist world, painters making their way in the second part of America’s twentieth century. As a young girl she was a champion figure skater, and though she lacked balance and coordination, accomplished one athletic triumph after another, until giving up competitive skating to become a painter. Mitchell saw people and things in color; color and emotion were the same to her. She said, “I use the past to make my pic[tures] and I want all of it and even you and me in candlelight on the train and every ‘lover’ I’ve ever had—every friend—nothing closed out. It’s all part of me and I want to confront it and sleep with it—the dreams—and paint it.”Her work had an unerring sense of formal rectitude, daring, and discipline, as well as delicacy, grace, and awkwardness.Mitchell exuded a young, smoky, tough glamour and was thought of as “sexy as hell.”Albers writes about how Mitchell married her girlhood pal, Barnet Rosset, Jr.—scion of a financier who was head of Chicago’s Metropolitan Trust and partner of Jimmy Roosevelt. Rosset went on to buy Grove Press in 1951, at Mitchell’s urging, and to publish Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, et al., making Grove into the great avant-garde publishing house of its time. Mitchell’s life was messy and in New York and East Hampton carousing with de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, and others; going to clambakes, cocktail parties, softball games—and living an entirely different existence in Paris and Vétheuil.Mitchell’s inner life embraced a world beyond her own craft, especially literature . . . her compositions were informed by imagined landscapes or feelings about places. In Joan Mitchell, Patricia Albers brilliantly reconstructs the painter’s large and impassioned her growing prominence as an artist; her marriage and affairs; her friendships with poets and painters; her extraordinary work. Joan Mitchell re-creates the times, the people, and her worlds from the 1920s through the 1990s and brings it all spectacularly to life.
553 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
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812 people want to read
About the author
Patricia Albers
7 books12 followersPatricia Albers's new biography Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész will be out in January 2026. Born in Budapest in 1894, Kertész soared to star status in Jazz Age Paris, tumbled into poverty and obscurity in wartime New York, slogged through fifteen years shooting for House & Garden, then improbably reemerged into the spotlight with a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. By the time of his death in 1985, he had exhibited around the world, taken more than 100,000 images, and steered the medium in new and vital directions.
Patricia takes Kertész from the eastern front in World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively central European diaspora. From Condé Nast's postwar media empire to the photo boom of the 1970s, she revisits Kertész's relationships with other photographers, among them his frenemy Brassaï and his protégé Robert Capa. She breathes life into a gentle, generous, and unassuming man endowed with Old World charm but also sputtering with grievance and rage and inclined to indulgence in deception.
Patricia's earlier books include Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life and Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area,
Patricia takes Kertész from the eastern front in World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively central European diaspora. From Condé Nast's postwar media empire to the photo boom of the 1970s, she revisits Kertész's relationships with other photographers, among them his frenemy Brassaï and his protégé Robert Capa. She breathes life into a gentle, generous, and unassuming man endowed with Old World charm but also sputtering with grievance and rage and inclined to indulgence in deception.
Patricia's earlier books include Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life and Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area,
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May 22, 2019
Rating: 3.9* of five
The Publisher Says: “Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead.” —New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950s
She was a steel heiress from the Midwest—Chicago and Lake Forest (her grandfather built Chicago’s bridges and worked for Andrew Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American Revolution—Anglo-Saxon, Republican, Episcopalian.
She was tough, disciplined, courageous, dazzling, and went up against the masculine art world at its most entrenched, made her way in it, and disproved their notion that women couldn’t paint.
Joan Mitchell is the first full-scale biography of the abstract expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s; a portrait of an outrageous artist and her struggling artist world, painters making their way in the second part of America’s twentieth century.
As a young girl she was a champion figure skater, and though she lacked balance and coordination, accomplished one athletic triumph after another, until giving up competitive skating to become a painter.
Mitchell saw people and things in color; color and emotion were the same to her. She said, “I use the past to make my pic[tures] and I want all of it and even you and me in candlelight on the train and every ‘lover’ I’ve ever had—every friend—nothing closed out. It’s all part of me and I want to confront it and sleep with it—the dreams—and paint it.”
Her work had an unerring sense of formal rectitude, daring, and discipline, as well as delicacy, grace, and awkwardness.
Mitchell exuded a young, smoky, tough glamour and was thought of as “sexy as hell.”
Albers writes about how Mitchell married her girlhood pal, Barnet Rosset, Jr.—scion of a financier who was head of Chicago’s Metropolitan Trust and partner of Jimmy Roosevelt. Rosset went on to buy Grove Press in 1951, at Mitchell’s urging, and to publish Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, et al., making Grove into the great avant-garde publishing house of its time.
Mitchell’s life was messy and reckless: in New York and East Hampton carousing with de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, and others; going to clambakes, cocktail parties, softball games—and living an entirely different existence in Paris and Vétheuil.
Mitchell’s inner life embraced a world beyond her own craft, especially literature . . . her compositions were informed by imagined landscapes or feelings about places.
In Joan Mitchell, Patricia Albers brilliantly reconstructs the painter’s large and impassioned life: her growing prominence as an artist; her marriage and affairs; her friendships with poets and painters; her extraordinary work.
Joan Mitchell re-creates the times, the people, and her worlds from the 1920s through the 1990s and brings it all spectacularly to life.
My Review: This is a life, not a biography, in the sense that it offers more of a rounded picture of Joan Mitchell than a rigorous analysis of her milieu and her position and her place in history. Mitchell, a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard broad, is famous if you know who she is, and invisible if you don't. I suspect that would make her really, really mad. Mitchell was a daughter of privilege, wealthy dermatologist father and novelist/poet/editor ([[Marion Sobel Mitchell]]) mother, who felt unloved and grew into a figure-skating champ, then an early Abstract Expressionist/Action painter, then the wife of serial monogamist/avant garde publisher Barney Rosset (an old friend of ours), whose life-work running Grove Press was all due to Joan telling him about her friend's failing little publishing company, and finally ending her days as an expatriated eminence grise of feminist art in America. How she hated that! The expatriating part she loved, living in a small French village where Monet had honed his Impressionist chops; the feminist part? Loathed it from the depths of her gin-soaked soul. She felt no kinship with Woman. She felt no unmixed feeling, frankly, on any subject. She was a difficult, dangerous friend and a worse enemy. She was deeply disagreeable, arguing to no great purpose about anything with anyone, and seldom offering any kind of apology for the havoc she caused in the lives and worlds of those around her.
She died of cancer at sixty-seven, after drinking, smoking, and boinking enough for three dozen misspent youths. Barney was sincerely distraught. I suspect he never got over her. He talked about her quite a lot...the other four wives, not so much, unless there was some child or grandchild related reason to do so. I don't imagine anyone else had an unmixed response.
Her work was...it remains...well...go here to see Field for Skyes, which she painted to release the grief of losing her beloved Skye terrier Bertie. It's an IMMENSE piece of art, but even in the inkydinky Internet form, it's lovely. In person, Mitchell paintings are all about paint...the effects of different techniques of putting paint onto a painting are crucially important to the visual experience of the painting. In photos, that's simply not possible to reproduce. But enough survives to give you a chance to experience Mitchell's passion. Like it or don't, and I don't much, Mitchell's work is strong and intense and accomplished. What it isn't, and what I suspect she knew it wasn't, is great.
Field for Skyes, Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution
Books about art are, unless they're big and all in color and lushly produced, like safe sex: enough of the real thing survives that you're inclined to continue, but it ain't like the real damn thing, and no amount of skill or wishing or forcing yourself to believe is gonna make it so.
Patricia Albers does a decent job conveying the chaos and the bleakness of Mitchell's life. She does a lot less well at giving any hint as to why the woman didn't kill herself in existential crisis...does ANYthing make Mitchell happy? I couldn't say...but the inevitable moment when Albers must speak to us, her readers, about paintings she cannot show us in a 400+-page mostly text book, points up this book's major failing. Here, from p249, is Albers describing Mitchell's painting Ladybug, painted per Albers very shortly after the death of Mitchell's beloved singer Billie Holiday in 1959:
"Luscious garden hues -- cadmium red, celadon, cobalt blue, ultramarine, slurry brown, carmine, ochre, acid raspberry -- splash and streak through this luminous nine-foot-wide oil. Some colors optically blend. Others pop from the picture plane, thanks in part to the painter's astute use of red-green and blue-ochre polarities. (The latter, along with Ladybug's architectural exactitude and play of colors against aerating whites, evoke the late work of Cezanne.) Mitchell's gloriously variegated brushstrokes push and tug and shimmer and float, like the edges of planes jostling in a shallow space or foliage lifted and twirled by a breeze, kissing the light, then heaving away." (There's more, but I'm tired of typing this stuff.)
This is Ladybug, on view at the Museum of Modern Art:
I've seen the painting with my own two baby greens and, to be frank, I would not picture anything like that painting from those words. And lest it be said that everyone's experience of art is subjective, I counter that I've seen a LOT of art and even a lot of Mitchells...I, an experienced and sophisticated viewer, should be able to recognize a painting I've actually seen from this kind of description.
So...would I recommend the book to you? No, not unless you're an art aficionado possessed of a strong and broad visual vocabulary. It wouldn't hurt to read the stuff about the world of the 1950s New York School of Abstract Expressionists in here, but that's frankly not enough to make it worth your while to pick the book up. Dare if you must. But keep Google Images open and use it freely and frequently if you're braving these waters without your own mental map. Shoals abound for the innocent and the unwary.
But for the initiate, this grimoire of grimness illuminates (how ironic) some dingy corners of an important passage in American and world art. In the end, I'm glad I read it, but I suspect many would not share my interest.
The Publisher Says: “Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead.” —New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950s
She was a steel heiress from the Midwest—Chicago and Lake Forest (her grandfather built Chicago’s bridges and worked for Andrew Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American Revolution—Anglo-Saxon, Republican, Episcopalian.
She was tough, disciplined, courageous, dazzling, and went up against the masculine art world at its most entrenched, made her way in it, and disproved their notion that women couldn’t paint.
Joan Mitchell is the first full-scale biography of the abstract expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s; a portrait of an outrageous artist and her struggling artist world, painters making their way in the second part of America’s twentieth century.
As a young girl she was a champion figure skater, and though she lacked balance and coordination, accomplished one athletic triumph after another, until giving up competitive skating to become a painter.
Mitchell saw people and things in color; color and emotion were the same to her. She said, “I use the past to make my pic[tures] and I want all of it and even you and me in candlelight on the train and every ‘lover’ I’ve ever had—every friend—nothing closed out. It’s all part of me and I want to confront it and sleep with it—the dreams—and paint it.”
Her work had an unerring sense of formal rectitude, daring, and discipline, as well as delicacy, grace, and awkwardness.
Mitchell exuded a young, smoky, tough glamour and was thought of as “sexy as hell.”
Albers writes about how Mitchell married her girlhood pal, Barnet Rosset, Jr.—scion of a financier who was head of Chicago’s Metropolitan Trust and partner of Jimmy Roosevelt. Rosset went on to buy Grove Press in 1951, at Mitchell’s urging, and to publish Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, et al., making Grove into the great avant-garde publishing house of its time.
Mitchell’s life was messy and reckless: in New York and East Hampton carousing with de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, and others; going to clambakes, cocktail parties, softball games—and living an entirely different existence in Paris and Vétheuil.
Mitchell’s inner life embraced a world beyond her own craft, especially literature . . . her compositions were informed by imagined landscapes or feelings about places.
In Joan Mitchell, Patricia Albers brilliantly reconstructs the painter’s large and impassioned life: her growing prominence as an artist; her marriage and affairs; her friendships with poets and painters; her extraordinary work.
Joan Mitchell re-creates the times, the people, and her worlds from the 1920s through the 1990s and brings it all spectacularly to life.
My Review: This is a life, not a biography, in the sense that it offers more of a rounded picture of Joan Mitchell than a rigorous analysis of her milieu and her position and her place in history. Mitchell, a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard broad, is famous if you know who she is, and invisible if you don't. I suspect that would make her really, really mad. Mitchell was a daughter of privilege, wealthy dermatologist father and novelist/poet/editor ([[Marion Sobel Mitchell]]) mother, who felt unloved and grew into a figure-skating champ, then an early Abstract Expressionist/Action painter, then the wife of serial monogamist/avant garde publisher Barney Rosset (an old friend of ours), whose life-work running Grove Press was all due to Joan telling him about her friend's failing little publishing company, and finally ending her days as an expatriated eminence grise of feminist art in America. How she hated that! The expatriating part she loved, living in a small French village where Monet had honed his Impressionist chops; the feminist part? Loathed it from the depths of her gin-soaked soul. She felt no kinship with Woman. She felt no unmixed feeling, frankly, on any subject. She was a difficult, dangerous friend and a worse enemy. She was deeply disagreeable, arguing to no great purpose about anything with anyone, and seldom offering any kind of apology for the havoc she caused in the lives and worlds of those around her.
She died of cancer at sixty-seven, after drinking, smoking, and boinking enough for three dozen misspent youths. Barney was sincerely distraught. I suspect he never got over her. He talked about her quite a lot...the other four wives, not so much, unless there was some child or grandchild related reason to do so. I don't imagine anyone else had an unmixed response.
Her work was...it remains...well...go here to see Field for Skyes, which she painted to release the grief of losing her beloved Skye terrier Bertie. It's an IMMENSE piece of art, but even in the inkydinky Internet form, it's lovely. In person, Mitchell paintings are all about paint...the effects of different techniques of putting paint onto a painting are crucially important to the visual experience of the painting. In photos, that's simply not possible to reproduce. But enough survives to give you a chance to experience Mitchell's passion. Like it or don't, and I don't much, Mitchell's work is strong and intense and accomplished. What it isn't, and what I suspect she knew it wasn't, is great.
Field for Skyes, Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution
Books about art are, unless they're big and all in color and lushly produced, like safe sex: enough of the real thing survives that you're inclined to continue, but it ain't like the real damn thing, and no amount of skill or wishing or forcing yourself to believe is gonna make it so.
Patricia Albers does a decent job conveying the chaos and the bleakness of Mitchell's life. She does a lot less well at giving any hint as to why the woman didn't kill herself in existential crisis...does ANYthing make Mitchell happy? I couldn't say...but the inevitable moment when Albers must speak to us, her readers, about paintings she cannot show us in a 400+-page mostly text book, points up this book's major failing. Here, from p249, is Albers describing Mitchell's painting Ladybug, painted per Albers very shortly after the death of Mitchell's beloved singer Billie Holiday in 1959:
"Luscious garden hues -- cadmium red, celadon, cobalt blue, ultramarine, slurry brown, carmine, ochre, acid raspberry -- splash and streak through this luminous nine-foot-wide oil. Some colors optically blend. Others pop from the picture plane, thanks in part to the painter's astute use of red-green and blue-ochre polarities. (The latter, along with Ladybug's architectural exactitude and play of colors against aerating whites, evoke the late work of Cezanne.) Mitchell's gloriously variegated brushstrokes push and tug and shimmer and float, like the edges of planes jostling in a shallow space or foliage lifted and twirled by a breeze, kissing the light, then heaving away." (There's more, but I'm tired of typing this stuff.)
This is Ladybug, on view at the Museum of Modern Art:
I've seen the painting with my own two baby greens and, to be frank, I would not picture anything like that painting from those words. And lest it be said that everyone's experience of art is subjective, I counter that I've seen a LOT of art and even a lot of Mitchells...I, an experienced and sophisticated viewer, should be able to recognize a painting I've actually seen from this kind of description.
So...would I recommend the book to you? No, not unless you're an art aficionado possessed of a strong and broad visual vocabulary. It wouldn't hurt to read the stuff about the world of the 1950s New York School of Abstract Expressionists in here, but that's frankly not enough to make it worth your while to pick the book up. Dare if you must. But keep Google Images open and use it freely and frequently if you're braving these waters without your own mental map. Shoals abound for the innocent and the unwary.
But for the initiate, this grimoire of grimness illuminates (how ironic) some dingy corners of an important passage in American and world art. In the end, I'm glad I read it, but I suspect many would not share my interest.
November 6, 2012
I wish Patricia Albers could write as well as Mitchell could paint.
It's frustrating to read descriptions of breakthrough or outstanding paints without an image to reference; this volume should have had many more images of Mitchell's work, as where she was and who she was with had so much influence on what she painted. Albers' fact-checking is sloppy; for example,Mitchell was in the 1989 Whitney Biennial; there was no Biennial in 1990, as stated in the book. There is a lot of speculation and discussion of Mitchell's possible synesthesia, which is dropped as a theme later in the book when the author starts trying to discuss her life and it's impact on her art. After all Albers' talk of synesthesia, she doesn't seem able to link this up with how Mitchell saw the world and interpreted through her art. In fact, the author doesn't seem up to the task of writing critically about Mitchell's painting at all. She relies on cliche and fawning praise. On the good side, the author gives us an interesting account of a brilliant, ambitious artist who destroyed herself through alcoholism and terrible life choices, both professionally and personally. She was a fascinating individual and this comes through the pages, however hard it can sometimes be to read this book.
It's frustrating to read descriptions of breakthrough or outstanding paints without an image to reference; this volume should have had many more images of Mitchell's work, as where she was and who she was with had so much influence on what she painted. Albers' fact-checking is sloppy; for example,Mitchell was in the 1989 Whitney Biennial; there was no Biennial in 1990, as stated in the book. There is a lot of speculation and discussion of Mitchell's possible synesthesia, which is dropped as a theme later in the book when the author starts trying to discuss her life and it's impact on her art. After all Albers' talk of synesthesia, she doesn't seem able to link this up with how Mitchell saw the world and interpreted through her art. In fact, the author doesn't seem up to the task of writing critically about Mitchell's painting at all. She relies on cliche and fawning praise. On the good side, the author gives us an interesting account of a brilliant, ambitious artist who destroyed herself through alcoholism and terrible life choices, both professionally and personally. She was a fascinating individual and this comes through the pages, however hard it can sometimes be to read this book.
October 22, 2011
1. So far it's a tedious review of family history. Interesting that Mitchell's grandfather was an engineer who built bridges, including the original Van Buren Street drawbridge in Chicago.
2. Now I'm in her NY days. I do not like her, which is good. It means the book is honest. It portrays Mitchell as fastidiously self-serving. OK, she's also deeply troubled. And bent on being an artist. I'm at the part where she despises her wealthy parents, while living off their $$, of course. Once her father told a lover that she couldn't possibly marry another artist, unless he was of Picasso stature.
3. Now she's in Paris, where we'd all like to go to forget our troubles. She's trying to moderate her drinking, lose weight, & forget her man. Oh, & paint with French oils that challenge her with their new names & qualities. Her mother is paying, & I don't resent her for that -- not her fault she was born rich. Who knows if she'd have developed her talents without the time & experiences that provided.
4. I'm writing this months later: What I'll remember about Joan Mitchell is what I loved about her paintings (which I now can see as landscapes) even before reading this -- the color, sweep, and abandon of her work.
2. Now I'm in her NY days. I do not like her, which is good. It means the book is honest. It portrays Mitchell as fastidiously self-serving. OK, she's also deeply troubled. And bent on being an artist. I'm at the part where she despises her wealthy parents, while living off their $$, of course. Once her father told a lover that she couldn't possibly marry another artist, unless he was of Picasso stature.
3. Now she's in Paris, where we'd all like to go to forget our troubles. She's trying to moderate her drinking, lose weight, & forget her man. Oh, & paint with French oils that challenge her with their new names & qualities. Her mother is paying, & I don't resent her for that -- not her fault she was born rich. Who knows if she'd have developed her talents without the time & experiences that provided.
4. I'm writing this months later: What I'll remember about Joan Mitchell is what I loved about her paintings (which I now can see as landscapes) even before reading this -- the color, sweep, and abandon of her work.
September 5, 2022
About 50 pages in I was ready to abandon this book. Wealthy, entitled, driven to excel at everything she did--even Mitchell's traumatic relationship with her father (who rejected her as a daughter, having only wanted a son)--everything about the woman got on my nerves.
I'm grateful I continued reading. Although all her negative traits remained active, her talent and dedication as a painter came through. Not to mention, the brilliance of her works (I went to MOMA in NYC to see her famous "Ladybug"--a stunning work). And she certainly makes for absorbing reading--a tragic heroine, alcoholic, verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive to others, enmeshed in two long-term and destructive relationship, she was also warmly supportive of young artists. She could be a loyal friend, although she tested her friendships constantly by verbally attacking her friends and some of the friendships, understandably, did not survive thereby reinforcing her terror of abandonment.
But of course what makes this book important is that the subject was a gifted artist who drove herself, even in the days when she was near death and in terrible pain, to keep creating. The book inspired me to look at as much of her work as I can: and isn't that what a book like this should do?
I'm grateful I continued reading. Although all her negative traits remained active, her talent and dedication as a painter came through. Not to mention, the brilliance of her works (I went to MOMA in NYC to see her famous "Ladybug"--a stunning work). And she certainly makes for absorbing reading--a tragic heroine, alcoholic, verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive to others, enmeshed in two long-term and destructive relationship, she was also warmly supportive of young artists. She could be a loyal friend, although she tested her friendships constantly by verbally attacking her friends and some of the friendships, understandably, did not survive thereby reinforcing her terror of abandonment.
But of course what makes this book important is that the subject was a gifted artist who drove herself, even in the days when she was near death and in terrible pain, to keep creating. The book inspired me to look at as much of her work as I can: and isn't that what a book like this should do?
January 25, 2025
Never in my life did I think I could or would read a 400+ page biography LOL. What started as a slapdash desire to skim through for “research” purposes quickly turned into devouring each and every word—finding solace in the journey of such a magnificent and uniquely herself artist.
My heart aches for the ways that her life was colored by the discontent her father displayed towards her, even in her final days.
I am totally moved by her biography. Just filled to the brim with joy - to know that here was an artist so in AWE of the messiness of being a human, of the delight of colors and paint and the physicality of art-making, and so deeply devoted to her art making right until the end.
I love the parallels, having studied anatomy, being drawn to Van Gogh, and approaching painting as a way to “feel living”.
And so fascinating to read her experience with synesthesia and eidetic memory.
I love Joan and I will plan to see her art irl asap.
My heart aches for the ways that her life was colored by the discontent her father displayed towards her, even in her final days.
I am totally moved by her biography. Just filled to the brim with joy - to know that here was an artist so in AWE of the messiness of being a human, of the delight of colors and paint and the physicality of art-making, and so deeply devoted to her art making right until the end.
I love the parallels, having studied anatomy, being drawn to Van Gogh, and approaching painting as a way to “feel living”.
And so fascinating to read her experience with synesthesia and eidetic memory.
I love Joan and I will plan to see her art irl asap.
January 5, 2018
Okay, if you are a normal person, this is a 3 star experience I think. If you are a Joan Mitchell nerd, it is a 5.
Very eye-opening. I didn't realize I live right where she did in Chicago, that she never really worried about money, that she lived so hard and slept around so vigorously, was a lifelong alcoholic and therapy devotee and was constantly painting.
You start to really dislike her in the book and then somehow it comes around and I found myself respecting her and feeling afraid for people at dinner parties where she was. And feeling impressed with her as a force of nature. I would have definitely been one of the many that cried and left if invited for lunch. She behaved exactly like a man of her era and got very pissed when her endless supply of lovers dried up because she got old.
It's weird to think of how much money she always had and how educated she was and I guess just that she was a painter her entire life. Could she have been what she was without all of that? I feel like it lessens her achievement--makes it easier or something--but meanwhile, without all of that, I don't think she could have afforded to be what she was. And even with that, it still seemed hard.
She was also so good to young painters while always trying to break up marriages. And she swore like a sailor, to the point where as an older lady, she saw some Matisse paintings, which she loved, and exclaimed, "that motherf*ck."
I got introduced to Hans Hofmann, the guy who taught all of the abstract expressionists, Jean-Paul Ripoelle, Canadian art icon and her ex-lover, and the entire New York art scene from the 50's. There is lots of good googling that has gone on about the de Koonings, Franz Kline, Sam Francis, Frankenthaler, and on and on and on.
I am a confessed Joan Mitchell nerd and mostly was forcing myself to read this because it was expensive and I had to justify buying it, but once I hit the section where she was having an affair with Samuel Beckett (?) and he was like "keep your boyfriend okay, I'm not good in bed" I was hooked. Turns out everybody was like "Joan you're too much of a booze hound to own a car" and she was like "yeah, that makes sense."
A tough, tough broad. And her paintings are still so alive when they are alive. To quote our pal Patricia, they have my favorite thing about this kind of painting which I have never been able to put my finger on before, "the Great Abstract Expressionist Mark; fear, fury, aloneness, and love." So maybe if you know someone who doesn't get it, that person is someone who you can trust with your house keys.
And here are two sections that stood out to me:
...Joan was rarely a tottering drunk - in other words, she was a true alcoholic. She drank to ward off anxiety and bolster her feelings of self-worth, even though alcohol exacerbated the self-doubts she projected as hypercritical hostility and kept her in depressive cycles. But most fundamentally she drank to get her conscious mind out of the way when she painted. Painting had to rise above the ordinary. Reason had to fall to the wayside. Joan told one friend that if she did not drink she could not paint. "I will use anything that will encourage me or inspire me," she said to another. "Anything at all to feel something. I might read a poem. I might have another Scotch. I might talk to one of my dogs."
--and this, from near the end of her life--
She hated the idea of losing self-control as much as that of wasting time on self-pity and felt that the trick was to care deeply about something outside yourself. Poetry and music helped: Rilke, of course ("Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final"), and the timelessly beautiful Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss, which culminate in serene surrender to the inevitability of death. Joan saw friends, followed tennis and figure skating on TV, fretted over the state of the world, and painted. She may have felt able to salvage from her illness even more intensity than before for her work; on the other hand, she sometimes moped around La Tour, questioning the worth of what she had created: "I feel time is very short, and I've done nothing."
Very eye-opening. I didn't realize I live right where she did in Chicago, that she never really worried about money, that she lived so hard and slept around so vigorously, was a lifelong alcoholic and therapy devotee and was constantly painting.
You start to really dislike her in the book and then somehow it comes around and I found myself respecting her and feeling afraid for people at dinner parties where she was. And feeling impressed with her as a force of nature. I would have definitely been one of the many that cried and left if invited for lunch. She behaved exactly like a man of her era and got very pissed when her endless supply of lovers dried up because she got old.
It's weird to think of how much money she always had and how educated she was and I guess just that she was a painter her entire life. Could she have been what she was without all of that? I feel like it lessens her achievement--makes it easier or something--but meanwhile, without all of that, I don't think she could have afforded to be what she was. And even with that, it still seemed hard.
She was also so good to young painters while always trying to break up marriages. And she swore like a sailor, to the point where as an older lady, she saw some Matisse paintings, which she loved, and exclaimed, "that motherf*ck."
I got introduced to Hans Hofmann, the guy who taught all of the abstract expressionists, Jean-Paul Ripoelle, Canadian art icon and her ex-lover, and the entire New York art scene from the 50's. There is lots of good googling that has gone on about the de Koonings, Franz Kline, Sam Francis, Frankenthaler, and on and on and on.
I am a confessed Joan Mitchell nerd and mostly was forcing myself to read this because it was expensive and I had to justify buying it, but once I hit the section where she was having an affair with Samuel Beckett (?) and he was like "keep your boyfriend okay, I'm not good in bed" I was hooked. Turns out everybody was like "Joan you're too much of a booze hound to own a car" and she was like "yeah, that makes sense."
A tough, tough broad. And her paintings are still so alive when they are alive. To quote our pal Patricia, they have my favorite thing about this kind of painting which I have never been able to put my finger on before, "the Great Abstract Expressionist Mark; fear, fury, aloneness, and love." So maybe if you know someone who doesn't get it, that person is someone who you can trust with your house keys.
And here are two sections that stood out to me:
...Joan was rarely a tottering drunk - in other words, she was a true alcoholic. She drank to ward off anxiety and bolster her feelings of self-worth, even though alcohol exacerbated the self-doubts she projected as hypercritical hostility and kept her in depressive cycles. But most fundamentally she drank to get her conscious mind out of the way when she painted. Painting had to rise above the ordinary. Reason had to fall to the wayside. Joan told one friend that if she did not drink she could not paint. "I will use anything that will encourage me or inspire me," she said to another. "Anything at all to feel something. I might read a poem. I might have another Scotch. I might talk to one of my dogs."
--and this, from near the end of her life--
She hated the idea of losing self-control as much as that of wasting time on self-pity and felt that the trick was to care deeply about something outside yourself. Poetry and music helped: Rilke, of course ("Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final"), and the timelessly beautiful Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss, which culminate in serene surrender to the inevitability of death. Joan saw friends, followed tennis and figure skating on TV, fretted over the state of the world, and painted. She may have felt able to salvage from her illness even more intensity than before for her work; on the other hand, she sometimes moped around La Tour, questioning the worth of what she had created: "I feel time is very short, and I've done nothing."
September 9, 2012
It's hard to believe Joan Mitchell, that crusty, alcoholic, modernist pioneer was not just an ice skater, but a champion figure skater in her youth. There is a lot else fascinating about her beginnings such as her mother's career in poetry, her own poetry, her diving, and her enrollment at the Parker School despite her father's conservativism and racism.
Success in sports, a coveted education, marriage to a man who loved her, and family wealth that permitted her to pursue her passion were not enough. After she came of age, the only untainted part of her life was the art she created. Her life became a drunken brawl of what may have been fun for her for a while, but for the reader, and those in her orbit it was sad and disturbing.
A lot of friends distanced themselves after insults, outrageous behavior and for some, the interference in their marriages and romantic lives. A few fared well under her wing, although, her mentorship could be a two edged sword. Gallery and museum personnel probably suffered in silence. Albers describes the mess of her life in pages that were, at times, hard to read. The incident on page 351, perhaps the worst of Joan's self-humiliation, defines how difficult it was to be in the same room with her.
The sub-title "Lady Artist", which Lee Krasner shunned, has several mentions in the book. Early in her career Joan seems indifferent, calling a friend a "lady composer" similar to herself as a "lady artist" but certainly bristles at the treatment of women in the art world and seems to put down the term towards the end.
I added two new words to my vocabulary through this book: eidetic and synesthesia
Albers has another, also very well researched biography: Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti.
Success in sports, a coveted education, marriage to a man who loved her, and family wealth that permitted her to pursue her passion were not enough. After she came of age, the only untainted part of her life was the art she created. Her life became a drunken brawl of what may have been fun for her for a while, but for the reader, and those in her orbit it was sad and disturbing.
A lot of friends distanced themselves after insults, outrageous behavior and for some, the interference in their marriages and romantic lives. A few fared well under her wing, although, her mentorship could be a two edged sword. Gallery and museum personnel probably suffered in silence. Albers describes the mess of her life in pages that were, at times, hard to read. The incident on page 351, perhaps the worst of Joan's self-humiliation, defines how difficult it was to be in the same room with her.
The sub-title "Lady Artist", which Lee Krasner shunned, has several mentions in the book. Early in her career Joan seems indifferent, calling a friend a "lady composer" similar to herself as a "lady artist" but certainly bristles at the treatment of women in the art world and seems to put down the term towards the end.
I added two new words to my vocabulary through this book: eidetic and synesthesia
Albers has another, also very well researched biography: Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti.
September 11, 2013
I'm surprised that I liked this book. Really. The author ticked me off at times with her use of "big" words - like "antipodes" for example. I felt like she was showing off her vocabulary for her own sake. And she loaded paragraphs with names, one after the other, names. Of course, lots of them were artists that were well known though there were others that seemed so part of the art movement of the time, yet I'd never heard of them. And then there were the people I'd heard of, the well known artists and gallery owners, AND my drawing instructor and his wife, and the artist we'd met in Paris one year while staying at the Cite International des Arts. Whoa! There were the parts in Chicago, where I grew up, the locations were familiar, and there was New York,and parts of France. So I got hooked. I couldn't put this book down. I wanted to but kept being drawn to it. I don't know how the author did it, but certainly she did a lot of research, to give us the conversations, the living situations, the troubles. When I was a student, studying painting, I desperately looked for women painters (or as Joan called them Lady Painters. My friends and I wanted role models. There weren't many, and after reading this book, I'm glad that I didn't look to Joan as a role model for my life! But oh do I love her paintings. I could look at them for hours. So if you have an interest in painting, in biographies, in abstract expresionism, in the life of an artist, in Joan Mitchell, this is the book for you.
September 17, 2011
Delighted to discover a new-to-me artist in Joan Mitchell whose paintings stir me.
I'm learning that art and artist are separate entities and one can appreciate one and not the other. For example, earlier this year I read Flannery O'Connor's letters and came away with enormous admiration for her talent, vision, and character, but found her fiction very difficult to read. In that case I value the artist, not so much the art.
With this book, it's the reverse. Love the art, but Mitchell the artist, not so much.
The book is well written including some lovely language (surprising in a biography), but mostly it includes an exhaustive resume of Mitchell's sexual affairs (uninteresting) and the author takes many intricate side roads into the lives of other people from the era, sometimes traveling far afield from Mitchell and making me wonder why they were included in the book at all.
This would be a good read to get a sense of the first and second generation Abstract Expressionsists in New York in the 40s and 50s, but as a portrait of a specific artist, I found it pretty boring.
I'm learning that art and artist are separate entities and one can appreciate one and not the other. For example, earlier this year I read Flannery O'Connor's letters and came away with enormous admiration for her talent, vision, and character, but found her fiction very difficult to read. In that case I value the artist, not so much the art.
With this book, it's the reverse. Love the art, but Mitchell the artist, not so much.
The book is well written including some lovely language (surprising in a biography), but mostly it includes an exhaustive resume of Mitchell's sexual affairs (uninteresting) and the author takes many intricate side roads into the lives of other people from the era, sometimes traveling far afield from Mitchell and making me wonder why they were included in the book at all.
This would be a good read to get a sense of the first and second generation Abstract Expressionsists in New York in the 40s and 50s, but as a portrait of a specific artist, I found it pretty boring.
August 19, 2011
Just once, I would love to read a bio of a visual artist that reads like this: "He/She was really sweet, drank only socially, didn't smoke or do drugs, and loved his/her spouse. And, he/she was a great artist." Guess not. Joan Mitchell sounds like a foul-mouthed bitch, a heavy drinker and smoker, emotionally distant and unable to form healthy relationships with men. Her one redeeming factor was her generosity to young artists. Still, the book was interesting in its depiction of how a nontraditionally inclined woman made her way in the 1950s and 1960 and in the hyper-phallic Abstract Expressionist world of New York.
June 25, 2013
An informative biography, full of details about Mitchell's family background, love affairs and artistic struggles. Her desire to be "one of the boys" of the New York School. Her fear of abandonment and death. Her steadfast love of van Gogh. She painted from the memory of a landscape, until she abstracted it in the idiom of Abstract Expressionism. The writing of the biography is in places too breezy and purple for my taste. The biographer clearly admires her subject, but does not hide her flaws.
December 13, 2011
Joan Mitchell was a real piece of work!
November 9, 2018
I'll state at the outset that Joan Mitchell is my favorite painter of all time, and IMNSHO the strongest modern painter, above even DeKooning or Pollock. However, I knew little of her life until recently, when I read Mary Gabriel's excellent "Ninth Street Women", which details the history of the New York School from the framework of the five dominant women who were there and painting from the beginning. The whole lot of them, men and women, lived fiercely and furiously: to a person they were alcoholics, and screwed around relentlessly, and brawled, and shouted and starved. This was no less true of Joan Mitchell, who could swear, screw, drink and brawl with the best of them. But there were sharper and deeper and often meaner edges to her cantankerousness that seemed to cry out for explanation and understanding.
Enter "Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter". Patricia Albers is a fantastic writer, in all respects. She gives detailed descriptions of many paintings, is attuned to the artistic temperament and process, and, importantly in this context, has a fine appreciation of psychological complexities. To the latter point, the key to understanding Joan Mitchell lies in knowing she was not "neuronormal". To begin with, she was a synesthete: she saw words, numbers and even people as colors. This was evidently never revealed until an interview she gave in her 60's. On top of that, she had an eidetic memory, keeping her own inner album of complex feeling/image/spatial relationships. Those two facts alone, plus her assertion that she was not an "action painter", but rather very carefully constructed her paintings, gave me a major shift of perspective in looking at her work.
The next part of the "problematic Joan Mitchell" had to do with her upbringing: her mother was a high society, moneyed poet (actually ran Poetry magazine for years) while her father came from working class roots, was a well-known dermatologist who fancied himself an expert in male sexual diseases. "Jimmie" had wanted sons, so that when he was given two daughters, he treated them like sons-who-didn't-make-the-mark: driving them, doling out criticism, never granting approval. Joan took the route of becoming a feisty independent fighter.
Plop this neuro-different, extremely talented, driven artist into the macho, male-dominated world of art in the 1940's, 50's, 60's..... One begins to appreciate the prickliness.
This book took awhile to get through because, thanks to the wonders of Google Images, I was able to check back and forth, locating at least 80-90% of the works discussed online with excellent reproductions (often better than the ones in my library of Joan Mitchell art books), an exercise I would highly recommend, as I do the entire book itself. This is a tale that is complex and satisfying on many levels, and should also heighten your appreciation of this modern master's work.
Enter "Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter". Patricia Albers is a fantastic writer, in all respects. She gives detailed descriptions of many paintings, is attuned to the artistic temperament and process, and, importantly in this context, has a fine appreciation of psychological complexities. To the latter point, the key to understanding Joan Mitchell lies in knowing she was not "neuronormal". To begin with, she was a synesthete: she saw words, numbers and even people as colors. This was evidently never revealed until an interview she gave in her 60's. On top of that, she had an eidetic memory, keeping her own inner album of complex feeling/image/spatial relationships. Those two facts alone, plus her assertion that she was not an "action painter", but rather very carefully constructed her paintings, gave me a major shift of perspective in looking at her work.
The next part of the "problematic Joan Mitchell" had to do with her upbringing: her mother was a high society, moneyed poet (actually ran Poetry magazine for years) while her father came from working class roots, was a well-known dermatologist who fancied himself an expert in male sexual diseases. "Jimmie" had wanted sons, so that when he was given two daughters, he treated them like sons-who-didn't-make-the-mark: driving them, doling out criticism, never granting approval. Joan took the route of becoming a feisty independent fighter.
Plop this neuro-different, extremely talented, driven artist into the macho, male-dominated world of art in the 1940's, 50's, 60's..... One begins to appreciate the prickliness.
This book took awhile to get through because, thanks to the wonders of Google Images, I was able to check back and forth, locating at least 80-90% of the works discussed online with excellent reproductions (often better than the ones in my library of Joan Mitchell art books), an exercise I would highly recommend, as I do the entire book itself. This is a tale that is complex and satisfying on many levels, and should also heighten your appreciation of this modern master's work.
May 28, 2019
3.5 stars. I just "liked" vs. "really liked" it, but gave the xtra star because of all the work that went into it. Based on several mean words and acts reported, I don't think I would have liked Joan in person. As for the biography, at times the author does that thing I really don't like, saying they "would have" [fill in the blank]. I want to read facts, not speculation woven in as if it were factual. She also puts in a lot of very personal stuff (like a naked picture of the artist). When biographers do that, I always wonder how the subject would feel about it.
I like to see pictures of the people and things mentioned in a biography, and those were generously provided. Speaking of pictures, the New York section of the book mentions so many people and art works that I had a great time looking them all up on google images. I'm pretty sure I'd have to see Joan's very large paintings in person to really like them vs. the thumbnails on my phone, btw. It was somewhat astonishing that the author had so much to say about each painting, when they kind of looked like ugly-colored scribbles on my phone, lol. I still have a lot of thinking to do about which art by which privileged people gets elevated, and which equally good if not better art never really gets seen or sold.
One little quibble for the editor: phthalo green is not spelled "thalo," which is a spelling copyrighted by Grumbacher for their proprietary color, in the same way you wouldn't/couldn't say "Coke" if you meant any other soft drink.
I like to see pictures of the people and things mentioned in a biography, and those were generously provided. Speaking of pictures, the New York section of the book mentions so many people and art works that I had a great time looking them all up on google images. I'm pretty sure I'd have to see Joan's very large paintings in person to really like them vs. the thumbnails on my phone, btw. It was somewhat astonishing that the author had so much to say about each painting, when they kind of looked like ugly-colored scribbles on my phone, lol. I still have a lot of thinking to do about which art by which privileged people gets elevated, and which equally good if not better art never really gets seen or sold.
One little quibble for the editor: phthalo green is not spelled "thalo," which is a spelling copyrighted by Grumbacher for their proprietary color, in the same way you wouldn't/couldn't say "Coke" if you meant any other soft drink.
August 6, 2020
This book glaringly reveals one of the main difficulties of writing about art - unless you have lots of photos, you have to describe the artworks. Albers does a decent job but sometimes comes off excessively romantic. (Albers makes much of Mitchell's synesthesia.) Still - it's hard to fault her. Mitchell's works are evocative and far from easy to articulate.
Towards the end, the book seems a bit breathless - as if Albers has to rush to the finish line. At moments, it's honestly painful to read about Mitchell's brawling again and again but it does leave one with the feeling that she must have been an exceptional person - why else would so many people put up with her bad behavior. Her life also raises the question of whether it was indeed so difficult to be - as Mitchell put it 'a lady painter' - that Mitchell's personality often buckled under the strain.
All in all, an interesting life that intersected with many others. I thought it was worth the read.
Towards the end, the book seems a bit breathless - as if Albers has to rush to the finish line. At moments, it's honestly painful to read about Mitchell's brawling again and again but it does leave one with the feeling that she must have been an exceptional person - why else would so many people put up with her bad behavior. Her life also raises the question of whether it was indeed so difficult to be - as Mitchell put it 'a lady painter' - that Mitchell's personality often buckled under the strain.
All in all, an interesting life that intersected with many others. I thought it was worth the read.
April 11, 2013
This is a really fine book - I kept having to google each painting as it was discussed, and luckily, I had seen quite a few of them before reading this.
“There's something in this richness that I hate”, wrote Elinor Wylie in her poem, Puritan Sonnet. This comes to me later, after long looking and reading, when visual hunger is deeply sated, and turns away. But after all, no, I don’t think so. It’s Wylie whose pain has metamorphosed to cold stone, while Mitchell’s anxious, existential self generated lighting, sun flares, and shooting stars with an abundance of richness.
How my eyes delight and my heart leaps up, so quickened by Joan Mitchell’s paintings! Their immediacy fills the room, engagement is so sudden. Then, after that long looking, I’m gasping for breath- she’s worn me out with the relentless pace and intensity. So it’s not her richness that I hate, I wish for more of my own. She won’t let me go, slow down, or take refuge in lesser visions of the natural world. As if she’s caught me slumming, secretly enjoying, say, a Disney forest glade, or a William Wendt California hillside, calling me to task for escaping to the sentimental and seductive.
Is charm ever honest? Resistible? “There's something in this richness that I hate”, wrote Elinor Wylie in her poem, Puritan Sonnet. This comes to me later, after long looking and reading, when visual hunger is deeply sated, and turns away. But after all, no, I don’t think so. It’s Wylie whose pain has metamorphosed to cold stone, while Mitchell’s anxious, existential self generated lighting, sun flares, and shooting stars with an abundance of richness.
I see her: Dionysian, Diana-warrior fierce, untempered, renewed by nature’s force and fury. It is as if she saw into the heart of creation, telling a modern story. Not for her the majesty of Genesis, the Spirit moving upon the deep void, a divine adagio of majestic largesse.
Nor does she find horror in its heart. I am compelled to gaze and find wonder and awe, and there will be no possibility of despair, though any consideration of the natural world includes the ineluctable passing of time. It’s no surprise to learn she loved Proust.
Her creation story is orchestrated by a fierce divinity of power and might, one who gives no quarter to those who would deny the mighty work done. None can quail before it, or take refuge in dissembling, gentling, or gloss.
She would probably scoff at the Big Bang theory, seeing it as orderly power, as if it were some cosmic fireworks joke. She knows the chthonic void and she tells of chaos, before and when creation begins. Her defiance is to insist upon my recognition of this. She will not let me hide in pretty, but if I wish, I can possess real compassion, much more painful to own, but authentic in its power.
Joan Mitchell’s intentions were deeply individual and subjective. According to her biographer, Patricia Albers, she had an eidetic memory coupled with an unusual range of synesthetic perceptions. Her paintings, she said, were emotional records of her feelings, but eidetic memories are deeply real and vivid, and coupled with the synesthesia she experienced, must have her interior life most unique and rich.
Her palette! Though Impressionism needs no more validating, I think Mitchell found one of those seminal strands present in all great art, and pursued it in an authentic and celebratory response to its accomplishments. How far she took it is a marvel, and how easy it is to let it all happen to you. Bonnard, Matisse, Avery - this vivid, chromatic, hyper-intensity, the complements sounding like the bells of Notre Dame.
Joan Mitchell’s personal story is about a mad lover, deeply driven by her erotic life, a sordid, private hell in which she gave as cruelly as she received. Friends were insulted, degraded, petted and prized as her volatile intellect and emotions drove her.
Once living in France, her response to the beauty of le paysage and a deepened profound response to Impressionism fused and she created some of her greatest paintings. Family wealth permitted her to purchase La Tour, a country home near Giverney. The forms of nature became her singular subject, in serial and deliberately spontaneous progressions.
But now let us speak of the sunflowers. She was particularly compelled by the drying stalks in her garden, their unique iconographic French character, and of course, Van Gogh. For her, though, it is not the rational presence within their brown breasts, the Fibonacci spiral pattern which gives mute evidence of intentional structure that moves her - it is their temporality, their fierce and ragged glorious strength.
The richly browned head bends over on its stalk in the painting on the left, its curve poignantly conveying the heavy burden it lifts so high into the summer sky. It seems to see itself reflected in a bright yellow pool.
The late Sunflowers (1991-92) below dissipate like fireworks, or sun flares which have detached and are falling to earth, reversing Icarus’ journey. The petals and hearts are released, floating yet fixed, in a wild unguarded, yet revealed moment.
Mitchell’s willed meditation upon Van Gogh, and its submission to his vision, seems as fulfilled as Io embraced by Jupiter, or St. Teresa’s mystical ecstasy.
There’s a great formalism in Mitchell that despite its energy, is still cool at at its core, balancing oppositional tensions to achieve resolution. It’s the title of the her last painting that implies so much more in its briefness, even humility: Merci. Don’t miss the very human maker of these paintings. Thanks for the memory, Sinatra singing, tipping his hat, done it my way. It was, perhaps, her only prayer.
“There's something in this richness that I hate”, wrote Elinor Wylie in her poem, Puritan Sonnet. This comes to me later, after long looking and reading, when visual hunger is deeply sated, and turns away. But after all, no, I don’t think so. It’s Wylie whose pain has metamorphosed to cold stone, while Mitchell’s anxious, existential self generated lighting, sun flares, and shooting stars with an abundance of richness.
How my eyes delight and my heart leaps up, so quickened by Joan Mitchell’s paintings! Their immediacy fills the room, engagement is so sudden. Then, after that long looking, I’m gasping for breath- she’s worn me out with the relentless pace and intensity. So it’s not her richness that I hate, I wish for more of my own. She won’t let me go, slow down, or take refuge in lesser visions of the natural world. As if she’s caught me slumming, secretly enjoying, say, a Disney forest glade, or a William Wendt California hillside, calling me to task for escaping to the sentimental and seductive.
Is charm ever honest? Resistible? “There's something in this richness that I hate”, wrote Elinor Wylie in her poem, Puritan Sonnet. This comes to me later, after long looking and reading, when visual hunger is deeply sated, and turns away. But after all, no, I don’t think so. It’s Wylie whose pain has metamorphosed to cold stone, while Mitchell’s anxious, existential self generated lighting, sun flares, and shooting stars with an abundance of richness.
I see her: Dionysian, Diana-warrior fierce, untempered, renewed by nature’s force and fury. It is as if she saw into the heart of creation, telling a modern story. Not for her the majesty of Genesis, the Spirit moving upon the deep void, a divine adagio of majestic largesse.
Nor does she find horror in its heart. I am compelled to gaze and find wonder and awe, and there will be no possibility of despair, though any consideration of the natural world includes the ineluctable passing of time. It’s no surprise to learn she loved Proust.
Her creation story is orchestrated by a fierce divinity of power and might, one who gives no quarter to those who would deny the mighty work done. None can quail before it, or take refuge in dissembling, gentling, or gloss.
She would probably scoff at the Big Bang theory, seeing it as orderly power, as if it were some cosmic fireworks joke. She knows the chthonic void and she tells of chaos, before and when creation begins. Her defiance is to insist upon my recognition of this. She will not let me hide in pretty, but if I wish, I can possess real compassion, much more painful to own, but authentic in its power.
Joan Mitchell’s intentions were deeply individual and subjective. According to her biographer, Patricia Albers, she had an eidetic memory coupled with an unusual range of synesthetic perceptions. Her paintings, she said, were emotional records of her feelings, but eidetic memories are deeply real and vivid, and coupled with the synesthesia she experienced, must have her interior life most unique and rich.
Her palette! Though Impressionism needs no more validating, I think Mitchell found one of those seminal strands present in all great art, and pursued it in an authentic and celebratory response to its accomplishments. How far she took it is a marvel, and how easy it is to let it all happen to you. Bonnard, Matisse, Avery - this vivid, chromatic, hyper-intensity, the complements sounding like the bells of Notre Dame.
Joan Mitchell’s personal story is about a mad lover, deeply driven by her erotic life, a sordid, private hell in which she gave as cruelly as she received. Friends were insulted, degraded, petted and prized as her volatile intellect and emotions drove her.
Once living in France, her response to the beauty of le paysage and a deepened profound response to Impressionism fused and she created some of her greatest paintings. Family wealth permitted her to purchase La Tour, a country home near Giverney. The forms of nature became her singular subject, in serial and deliberately spontaneous progressions.
But now let us speak of the sunflowers. She was particularly compelled by the drying stalks in her garden, their unique iconographic French character, and of course, Van Gogh. For her, though, it is not the rational presence within their brown breasts, the Fibonacci spiral pattern which gives mute evidence of intentional structure that moves her - it is their temporality, their fierce and ragged glorious strength.
The richly browned head bends over on its stalk in the painting on the left, its curve poignantly conveying the heavy burden it lifts so high into the summer sky. It seems to see itself reflected in a bright yellow pool.
The late Sunflowers (1991-92) below dissipate like fireworks, or sun flares which have detached and are falling to earth, reversing Icarus’ journey. The petals and hearts are released, floating yet fixed, in a wild unguarded, yet revealed moment.
Mitchell’s willed meditation upon Van Gogh, and its submission to his vision, seems as fulfilled as Io embraced by Jupiter, or St. Teresa’s mystical ecstasy.
There’s a great formalism in Mitchell that despite its energy, is still cool at at its core, balancing oppositional tensions to achieve resolution. It’s the title of the her last painting that implies so much more in its briefness, even humility: Merci. Don’t miss the very human maker of these paintings. Thanks for the memory, Sinatra singing, tipping his hat, done it my way. It was, perhaps, her only prayer.
February 28, 2022
I enjoyed learning about Joan Mitchell. The author had was very detailed on the accounts of Joan’s life and the relationships of not only partners, but friends as well. I will say that the author used language that just didn’t flow very well, for example just throwing in synonyms that just seems she wanted to use a big word in the sentence.
The research was well done, but a lot of the information was back story to certain peoples lives that I don’t think was needed to get the life story of Joan.
Overall it was a good read and if you want more information on Joan Mitchell this is a good source.
The research was well done, but a lot of the information was back story to certain peoples lives that I don’t think was needed to get the life story of Joan.
Overall it was a good read and if you want more information on Joan Mitchell this is a good source.
May 30, 2019
Excellent!!! She was one of the NINTH STREET WOMEN ARTISTS-( new books recently published, hope to start reading asap!) along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler I came away with a lot of compassion for her, especially from her childhood. She came across as both strong and vulnerable, if that is possible.
I took a long time to finish the book because it was backed away for my move from devon to Scotland, needless to say I packed it earlier that the move took place- wont do that again.
I took a long time to finish the book because it was backed away for my move from devon to Scotland, needless to say I packed it earlier that the move took place- wont do that again.
Read
February 5, 2025This is an excellent biography of Joan Mitchell, a member of the New York School of artists in the 1950s, though her career continued through the early nineties. Mitchell was an interesting personality, full of contradictions. She grew up with money, yet often feigned poverty. She could be extremely harsh and insulting one moment, and sweet and kind the next. I suspect this trait was often brought on by the enormous amounts of alcohol she consumed throughout her life. Recommended!
July 1, 2020
Could not put this book down. Albers beautifully tells the story of Joan Mitchell’s life, you feel like you personally know her at the end of the book. Wonderful insight Mitchell’s process in painting, thoughts and her personal life.
November 21, 2018
Excellent read. Fascinating insights into the woman and the painter.
March 29, 2019
A most interesting artist and painter, for me the writer falls short of her subject
February 13, 2020
By far, this is the best book about an artist that I have ever read and I’ve read a lot.
January 8, 2012
Not everyone will "like" Joan Mitchell. A classic "difficult" personality, she struggled with the gender bias of the fifties Abstract Expressionist era to become an accomplished and successful painter. She emerges as as an amazing individual, indomitable, sexy, loud, alcoholic, vulgar, passionate, socially brutal, insecure, ambitious, fearful, moody, vindictive, devoted to her friends and lovers, and haunted by the demons of memory and emotion, which she experienced directly as color and form. The author argues that she was a true full-blown synesthete, and experienced words, people, emotions, places, and memories directly as colors: there's a lot of evidence for this, although Joan never seems to have known that synesthesia is a well-documented (although rare) condition, and spent much of her life fearing she was insane. Some of the most fascinating and beautiful passages deal with her intutitive and passionate color expression, for example:
"Pigment flying upward and outward, the artist had snarled up browns, dark greens, blues, viridians and, most strikingly, pink corals, roses, and orchids, amid whites helter-skelter with flecks and cascades of drips."
You may find yourself rooting for her in the end, as she continues to create passionate, enormous canvases to the very end, as her body totally falls apart.
"Pigment flying upward and outward, the artist had snarled up browns, dark greens, blues, viridians and, most strikingly, pink corals, roses, and orchids, amid whites helter-skelter with flecks and cascades of drips."
You may find yourself rooting for her in the end, as she continues to create passionate, enormous canvases to the very end, as her body totally falls apart.
Read
August 16, 2011OFTEN CLASSIFIED AS a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, Joan Mitchell owed as much to the School of Paris as she did to the New York School. A card-carrying member of the Eighth Street Club and a regular fixture at the Cedar Tavern, she considered her friend and lover Willem de Kooning her father and her Freudian analyst Edrita Fried her mother. Read more...
August 24, 2013
Another test of my Frank Sinatra rule: that an artist can be mean mean mean while their art can be nice nice nice. This author only starts, and then only starts again, to engage the wonder of these paintings, and instead chooses to psychologize a seemingly indulged, lifelong child. But like the biographies of DeKooning and Pollock, I can never get enough descriptions of the Cedar Bar in the 50s, and a time when poetry and music were more entwined with the milieu of visual art than they are now.
July 22, 2013
You can tell that Patricia Albers loves her subject. This biography ebbs and flows. At one point, I thought I would likely not finish it. The tale is a brutal read, often depressing, and as I looked at Mitchell's work on line I began to feel as though this artist needed an editor and no one was quite up to taking on the task. I wish there were more illustrations in the book to accompany Albers vivid descriptions. What remains is to see some of Mitchell's paintings now.
February 8, 2014
I love her work- definitely in my top ten, but what emerges is a portrait of a thoroughly unlikeable person. I also suspect that the story of her artistic life would have been completely different had she not come from a family of means who supported her financially for many years while she established herself. The moral: the best way to be an artist is to be born wealthy. Still, she spent it well.
March 13, 2012
Her art didn't interest me as much as her life. Her mother was the editor of Poetry magazine, she flirted with Carl Sandburg, and she married Barney Rosset, who ultimately founded Grove Press. Radically her own person, Mitchell was equally tough on herself and on the people she called her friends. This bio is juicy and articulate, like Mitchell herself.
March 6, 2015
A fascinating biography of one of the great abstract e press ironists, along with DeKoonong, pollack...A difficult sometimes extremely unpleasant woman who struggled with the bias against women in the art world, who remained totally dedicated to her art, in fact life was her art and who struggled with her demons all her life. Found myself just wanting to sit and hold the book after I finished.
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