Joan Mitchell

An American artist who worked in painting, drawing and printmaking, Joan Mitchell devoted her 50-year career to abstraction. In addition to large canvases, she worked extensively on paper, transposing her layering of bold colors in oil paints to soft pastels, while also experimenting with various other materials in her sketchbooks. Contrary to the association of gestural abstraction with spontaneity, Mitchell’s exuberant marks resulted from a steady, deliberate process. While she is often affiliated with Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Jackson Pollock, Mitchell’s large, light-filled and brightly colored canvases were, in her words, “about landscape, not about me.”

Mitchell was born and raised in Chicago. Her father, James Herbert Mitchell, a doctor and amateur artist, brought Mitchell and her sister to the Art Institute regularly as children. Mitchell grew especially enamored with the work of Cezanne, Matisse, and Van Gogh and took weekend classes at the museum as a young child. Her mother, Marion Strobel Mitchell, a poet and co-editor of Poetry magazine, instilled in her a love of poetry. This love is reflected in her many collaborations with poets and frequent titling of paintings after poems during her career.

After attending Smith College for a year, Mitchell transferred to the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) and graduated in 1947, receiving the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship to study abroad in France. That summer, while postponing her travels due to a recovering postwar Europe, she showed her lithograph Tired Children at the museum’s 51st Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity and won the Print Committee Prize. After completing additional coursework at SAIC in the 1950s (they would later award her an honorary doctorate in 1989), Mitchell moved to New York and gradually immersed herself in the thriving avant-garde painting scene. She became especially close with de Kooning and Franz Kline, and later Philip Guston. In 1958, the Art Institute included her painting City Landscape (1955) in its 18th Annual Society for Contemporary American Art Exhibition and subsequently acquired it for the permanent collection.

In 1959 Mitchell moved to France, where she spent the next thirty-three years. Initially, she maintained a studio in Paris, involving herself in the lively international discussions about painting then taking place in France. However, in 1967, she purchased La Tour, a property in the town of Vétheuil overlooking the Seine. Mitchell moved to La Tour the following year and lived and worked on these grounds until the end of her life in 1992, notably expanding her practice throughout the 1970s and 1980s to include ambitious multi-panel compositions. During these years, Mitchell often invited younger painters, poets, and musicians to share this creative space with her, communing in the landscape so closely associated with Impressionist and Symbolist painting, while she continued expanding the parameters of post-war abstraction.