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JOAN MITCHELL
(American, 1926-1992)
Untitled, circa 1956
Oil on canvas
19 1/8 x 16”
Purchase: The National Endowment for the Arts, Patrons of the John Jacob Niles Benefit Concert, and Friends of the Art Museum 1980.14

In the late 1940s, Chicagoan Joan Mitchell moved to New York City, where she met Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Frank O’Hara. By 1950, Joan Mitchell—who had studied at Smith College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia University—was a prominent member of New York’s downtown art scene and the Abstract Expressionists, a group that, up to then, had been known for its strong-armed male chauvinism. She chose not to stay there long, preferring to live in France, spending the remainder of her life on a secluded estate above Vétheuil, a little town north of Paris on the Seine where Claude Monet had also painted. Her paintings reveal her empathy for de Kooning’s inventive color and line; however, unlike most Abstract Expressionists, Mitchell resisted the notion that painting is a matter of instinct. Instead, she viewed painting as an intentional act rather than the result of chance effect. Her works of the 1950s, including Untitled, are tense and feverish, characterized by a busy network of disconnected, vividly colored strokes that are densest in the center of the image and against a vague sea of flat patches. She is said to have been inspired by an “inner landscape,” the distilled sensations from a remembered landscape, in which scanning vision and light contrast link the image in the mind’s eye to the interpretation on canvas.