Untitled

By 1950, Joan Mitchell 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. Her paintings reveal her empathy for Willem 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 a willed act, not the result of chance effect. Her works of the 1950s 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: scanning vision, light contrast, and the loose sensations linking the image in the mind’s eye to the interpretation on canvas.