.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Even at the beginning of her career Paul Brach noted that, "... this young painter marks the appearance of a new personality in abstract painting. Miss Mitchell's huge canvases are post-Cubist in their precise articulation of spatial intervals, yet they remain close in spirit to American abstract expressionism in their explosive impact. Movement is controlled about the periphery by large, slow-swinging planes of somber grays and greens. The tempo accelerates as the forms multiply. They gain in complexity and rush inward, setting up a wide arc-shaped chain reaction of spasmodic energies" (P. Brach, 'Fifty-Seventh Street in Review: Joan Mitchell', in Art Digest, January 1952, no. 26, pp. 17-18).
In Untitled we see the daring in Mitchell's palette, the brushwork, scale and densities of colour; she steered a repertoire of formal variations with an accompanying gamut of moods and sensations. She was unique among her contemporaries in keying her works to nature, but in abstract terms that sprang from a memory, feeling or sensation of it. Mitchell's private joys and tribulations invaded her paintings, often filtered through the medium of nature, but were always distilled into the liquid ambiguities of paint. She greatly admired Vincent Van Gogh's symbolic, subjective and impassioned expressions of nature through contrasting, colorist harmonies and vigorous brushwork.
"The constant in Mitchell's working was her open commitment to beauty and deep love of the physical act of painting. Whether materializing joyous memories or painful ones, or the ambiguous shades in between, the love of the beauty and of painting remained constant" (K. Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York 1997, p. 41).
In Untitled we see the daring in Mitchell's palette, the brushwork, scale and densities of colour; she steered a repertoire of formal variations with an accompanying gamut of moods and sensations. She was unique among her contemporaries in keying her works to nature, but in abstract terms that sprang from a memory, feeling or sensation of it. Mitchell's private joys and tribulations invaded her paintings, often filtered through the medium of nature, but were always distilled into the liquid ambiguities of paint. She greatly admired Vincent Van Gogh's symbolic, subjective and impassioned expressions of nature through contrasting, colorist harmonies and vigorous brushwork.
"The constant in Mitchell's working was her open commitment to beauty and deep love of the physical act of painting. Whether materializing joyous memories or painful ones, or the ambiguous shades in between, the love of the beauty and of painting remained constant" (K. Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York 1997, p. 41).