How Joan Mitchell became the ultimate conductor of colour

There’s nothing quite like standing before a Joan Mitchell painting. Basking in the dizzying dance of colour and texture, the viewer’s eye darts around the canvas, where every inch has been meticulously considered. With Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic compositions, each element is as enthralling as the work in its entirety.

‘Mitchell’s canvases pull you in in a bodily way. They project their physicality, prompting you to wonder about the mark-making, layering and motion that went into how the work was made,’ Sarah Roberts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs, tells Christie’s. Roberts recalls the Abstract Expressionist’s painting that stopped her in her tracks when visiting the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: Untitled (1961), a nearly ten-foot-tall canvas whose mud-like impastoed lower portion ascends into flurries of amethyst, coral and sage, punctuated by swathes of burnt tones, all framed in a spectrum of creamy beiges.

‘From her very spare canvases up to the ones that are flooded with multiple hues, Mitchell’s colour is always absolutely extraordinary,’ says Roberts, who co-curated the 2021-22 Joan Mitchell retrospective organised by SFMOMA and the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA). Then Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture, Roberts worked with Katy Siegel, then BMA Senior Programming Curator, to realise the show, which travelled to the Fondation Louis Vuitton and ran concurrently with the museum’s Monet - Mitchell blockbuster. The latter exhibition concluded at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 2023.

On the heels of this whirlwind world tour, Mitchell is celebrating another milestone: her centennial. Born in Chicago in 1925, the intrepid artist spent four decades in New York and France, where she established herself as one of the 20th century’s foremost painters. In 2025, celebrations will span the globe as more than 70 museums will display nearly 100 works by Mitchell. The initiative is spearheaded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, whose mission is to preserve the artist’s legacy and provide invaluable resources, such as grants and residencies to visual artists. Centennial programming highlights include an exhibition at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans featuring alumni of the Foundation’s residency programme (artists include Maren Hassinger, Firelei Báez and Carrie Moyer, amongst others) in August, a public symposium at the Art Institute of Chicago in October and an exhibition of mid-1960s works at David Zwirner in New York in November and December.

‘At Mitchell’s core was an unflagging belief in the ability of abstract painting to collect and convey multifaceted experience,’ says Roberts. ‘She went through so many different cycles and approaches, but running through it all is this extraordinary ability to orchestrate colour and to create a sense of movement and dynamism on the surface.’

Joan Mitchell’s early years and 1950s New York ‘breakthrough’

Though Mitchell built her career in New York and France, her Chicago upbringing left a lasting impression on her. Having grown up two blocks from Lake Michigan, the artist always felt a strong connection to nature — many of her brilliant blues used in paintings throughout her lifetime hearkened back to this lake. Her early interests also shaped her œuvre. With her mother being a poet and editor and her father an amateur artist, Mitchell was surrounded by the arts and began studying painting seriously at age 11. As a child she wrote poetry and was a competitive athlete in horseback riding, diving and figure skating. This juxtaposition of lyrical athleticism, of serenity and movement, could also describe her eventual masterworks.

As a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1945-47, Mitchell would continue admiring the work of 19th- and early 20th-century painters, including Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, while also experimenting with modern painting styles. Upon graduating, she was awarded a travel fellowship and spent a year in France. When returning to America in 1949, Mitchell settled in New York City, where she became a vital member of the New York School of painters and poets, which included Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

By 1951 Mitchell turned fully to abstraction, revealing the mastery of her gestural brushwork and eye for complex colour combinations, often contrasted with white paint that imbued her canvases with unparalleled luminosity. She also possessed an innate understanding of the spatial relationships between hues — that a colour could appear completely differently depending how far apart it was from another. ‘The freedom in my work is quite controlled,’ said Mitchell, describing the intentionality and duration behind her seemingly spontaneous compositions.

The artist often painted at night with electric light, ensuring her colours would look even more spellbinding in daylight. Later in the decade, she increasingly experimented with building paint on the canvas, as well as thinning it for sinuous washes of colour as well as drips.

The 1950s were marked by a series of successes for Mitchell. In 1951 her work was featured in Leo Castelli’s and the Artists’ Club’s legendary 9th Street Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture exhibition. In 1952 she had her first New York solo exhibition at the New Gallery. In 1953 she began showing with Stable Gallery in both group and solo exhibitions. Some of Mitchell’s most powerful and emblematic paintings debuted at seminal solo shows at Stable Gallery in 1955 (when the City Landscape works were exhibited) and 1957. The art historian Judith E. Bernstock described the 1955 series as a ‘breakthrough’, and the curator Jane Livingston declared, ‘These works mark the beginning of that unique combination of bravura and delicate subtlety that would remain with the artist for the rest of her life.’ In 1957, critic Irving Sandler, who famously penned the ARTnews article ‘Mitchell paints a picture’ that same year, called Mitchell ‘one of America’s most brilliant Action-Painters.’

As major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, began acquiring her paintings, the art critic Dore Ashton declared in 1958: ‘Power is written all over Joan Mitchell’s new canvases. Her large canvases aggressively flaunt their muscles and there is no getting away from it, they are muscular paintings.’

Paris, Vétheuil and painting as poetry

In 1955 Mitchell began dividing her time between New York and France, and in 1959 she settled permanently in Paris. Away from the intensity of the downtown New York art scene, Mitchell was able to build on her work with a renewed sense of focus. The artist’s ‘black paintings’, made between 1962 and 1965, abandoned her all-over style in favour of masses of dark pigment in forest greens and other deep hues. The works emit a turbulent intensity in some of the most evocative, daring colour combinations of her career.

In 1967 Mitchell acquired La Tour, an estate overlooking the Seine in the village of Vétheuil, northwest of Paris. She’d call La Tour her home until her death in 1992. Throughout her life Mitchell travelled often to America where she had numerous exhibitions, and she also frequently hosted fellow creative friends in Vétheuil, a garden-filled environment that proved immensely fruitful for her painting.

Amongst her most iconic series to come out of her time in Vétheuil are her Sunflower paintings, which would become a recurring motif throughout her œuvre, simultaneously connecting her with van Gogh. Reflective of her wider œuvre and approach, sunflowers, abstracted like fireworks, were less about literal representation and more capturing about a feeling or memory. ‘I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me — and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with,’ Mitchell once said.

This appreciation for nature not only inspired Mitchell’s endless palette, but it also separated her from her Abstract Expressionist peers. Recollecting lived experiences, whether in a field or on the sea; with her friends and beloved dogs; or of poetry and music, her art is both fearless and emotional. ‘My painting is not an allegory or a story. It is more like a poem,’ described Mitchell.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Mitchell additionally secured multiple canvases together to form both intimately scaled and monumental compositions. The latter could extend to more than 20 feet wide, immersing viewers in a symphony of colours much like nature itself.

The power of Joan Mitchell’s mature work

In the 1970s and 1980s, Mitchell had her first major museum solo exhibitions. Following her 1972 solo show at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, the Whitney staged an important exhibition in 1974. In 1982 Mitchell has her first major European museum solo exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (she was also the first female American artist to have a solo show there).

In 2002, the art historian and curator Jane Livingston commented that Mitchell’s ‘physical powers seemed to increase, rather than diminish [with time]’. The final decade of Mitchell’s career was marked by perpetual experimentation. Certain canvases, often based on flowers and trees, were somewhat spare, yet featured sophisticated colour palettes. As Mitchell reckoned with the end of her life, her art displayed a heightened emotional gravitas. Works like Faded Air I (1985), for example, were painted as the artist faced her own cancer diagnosis and the impact of AIDS amongst her friends.

On another hand, many of Mitchell’s works from the late 1980s were densely covered with small vertical or angular brushstrokes in the boldest of hues. Especially illustrative of this are Mitchell’s Grande Vallée paintings, a suite of 21 monumental works from 1983 that were inspired by an idyllic valley in Brittany that the artist visited during childhood.

Mitchell created exceptional prints and pastels with similar vivacity throughout her career. She produced an extraordinary group of pastels in the last two years of her life that were featured in her first solo museum drawings exhibition at the Whitney shortly before her passing in 1992.

The Joan Mitchell Foundation and a new generation of artists

The Joan Mitchell Foundation was established in 1993 to further the artist’s legacy and continue her ongoing support of artists. Mitchell frequently hosted artists and writers at her home in Vétheuil, where she provided them with space to develop their work.

The Foundation has offered grants and residencies to a multitude of artists, with special attention given to those in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In 2015 the Foundation opened the Joan Mitchell Center in the Louisiana city as its residency’s home base. ‘More and more we’re hearing from younger artists interested in learning about Mitchell and how she managed to carve out a life that was really centred around her work,’ says Roberts. ‘Mitchell was incredibly driven and ambitious. She never let herself stop inventing and pushed herself to the very end.’