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Lot Essay
In the late 1960s, Joan Mitchell moved from the fast-paced metropolis of New York City to Vétheuil, a small village just outside of Paris in the French countryside. The lavish landscape of her new surroundings provided Mitchell with great inspiration. In Vétheuil Mitchell consistently drew upon imagery from the beauty of nature for the next three decades until her death in 1992. Her studio was situated upon a hill overlooking the gardener's cottage that was once the home of Claude Monet. At the insistence of the studio's previous owner, Mitchell maintained a well groomed garden filled with a variety of flowers.
The present work contains quintessential aspects of Mitchell's late painting. With short, rapid brushstrokes, she applied strong primary hues of blue, yellow, and red in a vertical orientation. The layered brushstrokes form vibrant clusters that concentrate in the center of the painting. In addition, these clusters in the painting create a rich painterly surface without conforming to a strict pattern. Mitchell's keen sense of pure color acts as the equal counterpart to her formulation of lush naturalistc imagery.
Klaus Kertess describes this period of Mitchell's career as well as paintings that compare to Simple:
"In her final years, Mitchell moved her painting toward a more brazen beauty. In the Champs paintings of 1990 (from the French word for 'fields'), Mitchell returned to the cultivation of rectangularity found in her Field and Territory paintings of the early 1970s; now, however, the structuring is more purely painterly, as interacting bands of horizontally inclined, surging strokes are stacked in an unruly vertical formation. A more broadly brushed, viscuous opacity replaces the leaner, speeding transparencies of South and Mountain, and the colder light of fall reveals a range of blue that has the 'blues'" (K. Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, p. 41).
(fig. 1) Joan Mitchell in her studio on St. Mark's Place, New York, 1956. Photograph by Rudolph Burckhardt.
The present work contains quintessential aspects of Mitchell's late painting. With short, rapid brushstrokes, she applied strong primary hues of blue, yellow, and red in a vertical orientation. The layered brushstrokes form vibrant clusters that concentrate in the center of the painting. In addition, these clusters in the painting create a rich painterly surface without conforming to a strict pattern. Mitchell's keen sense of pure color acts as the equal counterpart to her formulation of lush naturalistc imagery.
Klaus Kertess describes this period of Mitchell's career as well as paintings that compare to Simple:
"In her final years, Mitchell moved her painting toward a more brazen beauty. In the Champs paintings of 1990 (from the French word for 'fields'), Mitchell returned to the cultivation of rectangularity found in her Field and Territory paintings of the early 1970s; now, however, the structuring is more purely painterly, as interacting bands of horizontally inclined, surging strokes are stacked in an unruly vertical formation. A more broadly brushed, viscuous opacity replaces the leaner, speeding transparencies of South and Mountain, and the colder light of fall reveals a range of blue that has the 'blues'" (K. Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, p. 41).
(fig. 1) Joan Mitchell in her studio on St. Mark's Place, New York, 1956. Photograph by Rudolph Burckhardt.