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Lot Essay
Joan Mitchell’s colossal Sunflower V is a stirring visual poem wrought from the great Abstract Expressionist’s athletic brushstrokes and energetic paints, articulating simultaneously the splendid grandeur and the macabre of the natural world witnessed by the artist upon her arrival in 1967 to Vétheuil, the small village just outside Paris where she would remain for the rest of her life. Immersing herself within her newfound arcadian garden and embracing the poignant legacy of her artistic forebearers, Mitchell’s style and outlook changed considerably from her early architectonic abstract renderings of New York’s urbanity and her more mournful Calvi and Black Paintings made in Paris in the earlier part of the 1960s. Sunflower V marks the definitive fulcrum for the artist, Mitchell here embracing the natural world newly surrounding her, while accommodating her American inheritance with the vibrant French artistic tradition. Among the depictions of sunflowers made by the artist, Mitchell would continue to explore the subject in a variety of media—paintings, drawings, lithographs, and prints—until the very end of her life, making a monumental diptych celebrating this favored form just a year before her death with Sunflowers (1990-1991). Her continued engagement with sunflowers denotes their deeply personal, even autobiographical, significance for Mitchell, who noted that “sunflowers are something I feel intensely. They look so wonderful when young and they are so very moving when they are dying” (quoted in “Exceptional Works: Joan Mitchell,” David Zwirner, June 2024, Online, accessed 3 June 2025).
Standing over two meters high, Sunflower V monumentalizes the vertical format favored by Old Master and Impressionist painters of flower still-lifes, expanding and exploring their vernacular at a revolutionary scale. Here, Mitchell suggestively paints a sunflower majestically unfurling from the top register down towards the bottom of the picture, the scale of the tableau capturing the true size of the massive sunflowers growing just outside her home in Vétheuil. The work manifests a detailed rendition of the bright blossom tossed high in the air, then careening downward through space in brilliant myriad melodies composed in shades of orange, red, thin washes of lavender and rich blues intermixed with the prominent dapples of white and yellow tones of tartrazine and orpiment. The alternating dense and thin passages of impastoed paint parallel and magnify her almost impressionistic brushwork at a stunning scale, capturing the atmospheric light surrounding and penetrating the petals, stems, and leaves which constitute the sunflower. Mitchell varies her brushstrokes, developing in certain areas—notably in the central zone—the poignant, linear strokes which recall her earlier 1950s works, and in other areas dense fields of interlocking gestural passages and blocky forms which Mitchell will go on to further develop through the next decade. The compositional plane is similarly expansive in Sunflower V, with the artist leaving less white space within her picture, nodding towards the allover paintings which she would develop later in life.
Sunflower V manifests a deep emotional complexity, capturing both the flower’s magnificent first bloom down through its collapsing death in a sweeping narrative played out across the canvas. Art critic Dave Hickey gracefully describes how “Mitchell’s sunflowers bloom for us in their glory, singly and in floral banks, they reward us in the fullness of their moment, which is not much longer than the painter takes to re-imagine them, but they die dead. Mitchell insists that they do… They turn ugly and forbidding, rot and burn away” (D. Hickey, “Joan Mitchell: Epigrammata,” in Joan Mitchell: Sunflowers, exh. cat., Cheim & Read, New York, 2008, p. 2). Hickey aligns Mitchell’s Sunflowers with the classical epigram, both poems and paintings intertwining petulance and grandeur to capture and express the quotidian experience of living and breathing, but in their psychological complexity and enduring power Mitchell also expresses the existentialist laments of writers including Charles Baudelaire, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett, the former two residing on her bookshelf and the later a dear friend. Mitchell aligns herself aesthetically with this thoroughly French tradition of philosophizing death by elevating joy and despair onto equal panes, both expressions finding purchase amid her meticulous brushstrokes and vibrant variants of color. While other artists, notably Vincent van Gogh, have captured the bloom and subsequent decay of sunflowers across a series of canvases, Mitchell’s innovation here is to include one flower’s entire life cycle in a singular plane.
Van Gogh famously chose sunflowers for his most iconic subject, painting the buds’ lifecycle across a series of seven canvases. Mitchell had assiduously studied and admired the great master’s paintings while training at the Art Institute of Chicago, and her embrace of the same subject mirrors her forebearer. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers were among the first paintings the artist made upon his arrival to Arles in the south of France, fleeing the rigors and tribulations of Paris. The Dutch artist rejoiced enthusiastically in the joyous expression of the flowers, writing in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888 that “I’m painting with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won’t surprise you when it’s a question of painting large SUNFLOWERS” (V. van Gogh, “No. 666: To Theo van Gogh. Arles, Tuesday, 21 or Wednesday, 22 August 1888,” Van Gogh Museum: The Letters, Online, accessed 3 June, 2025, emphasis original). Mitchell similarly alighted from the French metropolis for the bucolic idyll of Vétheuil, seeking to remove herself from the chaos of the city and to find new artistic inspiration. Acquiring La Tour, a house which prominently overlooked both the village and the river Siene, Mitchell and her partner, the Quebecois painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, developed and maintained a magnificent garden on her terrace, with Riopelle planting the Russian Mammoth Sunflowers which appear in her paintings.
Mitchell had chosen the same village which Claude Monet had moved to almost a century before, Riopelle sowing the same sunflowers which the Impressionist master had painted so stunningly in a series of paintings from 1881. Both Monet’s and Mitchell’s moves out from Paris allowed an important self-reinvention permitted by their removal from the Parisian art world, both artists developing extraordinary lyrical compositions which exude unparalleled optimism and energy. Mitchell’s house overlooked the home which housed Monet and his family, providing an intimate proximity to the Impressionist’s legacy. As the artist noted about her new life in Vétheuil, “I live in it, I walk in it. It’s fabulous. The garden, the trees, the church… the fields behind where Monet did his Poppy things… the Seine right below” (quoted in S. Patry, “Vétheuil: From Correlation to Sharing," in Claude Monet, Joan Mitchell, ed. S. Pagé, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2022, p. 175). La Tour also provided an important space for Mitchell to expand her work, both through its immersion within the French countryside and due to the property's size, permitting her standalone studio to be her largest yet, allowing her to paint her large compositions such as Sunflower V on stretched canvases for the first time in her career. The relocation most importantly influenced Mitchell’s practice, however, by propelling her directly into the legacy of van Gogh and Monet, adducing a flavor of France’s artistic patrimony into her American abstractions. Considering Mitchell’s Sunflower paintings, the great French art historian Pierre Schneider proclaimed her as “the last heir to the grand tradition,” writing with elegant ekphrasis how her paintings were “a purely abstract space suddenly interrupted by a yellow literally taken from a sunflower” (P. Schneider, “Mitchell: la conscience et la terre,” L’Express, August-September 1982, p. 19).
As Monet and van Gogh inspired Mitchell in her Sunflower paintings, Mitchell in turn has proved an important influence on successive generations of artists. The British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, whose paintings are similarly abstracted musings on nature, acclaims how with her Sunflower paintings, “Mitchell’s painting language empowers the climate of its existence rather than just our literal relationship with sunflowers themselves. The nuance of the sunflower as an idea, and all based on the pretense that sunflowers are yellow” (J. Fadojutimi, “Two Sunflowers: How do you look at Abstract Art,” Tate Etc., Issue 60, Winter 2023, Online, accessed 1 June, 2025).
Of signal importance to Joan Mitchell, other examples of her early Sunflowers are held in institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Mitchell would continue to be preoccupied by the motif until just before her death, continuing her exploration of the brilliant bloom and dramatic wilting of the flower. Drawing upon the tradition inaugurated by Monet and van Gogh, Mitchell triumphantly announces her permanence in her adopted home with Sunflower V, bridging American abstraction with the French tradition to formulate an entirely new and utterly beguiling expression of the natural world.
Standing over two meters high, Sunflower V monumentalizes the vertical format favored by Old Master and Impressionist painters of flower still-lifes, expanding and exploring their vernacular at a revolutionary scale. Here, Mitchell suggestively paints a sunflower majestically unfurling from the top register down towards the bottom of the picture, the scale of the tableau capturing the true size of the massive sunflowers growing just outside her home in Vétheuil. The work manifests a detailed rendition of the bright blossom tossed high in the air, then careening downward through space in brilliant myriad melodies composed in shades of orange, red, thin washes of lavender and rich blues intermixed with the prominent dapples of white and yellow tones of tartrazine and orpiment. The alternating dense and thin passages of impastoed paint parallel and magnify her almost impressionistic brushwork at a stunning scale, capturing the atmospheric light surrounding and penetrating the petals, stems, and leaves which constitute the sunflower. Mitchell varies her brushstrokes, developing in certain areas—notably in the central zone—the poignant, linear strokes which recall her earlier 1950s works, and in other areas dense fields of interlocking gestural passages and blocky forms which Mitchell will go on to further develop through the next decade. The compositional plane is similarly expansive in Sunflower V, with the artist leaving less white space within her picture, nodding towards the allover paintings which she would develop later in life.
Sunflower V manifests a deep emotional complexity, capturing both the flower’s magnificent first bloom down through its collapsing death in a sweeping narrative played out across the canvas. Art critic Dave Hickey gracefully describes how “Mitchell’s sunflowers bloom for us in their glory, singly and in floral banks, they reward us in the fullness of their moment, which is not much longer than the painter takes to re-imagine them, but they die dead. Mitchell insists that they do… They turn ugly and forbidding, rot and burn away” (D. Hickey, “Joan Mitchell: Epigrammata,” in Joan Mitchell: Sunflowers, exh. cat., Cheim & Read, New York, 2008, p. 2). Hickey aligns Mitchell’s Sunflowers with the classical epigram, both poems and paintings intertwining petulance and grandeur to capture and express the quotidian experience of living and breathing, but in their psychological complexity and enduring power Mitchell also expresses the existentialist laments of writers including Charles Baudelaire, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett, the former two residing on her bookshelf and the later a dear friend. Mitchell aligns herself aesthetically with this thoroughly French tradition of philosophizing death by elevating joy and despair onto equal panes, both expressions finding purchase amid her meticulous brushstrokes and vibrant variants of color. While other artists, notably Vincent van Gogh, have captured the bloom and subsequent decay of sunflowers across a series of canvases, Mitchell’s innovation here is to include one flower’s entire life cycle in a singular plane.
Van Gogh famously chose sunflowers for his most iconic subject, painting the buds’ lifecycle across a series of seven canvases. Mitchell had assiduously studied and admired the great master’s paintings while training at the Art Institute of Chicago, and her embrace of the same subject mirrors her forebearer. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers were among the first paintings the artist made upon his arrival to Arles in the south of France, fleeing the rigors and tribulations of Paris. The Dutch artist rejoiced enthusiastically in the joyous expression of the flowers, writing in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888 that “I’m painting with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won’t surprise you when it’s a question of painting large SUNFLOWERS” (V. van Gogh, “No. 666: To Theo van Gogh. Arles, Tuesday, 21 or Wednesday, 22 August 1888,” Van Gogh Museum: The Letters, Online, accessed 3 June, 2025, emphasis original). Mitchell similarly alighted from the French metropolis for the bucolic idyll of Vétheuil, seeking to remove herself from the chaos of the city and to find new artistic inspiration. Acquiring La Tour, a house which prominently overlooked both the village and the river Siene, Mitchell and her partner, the Quebecois painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, developed and maintained a magnificent garden on her terrace, with Riopelle planting the Russian Mammoth Sunflowers which appear in her paintings.
Mitchell had chosen the same village which Claude Monet had moved to almost a century before, Riopelle sowing the same sunflowers which the Impressionist master had painted so stunningly in a series of paintings from 1881. Both Monet’s and Mitchell’s moves out from Paris allowed an important self-reinvention permitted by their removal from the Parisian art world, both artists developing extraordinary lyrical compositions which exude unparalleled optimism and energy. Mitchell’s house overlooked the home which housed Monet and his family, providing an intimate proximity to the Impressionist’s legacy. As the artist noted about her new life in Vétheuil, “I live in it, I walk in it. It’s fabulous. The garden, the trees, the church… the fields behind where Monet did his Poppy things… the Seine right below” (quoted in S. Patry, “Vétheuil: From Correlation to Sharing," in Claude Monet, Joan Mitchell, ed. S. Pagé, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2022, p. 175). La Tour also provided an important space for Mitchell to expand her work, both through its immersion within the French countryside and due to the property's size, permitting her standalone studio to be her largest yet, allowing her to paint her large compositions such as Sunflower V on stretched canvases for the first time in her career. The relocation most importantly influenced Mitchell’s practice, however, by propelling her directly into the legacy of van Gogh and Monet, adducing a flavor of France’s artistic patrimony into her American abstractions. Considering Mitchell’s Sunflower paintings, the great French art historian Pierre Schneider proclaimed her as “the last heir to the grand tradition,” writing with elegant ekphrasis how her paintings were “a purely abstract space suddenly interrupted by a yellow literally taken from a sunflower” (P. Schneider, “Mitchell: la conscience et la terre,” L’Express, August-September 1982, p. 19).
As Monet and van Gogh inspired Mitchell in her Sunflower paintings, Mitchell in turn has proved an important influence on successive generations of artists. The British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, whose paintings are similarly abstracted musings on nature, acclaims how with her Sunflower paintings, “Mitchell’s painting language empowers the climate of its existence rather than just our literal relationship with sunflowers themselves. The nuance of the sunflower as an idea, and all based on the pretense that sunflowers are yellow” (J. Fadojutimi, “Two Sunflowers: How do you look at Abstract Art,” Tate Etc., Issue 60, Winter 2023, Online, accessed 1 June, 2025).
Of signal importance to Joan Mitchell, other examples of her early Sunflowers are held in institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Mitchell would continue to be preoccupied by the motif until just before her death, continuing her exploration of the brilliant bloom and dramatic wilting of the flower. Drawing upon the tradition inaugurated by Monet and van Gogh, Mitchell triumphantly announces her permanence in her adopted home with Sunflower V, bridging American abstraction with the French tradition to formulate an entirely new and utterly beguiling expression of the natural world.