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Lot Essay
Joan Mitchell’s Cherchez l'aiguille is a remarkable painterly tour de force dating from the critical juncture when the American artist was beginning to fully embrace her adopted French environment. Mitchell’s first voyage to France, in 1947, witnessed her first development into an abstract idiom, incorporating the lessons of Cezanne into her work. Her deep engagement with fellow Abstract Expressionists in New York at the beginning of the 1950s crystallized her approach to painting, as she befriended artists Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at the Cedar Tavern. Mitchell mastered her technique and consolidated her reputation in the middle of the decade, showing annually at Stable Gallery. As Jane Livingston writes, at the time, “most of her fellow painters felt that Mitchell’s best work of the 1950s established a new high mark in Abstract Expressionist painting” (The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, exh cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002, p. 23). Cherchez l'aiguille reveals Mitchell at the height of her abstract idiom, incorporating her new French influence into her New York School foundations to achieve an exceptional result. Cherchez l'aiguille is a masterpiece of Mitchell’s energetic Abstract Expressionist style, created just before her transition into a more delicate and lyrical style and withdrawn palette that would demarcate her paintings of the 1960s.
Lyrical ribbons of paint stretch horizontally across the surface of the canvas, building up into a crescendo of pure, unmitigated color. Verdant greens mingle with vibrant reds and bold blues to create a palimpsest of pigments, each stroke a bold thread weaving a rich polychromatic tapestry of paint. The density of strokes is weighted toward the top of canvas, achieving a perfect counterbalance with the more fluid brushwork in the work’s foreground, executed in more diluted paint. The frenzied timbre of Mitchell’s brushwork belies the methodical undertaking of her compositions: as Leo Steinberg comments on the artist’s formal structures: “the artist’s stroke—like a cat’s paw on a truant mouse—descends again to score triumphantly for the willed act as against chance effect” (quoted in J. E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 29). Cherchez l'aiguille builds upon Mitchell’s architectonic expressionism developed earlier in the decade, the work’s forceful brushstrokes now broader and built up in a latticed structure, functioning as lines as well as forms. As the art historian Sarah Roberts writes of Mitchell’s paintings of this period, “these compositions begin to contract toward the center, with leggy right-angle marks creating a sense of spiraling or oscillation” (“Frémicourt,” in Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 98).
The scholar Klaus Kertess identifies 1957, the year prior to Cherchez l'aiguille, as an essential moment in the formation of Mitchell’s mature abstraction: “Mitchell’s mastery was taking full flight into the eclipse of gestural painting. Her work was receiving support that was hardly inconsequential, but the art public’s gaze was more and more shifting elsewhere” (Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, p. 26). As Kertess acknowledges, as the decade waned, Abstract Expressionism was losing currency in the New York art world, with second- and third-generation abstract painters executing tired derivations of the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Mitchell avoided this aesthetic exhaustion through her determined exposure to new sources of inspiration, most significantly in France. The art critic William Rubin noted in his review of the School of New York: Some Younger Artists exhibition at Stable Gallery, which opened in December of 1959, how “the only really refreshing painter working in this vein [Abstract Expressionism]… is Joan Mitchell and it may be significant that this exception is a painter who for some years has lived in Paris… her work retains a freshness that one misses in her near counterparts in New York” (quoted in É. De Chassey, “A Country of Her Own: Joan Mitchell and France, 1948-1967,” in Joan Mitchell, op. cit., 2020, p. 94).
The present work was the centerpiece of Joan Mitchell’s first European exhibition, at Galerie Neufville in 1960, following its tour in the seminal traveling group exhibition Vitalità nell’arte—originating at Palazzo Grassi in Venice before touring to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Kunsthalle, Recklinghausen—which was one of the first public exhibitions of international abstraction in Europe. This exhibition was co-curated by Willem Sandberg and Count Paolo Marinotti, and is considered one of the first curated exhibitions of contemporary art in Europe and “a significant event in the postwar art world” (K. Handberg, “Vitalitá nell’arte: An Entry into the Trans-European Birth of the Contemporary Art Exhibition?,” Konsthistorisk tidskrift, vol. 81, no. 1, 2020, p. 2). Beyond his curatorial contributions, Marinotti was an art collector and dealer, becoming an early champion of Abstract Expressionism in Europe and eventually holding one of the most significant collections in Europe. The count had just acquired Cherchez l'aiguille, along with another work by Joan Mitchell, Mephisto (1958; Centre Pompidou, Paris), and included both in the exhibition, along with two Jackson Pollocks from his collection. Marinotti, along with his social companion, Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, lived with the present work for decades alongside masterpieces by Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, and Mark Rothko.
Cherchez l'aiguille epitomizes Mitchell’s embrace of French influences, particularly that of the ‘non-figuration’ school which sought to express grounded, worldly experiences through abstraction. Mitchell here concentrates her gestural color through broader, more economic strokes on a neutral background, revealing an affinity to the work of the French artist Simon Hantaï. The present work similarly reveals the potent influence of her most significant French interlocutor, the Québécois painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. After meeting in Paris in 1955, the two artists became lovers and close collaborators, incorporating the other’s style into their own work. This dual influence is revealed in a letter which Mitchell sent to Riopelle around the time the present work was made in 1958: “last night I painted eight pictures on paper… some were grey and dark [and] had an influence of someone I know in Paris—including a palette knife” (quoted in ibid., p. 90).
After years of determined effort, the thirty-three-year-old American finally received her first solo show at Galerie Neufville in 1960, with Cherchez l'aiguille as its centerpiece. Joan Mitchell, curated by the gallery’s owner, Laurence Rubin—whose brother William Rubin reviewed Mitchell’s New York shows so favorably—established the artist’s reputation as one of the leading lights of abstract painting across the continent. The esteemed critic Pierre Restany praised Mitchell for being so distinct from the “anonymous crowd of New York Action painters,” thanks to her virtuoso orchestration of color and harnessing of the spontaneity of gesture with a measure of control. Restany concluded by praising Mitchell’s “organic consistency and internal order rarely equaled in Abstract Expressionism” (quoted in S. Roberts, op. cit., p. 98). The anonymous reviewer in Connaissance des arts similarly celebrated Mitchell as a “painter of gesture,” whose painting “suggests landscapes through intertwined lines and colors of soft light” (“Les expositions à Paris,” Connaissance des arts 98, April 1960, p. 41). The review mentions only Cherchez l'aiguille by name, remarking on the work’s “humorous title” and its connection to Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh by the title’s association with haystacks (ibid.).
Cherchez l'aiguille, translating to the imperative phrase “find the needle,” is taken after the common French figurative expression “chercher une aiguille dans une botte de foin,” meaning to look for a needle in a haystack. Conjuring the sense of futility in the titular phrase, Mitchell turns the expression into a demand, exercising her reader to delve into the depths of her dense brushstrokes and mesmeric colors. Pondering the meaning of Mitchell’s titles, the philosopher and critic Linda Nochlin writes: “Almost all of Mitchell’s canvases were titled after the fact, not before. Far from being a painter who worked sur le motif, like Monet or Cezanne, one might say that Mitchell was a painter who worked the motif in after. She discovered analogies to some thing, place, idea or feeling after she completed the work, not before. Many of the titles are facetious or arcane… Some of them are flatly descriptive… but all of them are aware of what art critic Barbara Rose denominated the ‘struggle between coherence and wild rebellion.’ That is, if anything, what Mitchell’s paintings are ‘about’” (“Joan Mitchell: A Rage to Paint,” in J. Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, exh cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002, p. 58). Finding her footing in France, Mitchell was able to look into the present work to see the future path of her stylistic development; finding the needle out from the haystack, she takes her first steps toward the stylistic shifts which would mark the remainder of her career.
Lyrical ribbons of paint stretch horizontally across the surface of the canvas, building up into a crescendo of pure, unmitigated color. Verdant greens mingle with vibrant reds and bold blues to create a palimpsest of pigments, each stroke a bold thread weaving a rich polychromatic tapestry of paint. The density of strokes is weighted toward the top of canvas, achieving a perfect counterbalance with the more fluid brushwork in the work’s foreground, executed in more diluted paint. The frenzied timbre of Mitchell’s brushwork belies the methodical undertaking of her compositions: as Leo Steinberg comments on the artist’s formal structures: “the artist’s stroke—like a cat’s paw on a truant mouse—descends again to score triumphantly for the willed act as against chance effect” (quoted in J. E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988, p. 29). Cherchez l'aiguille builds upon Mitchell’s architectonic expressionism developed earlier in the decade, the work’s forceful brushstrokes now broader and built up in a latticed structure, functioning as lines as well as forms. As the art historian Sarah Roberts writes of Mitchell’s paintings of this period, “these compositions begin to contract toward the center, with leggy right-angle marks creating a sense of spiraling or oscillation” (“Frémicourt,” in Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 98).
The scholar Klaus Kertess identifies 1957, the year prior to Cherchez l'aiguille, as an essential moment in the formation of Mitchell’s mature abstraction: “Mitchell’s mastery was taking full flight into the eclipse of gestural painting. Her work was receiving support that was hardly inconsequential, but the art public’s gaze was more and more shifting elsewhere” (Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, p. 26). As Kertess acknowledges, as the decade waned, Abstract Expressionism was losing currency in the New York art world, with second- and third-generation abstract painters executing tired derivations of the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Mitchell avoided this aesthetic exhaustion through her determined exposure to new sources of inspiration, most significantly in France. The art critic William Rubin noted in his review of the School of New York: Some Younger Artists exhibition at Stable Gallery, which opened in December of 1959, how “the only really refreshing painter working in this vein [Abstract Expressionism]… is Joan Mitchell and it may be significant that this exception is a painter who for some years has lived in Paris… her work retains a freshness that one misses in her near counterparts in New York” (quoted in É. De Chassey, “A Country of Her Own: Joan Mitchell and France, 1948-1967,” in Joan Mitchell, op. cit., 2020, p. 94).
The present work was the centerpiece of Joan Mitchell’s first European exhibition, at Galerie Neufville in 1960, following its tour in the seminal traveling group exhibition Vitalità nell’arte—originating at Palazzo Grassi in Venice before touring to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Kunsthalle, Recklinghausen—which was one of the first public exhibitions of international abstraction in Europe. This exhibition was co-curated by Willem Sandberg and Count Paolo Marinotti, and is considered one of the first curated exhibitions of contemporary art in Europe and “a significant event in the postwar art world” (K. Handberg, “Vitalitá nell’arte: An Entry into the Trans-European Birth of the Contemporary Art Exhibition?,” Konsthistorisk tidskrift, vol. 81, no. 1, 2020, p. 2). Beyond his curatorial contributions, Marinotti was an art collector and dealer, becoming an early champion of Abstract Expressionism in Europe and eventually holding one of the most significant collections in Europe. The count had just acquired Cherchez l'aiguille, along with another work by Joan Mitchell, Mephisto (1958; Centre Pompidou, Paris), and included both in the exhibition, along with two Jackson Pollocks from his collection. Marinotti, along with his social companion, Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, lived with the present work for decades alongside masterpieces by Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, and Mark Rothko.
Cherchez l'aiguille epitomizes Mitchell’s embrace of French influences, particularly that of the ‘non-figuration’ school which sought to express grounded, worldly experiences through abstraction. Mitchell here concentrates her gestural color through broader, more economic strokes on a neutral background, revealing an affinity to the work of the French artist Simon Hantaï. The present work similarly reveals the potent influence of her most significant French interlocutor, the Québécois painter Jean-Paul Riopelle. After meeting in Paris in 1955, the two artists became lovers and close collaborators, incorporating the other’s style into their own work. This dual influence is revealed in a letter which Mitchell sent to Riopelle around the time the present work was made in 1958: “last night I painted eight pictures on paper… some were grey and dark [and] had an influence of someone I know in Paris—including a palette knife” (quoted in ibid., p. 90).
After years of determined effort, the thirty-three-year-old American finally received her first solo show at Galerie Neufville in 1960, with Cherchez l'aiguille as its centerpiece. Joan Mitchell, curated by the gallery’s owner, Laurence Rubin—whose brother William Rubin reviewed Mitchell’s New York shows so favorably—established the artist’s reputation as one of the leading lights of abstract painting across the continent. The esteemed critic Pierre Restany praised Mitchell for being so distinct from the “anonymous crowd of New York Action painters,” thanks to her virtuoso orchestration of color and harnessing of the spontaneity of gesture with a measure of control. Restany concluded by praising Mitchell’s “organic consistency and internal order rarely equaled in Abstract Expressionism” (quoted in S. Roberts, op. cit., p. 98). The anonymous reviewer in Connaissance des arts similarly celebrated Mitchell as a “painter of gesture,” whose painting “suggests landscapes through intertwined lines and colors of soft light” (“Les expositions à Paris,” Connaissance des arts 98, April 1960, p. 41). The review mentions only Cherchez l'aiguille by name, remarking on the work’s “humorous title” and its connection to Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh by the title’s association with haystacks (ibid.).
Cherchez l'aiguille, translating to the imperative phrase “find the needle,” is taken after the common French figurative expression “chercher une aiguille dans une botte de foin,” meaning to look for a needle in a haystack. Conjuring the sense of futility in the titular phrase, Mitchell turns the expression into a demand, exercising her reader to delve into the depths of her dense brushstrokes and mesmeric colors. Pondering the meaning of Mitchell’s titles, the philosopher and critic Linda Nochlin writes: “Almost all of Mitchell’s canvases were titled after the fact, not before. Far from being a painter who worked sur le motif, like Monet or Cezanne, one might say that Mitchell was a painter who worked the motif in after. She discovered analogies to some thing, place, idea or feeling after she completed the work, not before. Many of the titles are facetious or arcane… Some of them are flatly descriptive… but all of them are aware of what art critic Barbara Rose denominated the ‘struggle between coherence and wild rebellion.’ That is, if anything, what Mitchell’s paintings are ‘about’” (“Joan Mitchell: A Rage to Paint,” in J. Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, exh cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002, p. 58). Finding her footing in France, Mitchell was able to look into the present work to see the future path of her stylistic development; finding the needle out from the haystack, she takes her first steps toward the stylistic shifts which would mark the remainder of her career.