‘Joan Mitchell’ Is Every part At San Francisco Museum Of Fashionable Artwork

Joan Mitchell, Sans neige, 1969; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Gift of the Hillman Foundation.

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

Whether it’s a first-time entry into an art museum or a lifelong connoisseur, visitors to the historic Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will find it. Newcomers will be amazed by the enormous size, their strong, bright colors and the expressiveness of their brushwork. Lovers discover easily overlooked subtleties, the connection with painting, details about their life and work that provide an even richer context for an already beloved artist.

“Joan Mitchell”, which can be seen until January 17, 2022, captivates with its rare combination of total subtlety with deep subtlety – depending on the viewer. It’s a backboard-smashing slam dunk that is built up by a nifty drop-step.

There is no better example of the ability of Mitchell’s paintings to be everything to everyone than Sans Neige (1969). The 16 foot wide triptych, whose title translates to “no snow” in English, shows its full spectrum of markings, “from glowing passages of wet paint and dripping laundry to thickly applied impasto, or paint that gives a deep texture and of jumps off a surface ”, as SFMOMA describes it.

At first glance, the size and energy of the image confuse the senses, as if walking through a loop on a roller coaster. Once stabilized, the dazzling color acts like a tractor beam, drawing the viewer closer to the canvas and into a carefully constructed universe of individual brushstrokes that correspond to all descriptions. Hours – days – could be spent inspecting and considering individual artistic decisions, large and small. It’s an exciting ride, a film, a biography, a national park all rolled into one.

“Joan Mitchell” is the first opportunity in more than 40 years to see Sans Neige outside of his permanent home at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

What’s the best way to perceive a painting like this, the scale of which can be overwhelming?

“Mitchell herself liked to look from a distance – partly because of her eyesight and partly to see how the painting as a whole held together. When you step back, you feel the landscape effect: the sweep of the river, the vertical bracket of the trees, ”Katy Seigel, co-curator of the exhibition and senior programming & research curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art, told Forbes.com. “When you take a step closer, you step into the landscape – the painting fills your peripheral vision, your ups and downs, and that immersion can be magical. One more step and the landscape dissolves into paint and brushstrokes. Now you can feel Mitchell’s color handling, her movement, her outstretching arm and her touch, alternately declarative and sensitive. Beautiful color, paint that is dry and wet, thick and thin. It’s another way of getting lost. “

Getting “lost” in a Joan Mitchell painting is an experience everyone should enjoy.

Joan Mitchell, To the Harbor Master, 1957; AKSArt LP.

© Joan Mitchell estate; Photo: Tony Prikryl

This comprehensive retrospective shows around 80 outstanding works. In addition to the colorful, large-format, multi-part masterpieces from her later years, it contains rarely seen early paintings that established the artist’s career. The SFMOMA presentation includes 10 paintings that do not travel elsewhere, some from the museum’s own holdings.

Mitchell said, “Painting is made with feeling” and the curators have worked hard to produce an exhibition that will guide visitors through a variety of emotional, psychological and physical experiences.

“The atmosphere and feel of the exhibition change dramatically from gallery to gallery,” Sarah Roberts, exhibition co-curator and Andrew W. Mellon curator and head of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA, told Forbes.com. “Some rooms seem exuberant and full of energy, such as the gallery, which focuses on major works from the late 1950s; others are quieter, even melancholy, like the work she created from her experience in the Mediterranean in the early 1960s. Still others rise with mighty, huge canvases full of symphonic colors. “

Beyond the thrill of the theme park and the cinematic scale of the exhibition, art lovers will respond to their scientific goals of positioning Mitchell as a transnational painter for the first time.

“For the US audience, that means removing them from the 9th Street Story after the 50s and showing the very experimental, materialistic painting of Paris in the 60s, as well as the subsequent works that deal with nature, life and Dealing with death – alternating “hard, lyrical, operatic and tender,” said Siegel.

Mitchell limits “The 9th Street Story” to the New York abstract expressionists of the middle of the century. However, she spent the last over 30 years of her life in France, but moved there permanently in 1959 and painted all the time.

“Mitchell was determined to avoid any attempt to name them and limit them to representing a single thing or place,” explains Seigel. “For them, it meant a wider range of emotions / expressions beyond anger and alienation (in conjunction with Abstract Expressionism), including sadness, sensual joy, humor, joy and some kind of metaphysical soaring in the face of death. It also meant an ever more extensive and explicit connection to nature and its representation in certain views, trees, flowers. “

Connection to nature. Views. Trees.

“Joan Mitchell” points out to the viewer that the paintings are abstract, but the artist regards them as landscapes and sees herself as a landscape painter in the line of Van Gogh, Cézanne and Matisse.

Joan Mitchell, Sunflowers, 1990-91; John Cheim Collection.

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

A sense of place is imprinted in Mitchell’s paintings, from memories of her hometown of Chicago to New York, Paris and the Mediterranean coast to the pastoral hills of Vétheuil, the village outside Paris where she finally found her home.

“I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me – and remembered feelings about them, which naturally transform,” said Mitchell during her life.

This inspired her exuberant color choices.

“Bright, saturated colors were Mitchell’s most admired ties to nature and 19th and early 20th century painters. Their color palette reflects their commitment to color capturing the full spectrum of human experience and the richness of nature, ”said Roberts. “Even in watercolors she did in art school, she had an extraordinary intelligence and a bold use of color that has grown exponentially over the course of her life. She had the extraordinary ability to build highly complex color combinations across the entire surface by controlling the placement, proportion, weight and translucency of her colors. She took risky and strange color combinations that really should never work and somehow managed to do it. “

In that way, Mitchell was a powerful painter. A physical painter. As a growing up master figure skater, Mitchell’s paintings demonstrate an athleticism that is unique to the medium.

“I just got up that damn ladder and said to myself, ‘This stroke has to work,'” she once said. An attitude that led to images that seem bold and daring – do you dare to be called “male”?

Joan Mitchell kicked the ass.

She did this over a long career on both sides of the Atlantic, producing one of the most impressive canvases in art history. “Joan Mitchell” lives up to its theme.

Portrait of American born painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) in her studio, Paris, France, … [+] September 1956. Joan Mitchell, Paris, France.

Loomis Dean / The LIFE picture collection

After the presentation in San Francisco, “Joan Mitchell” can be seen from March 6 to August 14, 2022 at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A version of the exhibition will open at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in autumn 2022.