Joan Mitchell

Drawing into Painting is a survey of works by Joan Mitchell (1925–92) on canvas and paper from 1958 through 1992, the year of her death. For Mitchell, drawing and painting were related but autonomous activities. Her pastels can be as dense as oil paintings, and her oil paintings can be as light and airy as watercolors. The book includes art from each decade of her career, with a formal range spanning flurried strokes and gestural lines of rhapsodic color, to darkly massed forms and complex, multi-panel formats. Mitchell’s move to France in 1959, as Mark Rosenthal writes in his essay, “suggests an aesthetic choice whereby she submerged American artistic developments within a profound embrace of French Impressionism.” This decision represented a departure from the influences and goals of her colleagues in the New York School, and harked back to her student days at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lots of painters are obsessed with inventing something, American painter Joan Mitchell (1925–92) said in 1986. "When I was young, it never occurred to me to invent. All I wanted to do was paint." Throughout her life Mitchell remained committed to totally autonomous abstract painting, always driven by this fundamental love for the craft and technique of painting. In a career spanning more than four decades, Mitchell's painting style married the dynamic gesture of the Abstract Expressionists, her generational peers, to a keen sensitivity to natural phenomena such as light and water. Characterized by an intense color palette and fresh gestural energy, often applied on a very large scale, Mitchell’s paintings both sensually seduce and intellectually stimulate viewers.
Published to accompany a large-scale survey of Mitchell's painting, Joan Mitchell: Retrospective draws from Mitchell's entire oeuvre, from her early work of the 1950s to her late, multipart works painted in her last years. Both catalogue and exhibition insist on the importance of biography to any retrospective account of Mitchell’s work, and a large part of the exhibition is dedicated to the first extensive public presentation of archival materials from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Photographs, correspondence and ephemera from the archives are reproduced here, along with an illustrated timeline that relates Mitchell's life to her work.
Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell studied at Smith College before training at The Art Institute of Chicago. After a fellowship in Paris, Mitchell lived in New York, where she became part of the community of Abstract Expressionist painters. She spent increasing amounts of time in France, eventually moving to Paris in 1959, and remaining there until her death in 1992.

Highlighting ten paintings from 1951 to 1991, this publication provides an introduction to the work of American abstract painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), examining her breakthrough as an artist in postwar New York, her time in France and the airy abstract impressionism of her late paintings.