Joan Mitchell: The Poetry of Painting
Before there was Joni Mitchell, there was Joan Mitchell.
Joni, I grew up with and enjoy to this day, especially listening to “River” at Christmas time. Joan, I just met the other day at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is putting on a huge exhibition of her work — 80 pieces spanning a five-decade career. I stopped by on the last day of a short holiday hop out to San Francisco, partly because I was looking for something to do, but also because I’ve spent most of my life trying to decipher abstract expressionism and I figured the more exposure I have to it the better chance I’ll experience some kind of epiphany. I won’t say I had a breakthrough at MOMA, but I came away in awe of Mitchell’s energy, ambition and vision.
Joan was an American girl, born and raised in Chicago. Maybe she was destined to be an artist; her parents, who were wealthy, were both oriented toward the arts. Her father loved to take her to the Chicago museums and her mother was a published poet and author who was part of the local literary scene. Joan cut her teeth as a painter in New York during the 50s at a time when female artists — including peers like Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner — were often dismissed as either “women painters” or the wives of more famous painters (Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock respectively). Maybe she got fed up with it all, or maybe she just wanted a change — at any rate, she moved to Paris in 1959, and 10 years later to the country hamlet of Vetheuil, not far from Giverny, where Monet painted his famous garden. She lived there until her death in 1992 at age 67.
The most striking thing about her work is the confidence. There’s nothing tentative about her style. It’s bold and kinetic. Even if it’s not immediately comprehensible, it’s powerful and compelling. Another signature of her work is the scale. “La Vie en Rose,” for instance, is nine feet tall and 23 feet wide. It was painted at the end of her long-time relationship with Jean Paul Riopelle, whom she met in 1955 and immediately wrote to a friend “La vie en rose begins.” In addition to the size of “La Vie,” the colors are also stunning — deep blues, lavenders, and blushes of pink all anchored with emphatic strokes of black. She proudly considered herself a “colorist” and casually dismissed a lot of New York painters who dealt in blacks and grays or, increasingly in the 60s, neon. “You don’t see those colors in nature,” she said.
Besides the size and color, I was struck by the density and energy of her painting, especially in the kinetic “City Landscape.” Without knowing the title, it would be hard to say what the painting is about, although it sure makes a statement. But it lives up to the title, depicting the energy flow in a large city where the center is frenetic and then slowly dissipates as it thins out near the edges. Seeing a picture of it doesn’t do it justice. Up close, you can appreciate the patina the piece has developed over the past 65 years; some of the paint has taken on deeper tones and developed small cracks in the fatter strokes. It reeks of history and authenticity, like midtown Manhattan at dusk on a Friday evening.
I love context and the curators did a good job of providing that. Her sketchbooks capture ideas being born. There’s a lot of discussion of her affinity with poetry (her mom’s influence, probably) and her relationships with the great mid-century poets like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. In fact, she did a book called “The Poems,” a collection of eight lithographs illustrating Ashbery’s poetry, an original copy of which sells in the $10,000 range. Also on display is a typewritten letter to her from O’Hara describing her New York apartment, where he was staying, as a “godsend” and relaying other prosaic aspects of daily life.
Like a lot of us would do, when I walked through the exhibition I looked at some paintings and thought, I think I could do that. Some of the pieces look random and unfinished, just large splashes of paint on the canvas. But if you step in close, you start to see the logic and skill at work. Her paintings are not of “things,” per se, but of energy and feelings. And her technique is anything but random. She’s worked hard at it. I thought of a poetry professor I had in school, who would mercilessly cut down an aspiring 19-year-old poet reading a piece of free verse. “Before you get to do that,” he said, “you have to learn iambic pentameter.” You can’t throw away technique until you’ve learned it, in other words. Joan’s technique may be abstract, but it’s completely intentional. When she was once asked how she managed to keep painting when she became ill late in life, she answered, “I just got up on that fucking ladder and told myself, ‘This stroke has to work.’”
That commitment and intent — the pure deliberation of great art — came through loud and clear at MOMA. I’m glad I went.