Provenance

Estate of the artist
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Private collection (Purchased from above, 2010) Private collection (Purchased from above, 2024)
Exhibitions
Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Pastels by Joan Mitchell, March 8–June 22, 1997. Robert Miller Gallery, New York, Joan Mitchell, September 12–October 12, 2002.
Literature
Kertess, Klaus. Joan Mitchell: Pastel (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1992), ill, n.p., pl. 1.

Description

Pastel allowed the celebrated American artist Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) to exercise her
characteristic fierce exuberance of line and color, while also achieving subtler veils of color afforded by pastel’s smudgy, soft materiality. This work’s web-like frenzy of gestural lines, distributed evenly across the surface, epitomizes Mitchell’s mastery of the pastel medium. Here, the lines of color intermingle––blue, red, yellow, and black––to create a dense tangle. The pastel knot seems to float on top of its white background, as the bolder and more solid lines— particularly the blazing red—push and pull against receding colors. The traditional figure-ground relationship is recast in terms of emotionally charged immediacy of feeling. The artist’s pastel- dusted traces in the negative space around the central mass deliver a disarming intimacy and index of her physical presence. Mitchell made pastel drawings throughout her career as another way of exploring color and mark-making. This 1991 pastel work makes especially vivid Mitchell’s unparalleled orchestration of the energies of color, line, and light. The artist Brice Marden mused of Mitchell’s keen ability to suffuse her paintings with pure feeling: “She could make yellow heavy.” (1)
This particular pastel work was exhibited at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, in a 1997 exhibition called “Pastels by Joan Mitchell.” Furthermore, a similar example of this work from the same year (1991)––also entitled Pastel––resides at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Despite the seeming spontaneity of her pastel works as well as her paintings, Mitchell was highly methodical in her mark-making. “The freedom in my work is quite controlled,” she once explained. “I don’t close my eyes and hope for the best.”
Klaus Kertess cogently described Mitchell’s pastel works from this period––the early 1990s––in his catalogue essay for the artist’s 1992 exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery in New York:
“[The pastel works] have an elemental directness as well as a sensuous, chromatic braveness not customarily associated with the pastel’s paler and politer proclivities. They are at once vulnerable and defiant. Mitchell has fully exploited the fragile powdery effusiveness of pastel— the way it fugitively settles into and illuminates the nap of the paper surface. Pastel’s willing responsiveness to the varying pressures of the hand has been deployed in a startling panoply of mark making, from blurred staccato tracks, to amorphous wisps, to sinuous trajectories of athletic assertiveness. These pastels have a kind of velvet fury.” (2)
A central figure of the second generation of Abstract Expressionism at a time when women artists were heavily marginalized in the art world, Joan Mitchell established herself as a leading artist. She won the admiration of the leaders of the New York School: Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Hans Hofmann. Mitchell divided her time between New York and Paris until 1959, when she permanently moved to France. While her dramatic, lushly executed works possess an active, gestural quality that connects her work to New York School artists such as de Kooning and Kline, her work also evokes the paintings and pastels of French Impressionists through their vivid palette and frequent references to nature. As her work incorporated both of these influences, Mitchell is frequently termed an Abstract Impressionist. Such an association is reinforced by the fact that Mitchell worked primarily out of Vétheuil, a town outside of Paris where Claude Monet lived and worked.
Mitchell was born in 1925 in Chicago, Illinois. Growing up, she felt a particular affinity with Vincent Van Gogh, a lifelong favorite whose work would continue to influence Mitchell throughout her career. Mitchell attended Smith College, where she concentrated in English and studied art with Hyman George Cohen between 1942 and 1944. After two years, she transferred

to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied painting with Robert von Neumann and Louis Ritman and worked in a figurative manner. Mitchell’s art reflected the influence of a wide variety of artists, including Matisse and Cézanne, and Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, both of whom she met on a trip to Guanajuanto, Mexico. While at Chicago, she received the Edward L. Ryerson Traveling Fellowship before graduating with a B.F.A. in 1947. That same year, Mitchell moved to New York City to study with Hans Hofmann. Although impressed by his paintings, she ultimately decided not to enroll in his class. During this period, Mitchell saw works produced by New York School artists such as Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, but later said that she was not yet able to appreciate them.
The Ryerson Fellowship allowed Mitchell to work in Paris and Le Lavandou, a town in the south of France, for one year. She traveled with Barney Rosset, a childhood friend and her future husband who later, in 1951, founded Grove Press, an avant-garde publishing house. In Paris, Mitchell associated with artists such as Herbert Katzman and Philip Guston, who had earlier judged her work favorably in a competition in Chicago. During this period, Mitchell produced Cubist inspired works that reflected the influence of Picasso. Later that year, Mitchell and Rosset relocated to Le Lavandou for the winter. There, Mitchell painted what she called “expressionist landscapes”— increasingly abstract works that were far removed from her earlier, more figurative work.
Mitchell returned to New York City in 1950 and met several prominent Abstract Expressionist artists, such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, whose painting, Excavation, had profoundly impressed her. Mitchell began associating with more Abstract Expressionists and was invited to join the Artists’ Club, an exclusive organization that sponsored several important group exhibitions. Mitchell, along with artists Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner, were amongst the few women artists invited to join the club. In 1951, Mitchell presented a painting, Untitled (1950) in the Ninth Street Show, an exhibition organized by the club and curated by Leo Castelli. The other members praised Mitchell’s work, helping establish her reputation as one of the most promising young artists in New York. The following year, she would have her first solo exhibition in New York City.
Mitchell returned to Paris in the summer of 1955, where she met a group of artists which included Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm and Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle. Divorced from Rosset, she and Riopelle would live together until 1979. Mitchell continued to exhibit in New York, dividing her time between New York and Paris until she eventually relocated to France in 1959. Her works made during this period, such as Ladybug (1957) challenged many of the ideas of the New York School. Although such works were abstract, she saw them as dealing with nature and representing the outside world rather than an interior one, and declared that her works “were about landscape, not about me.” Mitchell did not wish to create a realistic view of nature, but rather to paint its effects, “what it leaves me with,” through the use of colors and brushstrokes that would evoke the sensations of landscapes. In contrast to action painting, which at the time was described as being primarily instinctual, Mitchell’s works were carefully composed, combining both planning and intuition.
Mitchell’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe. In 1974, the Whitney Museum of American Art had a ten-year retrospective of Mitchell’s work, and in 1982 she had a solo exhibition at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1988, the Herbert F. Johnson

Museum of Art at Cornell University mounted a major retrospective exhibition of her work that traveled to several venues, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art featured her work in a posthumous exhibition. Over a decade after her death, Mitchell’s distinctive work continues to influence several generations of artists.
1. John Ashberry, “An Expressionist in Paris,” ARTnews, April 1965.
2. Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell: Pastel. (New York: Robert Miller, 1994), n.p.