Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell 1926-92, American abstract painter, b. Chicago, studied Smith College, Art Institute of Chicago (B.F.A., 1947; M.F.A., 1950). A vibrant colorist, she was one of the finest painters of the second generation of abstract expressionism . In Manhattan during the 1950s Mitchell encountered action painting, developing friendships with such artists as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline and becoming part of a male-dominated art world. Her emotionally intense paintings of the 1950s feature slashing strokes of vivid color. From the next decade on she moved to equally intense canvases in which linear elements are joined by large gestural blocks, skeins, or cascades in lush colors. In 1959, Mitchell settled in France where, rejecting the movements that dominated art from the 1960s on, she continued to paint in an abstract expressionist style. Usually very large, sometimes in multipanel format, her often radiantly lyrical paintings incorporate both turbulence and control and are frequently inspired by landscapes and poetry.

Bibliography: See K. Kertess, Joan Mitchell (1997); J. Livingston et al., The Paintings of Joan Mitchell (2002).

Mitchell, Joan (1926–1992). American painter, born in Chicago, where she had her main training at the Art Institute of Chicago School, 1944–7. In 1950, after a year in Europe on a scholarship, she moved to New York. She began her career as a figurative painter, but in the early 1950s she met several leading Abstract Expressionists and became a representative of the second generation of the movement, painting in a free, vigorous, roughly-textured style that owes much to de Kooning in particular. Mitchell said that ‘Music, poems, landscapes and dogs make me want to paint’ and her work often conveys a feeling of landscape (which was her main subject in her figurative days). From 1955 she lived mainly in France and she died in Paris.