Belonging to the Post-War, New York School of Action painters, Joan Mitchell distinguished herself amongst her contemporaries as an accomplished printmaker.

Joan Mitchell made prints throughout almost every stage of her career up until her death. With Tyler Graphics and its founder Kenneth Tyler in the early 1990’s, Mitchell embarked on the most innovative and ambitious prints of her oeuvre. Kenneth Tyler first persuaded Joan Mitchell to make lithographs with him in the early 1980's, urging that her paintings could be translated beautifully into lithography. She completed her first suite of lithographs with Tyler in 1981, titled the Bedford Series, and thereafter a fruitful relationship was born.

The lithographs of the Bedford Series (lot 210), 1981, and later Sunflower Series (lot 23), 1992, embrace the very nature of the medium. The greasiness, oiliness, and rubbings of lithographic crayon and tusche become as much the subject of these works as her gestural brushstrokes embody the emotional resonance of her paintings.

Sunflowers II, from the Sunflower Series, presents a pictorial achievement in Mitchell’s oeuvre. Here, Mitchell combined deep rich tones with gestural marks that greatly echo the ethos of her career. Through color and line, disordered bouquets of sunflowers appear and again disappear to the viewer. Joan Mitchell’s electric gestural prints were deliberate and considered. She worked on clear mylar sheets of color separation, revising until the composition was as she wanted. In Sunflowers II, Mitchell’s explosive mark-making meets the ethereal quality of paper, creating prints that are at once free-flowing while contained within the margins.

Tyler Graphics allowed Mitchell to work in more colors than ever before, creating richly colored works that rivaled the more subdued hues of the prints she had produced in years before. Tyler was flexible, and Mitchell precise: “Ken,” she said to him in the studio, “I want to try a color like the color of dying sunflowers.”