“Sunflowers are something I feel very intensely. They look so wonderful when young and they are so very moving when they are dying. I don't like fields of sunflowers. I like them alone or, of course, painted by Van Gogh.”

—Joan Mitchell

Belonging to the post-war, New York school of action painters, Joan Mitchell was an accomplished printmaker and made editions throughout almost every stage of her career until her death. However, it was with Tyler Graphics’ founder Kenneth Tyler in the early 1990s that Mitchell embarked on the most innovative and ambitious prints of her oeuvre. The pair first collaborated in the early 1980s, when Tyler persuaded Mitchell that her paintings could be translated beautifully into lithography. When describing her approach to lithography, Tyler remarked,

“Mitchell's explosive mark-making meets the ethereal quality of paper, creating prints that are at once free-flowing while contained within the margins.”

—Kenneth Tyler

A printshop known for innovation, 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 prior. 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." When discussing their time together working on the Sunflowers series Ken remarked that, “Her studies of Matisse, van Gogh, Cézanne and Monet...led to a mastery of color unparalleled by her contemporaries. I never worked with anyone since [Josef] Albers that had such a keen knowledge of color and how colors interacted with each other. Joan's works are about the colors in life as she observed and recorded them…" 

Though her compositions may seem improvisational, Joan Mitchell's electric gestural prints were deliberate and considered. She worked on clear mylar sheets, one for each color, revising until the composition was exactly as she wanted. Sunflowers III presents a pictorial achievement in Mitchell's oeuvre, combining deep rich tones with the gestural marks that greatly echo the defining ethos of her career at a monumental scale that could only be produced with a fearless collaborator like Ken Tyler. Here, through color and line, disordered bouquets of sunflowers appear and disappear again to the viewer, celebrating the rich art historical past and modern techniques that are so elegantly distilled in Mitchell’s work.