A scintillating explosion of painterly fireworks, Untitled is a ravishing masterpiece in which Joan Mitchell explored her signature gestural physicality through the delicate and tender hues that characterize her late period. This important diptych from the pivotal year of 1979 is composed of impasto-rich passages of orange, yellow, lilac, and turquoise, evoking prismatic images of wildflowers and sunlight flickering across a body of water. Made during a time when many artists and critics internationally were proclaiming the end of painting and conceptual art had long eclipsed the medium as the dominant force in the post-war art world, Untitled foregrounds subjectivity, showcasing the expressive potentiality of painting.

 

Mitchell executed some of her most celebrated works of her oeuvre during the last decade or so of her career. In 1979, the year Untitled was made, her passionate yet tumultuous relationship with Jean-Paul Riopelle—which had been on and off for almost 25 years—ended for good, and she began painting works that reflected the optimism and sense of rebirth she experienced in her newfound solitude. It was also a time of great professional success for Mitchell: she had teamed up with prominent art dealer Xavier Fourcade just a few years earlier, who had helped secure her works in important American and European collections, and was included in a slew of major group exhibitions across the globe. 1979 marked the beginning of the final chapter of Mitchell’s career and an important period of aesthetic development, which gradually progressed into her last great series, La Grande Vallée, in 1983. This interval is regarded by many as the culmination of her life’s work, as it coalesces the gestural vigor of her masterpieces from the early 1960s with the expressive, meditative quality her works achieved in her later years.

 

Though her aesthetic metamorphosed a number of times throughout her career, the central tenets that guided her approach remained the same. Though of course she never strove to slavishly imitate nature, her work certainly did not abandon subjectivity either; instead, she sought to capture the impression or memory of a landscape. “I could certainly never mirror nature,” Mitchell said. “I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.”ⁱ One of Mitchell’s masterful remembered landscapes, Untitled evokes the lilac and yellow wildflowers the artist planted near her house, and the colorful and vivacious years spent outside the city and pollution and in the renewing bucolic air.

 

At Home in the Countryside

 

In 1967, Mitchell relocated full-time to a sprawling estate in Vétheuil, where she would reside for the remainder of her life; almost 40 miles outside of Paris, on a two-acre property, part of which was formerly owned by Claude Monet, she spent her days soaking up the sunshine on her patio overlooking the French countryside on a slow-moving stretch of the Seine river. After waiting through the evenings until it was pitch black outside, she would walk to her studio upstairs and begin to paint.

"Yellow comes from here [Vétheuil]...It is rapeseed, sunflowers...one sees a lot of yellow in the country. Purple too...it is abundant in the morning." 
— Joan Mitchell

She would often work long into the night, blasting Mozart while consumed with emotion and memory, gradually executing greater paintings—both in quality as well as in size, as she began more and more to favor larger, multi-panel works. By this point in her mature period, Mitchell had ceased making preparatory sketches, preferring to approach these diptychs and triptychs with the confidence amassed from decades spent refining her aesthetic and process. Raw inspiration pushed her to paint these edge-to-edge masterworks, which required a significant degree of physical effort, especially for her to execute the uppermost registers.

 

In Dialogue with the Impressionists

 

Painted in the French countryside, Untitled takes its place in the grand European tradition of landscape painting; it specifically evokes Monet’s final lily-pad works, which deconstructed form into an all-over abstracted web. Art critic Clement Greenberg credited these works as one of Abstract Expressionism’s most conspicuous forebearers, and due to the Impressionist’s time spent in Vétheuil, they are frequently referenced in junction with Mitchell’s mature work.

 

Though Untitled certainly shares a strong formal affinity with Monet’s later work, perhaps it more so evokes Vincent van Gogh’s interrogation of the emotive intensity of color, and its potentiality to represent not nature itself but instead the passion of existence and the force of feeling—which Mitchell embraced after moving to the quiet French countryside. “Personally, I am entirely absorbed in this infinite expanse of wheat fields against a background of hills, as large as the sea, in delicate colors of yellow, green, the pale violet of ploughed and harrowed land regularly dotted by the green of potato plants in flower, and all of it under a delicate sky in blues, whites, pinks, violets,” van Gogh proclaimed. “I am totally in a state of almost too great calm, in the frame of mind needed to paint that.”

 

A Tale of Two Paintings

 

Mitchell met distinguished musician and composer Gisèle Barreau in May 1979, and she soon after moved into the painter's residence in Vétheuil in order to help care for Mitchell's dogs, house, and studio. While living there, Barreau composed music and spoke to the artist about her childhood memories in a beautiful hidden valley in Brittany, France, near where she grew up. 

 

Barreau told Mitchell of these wooded bit of nature untouched by humans which she used to sneak off to alone. “Tall blades of green grass, fields of yellow dandelions, and other brightly colored wildflowers formed the vast terrain that enveloped the timid little girl,” Yvette Lee wrote. “The valley offered a rich acoustic environment and a visual pageant of seasonal colors: deep blues, bright oranges and yellows, cobalt violet, green, and pink.”ⁱⁱ 

 

"I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves me with."
— Joan Mitchell

Though she would not take this anecdote as her primary subject and begin the Grande Vallée series until four years later, in autumn of 1983, abstracted imagery representing Barreau’s fond memories of the valley of her youth seeped into Mitchell’s works soon after the two began living together. The vivacious orange and lilacs that blossom across Untitled, interrupted only by small spurts of vibrant green grass, can be found in numerous examples from this body of work, including Two Sunflowers, 1980, Fondation Louis Vuitton, but she only achieved the same clarity and precision of color as Untitled in Wood, Wind, No Tuba, 1980, Museum of Modern Art, New York. These two masterpieces—symphonies of tone and expression that echo the music of Mitchell and Barreau’s home—laid the groundwork for her Grande Vallée chapter: they both presage the ambitious multi-panel format Mitchell would employ for her final great series, canvases that would similarly flicker with exuberance, joy, and warmth. Painting “is the opposite of death, it permits one to survive, it also permits one to live,” Mitchell expressed. “It’s sadness in full sunlight as there is joy in the rain.”ⁱⁱⁱ 

 

Patricia Albers on Untitled, 1979

 

Patricia Albers, celebrated author of the definitive biography Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, reflects on two staggering works painted more than 20 years apart.

 

ⁱ Joan Mitchell, quoted in Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 31.
ⁱⁱ Yvette Lee, “‘Beyond Life and Death’: Joan Mitchell’s Grand Vallée Series,” in The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, Berkeley, 2002, p. 62.
ⁱⁱⁱ Joan Mitchell, quoted in Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, New York, 2011, p. 369.