"Feeling, existing, living, I think it’s all the same, except for quality. Existing is survival; it does not necessarily mean feeling…Feeling is something more: it’s feeling your existence. It’s not just survival. Painting is a means of feeling living."
—Joan Mitchell

 

 

 

Painted in the final year of Joan Mitchell’s celebrated career, Untitled is a ravishing embodiment of the remarkable vitality of the artist’s late paintings that ultimately encapsulate the entire course of her career. From bold vertical streaks to dancing ribbons of pigment, darkly luminous swaths to delicate wispy color, the present work showcases Mitchell’s mature sensibility of coalescing the disparate influences through her life that shaped her own singular painterly language with unprecedented liberation. Just months before her death in October 1992, the present work was exhibited in one of Mitchell’s last solo shows during her lifetime at the Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris from June to July that year.

 

 

 

Though the expressionist style of New York School spearheads such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline shaped Mitchell’s gestural vocabulary, her lifelong admiration for the French Impressionists—particularly Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Paul Cézanne—would burst forth onto the canvases of her final decade with extraordinary dynamism. Channeling those artists’ apprehension of abstraction more than ever before, Mitchell conjured exuberant landscapes and flowers, evocative atmospheres and states of mind through visual explosions of color.

 

"The paintings that Joan Mitchell created in the last decade of her life reveal an artist who showed no restraint…her fondness for a palette of blue, green, orange, black, and white, together with her personal vocabulary of choppy vertical smears, washes of pastel hues, slashed aggressive strokes, loops of joyful color...all of her favorite colors and a combination of the styles of gesture she had developed during the previous thirty years."
—Richard D. Marshall

 

 

 

Redolent of the darkly luminous hues often seen throughout van Gogh’s late landscapes and Monet’s uninhibited, near-abstract water lilies by the end of his life, the present composition also recalls Henri Matisse's Fauvist use of color in his landscapes, such as Landscape at Collioure, 1905. “All I wanted to do was paint,” Mitchell recalled. “I was so and still I am in such adulation of great painters...I wanted to put on paint like Matisse.”ⁱ Like a similar example residing at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the present work further features a striking reverb with the dynamically rhythmic compositions of Wassily Kandinsky, whose work inspired Mitchell since her early years particularly in line, gesture, and form.

 

 

 

In Untitled, the sweeping, rich blue vertical slashes at center alert to the elongated tree forms she had explored through the early 1990s, with the spherical clusters of horizontal brushstrokes at right recalling her bundles of sunflowers. In her last paintings of 1992, as Sarah Roberts observed, “Mitchell pared down sunflower and tree figures and placed them eloquently in fields of white canvas. No longer memories of views or captured feelings of the natural world in her grandeur, they are declarations of identity…With the sparest of means, these paintings crystallize her central concerns at the end of her life. They are about her...beauty, and death, but convey far more. Singular and uncategorizable, they are neither abstraction nor representation, but beyond both.”ⁱⁱ

 

 

 

The present work masterfully demonstrates the deep influence of pastel on Mitchell’s painterly practice and its forceful manifestations on her final canvases. “For a time I didn’t work and then I did a lot of pastels which in a way freed me. Some of them inspired me to do a different, I don’t know if it is called subject matter or whatever you call it to paint pictures.”ⁱⁱⁱ Drawn to the seductive color, textures, and immediacy of the medium, Mitchell translated the bold chromatic brilliance and flexible mark-making she found with pastel into her last paintings, employing a wider range of colors than in any period of her oeuvre before. As the boldly saturated colors of her pastel box made their way into paint, so did her compositions on paper make their way onto the canvas, as a firework of calligraphic lines appears to burst from the center of an unassuming white background.

 

 

 

 

Mitchell’s virtuosic, vigorous handling, along with her fearlessness with color as exemplified in Untitled, reflects her vital drive to ambitiously paint above all despite her declining health through a kind of passionate elegy. “The intimations of mortality are, however, bright and full of particulars,” John Ashbery expressed, “and lead to the truly magisterial work of her last years, in which all the levels of achievement seen so far are captured, celebrated and expanded, in pictures of enormous freedom and authority.”^iv In this explosive valedictory, Mitchell revels in the visual expression of her words, “I am alive, we are alive, we are not away of what is coming next.”^v

 

 

 

Stanley Whitney on Joan Mitchell

 

Stanley Whitney reflects on the artist’s remarkable career on the occasion of the concurrent major retrospective on Joan Mitchell currently at the San Francisco Museum of Art, September 4, 2021 – January 17, 2022 (traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art, March 6 – August 14, 2022 and to Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris in Fall 2022).

 

 

 

 

Collector’s Digest

 

San Francisco Museum of Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; Paris, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Joan Mitchell Retrospective, September 4, 2021 – Fall 2022

 

•    The present work arrives to auction amidst the comprehensive, global retrospective of Joan Mitchell’s work, signaling the reconsideration of the artist's oeuvre along with the pantheon of leading female Abstract Expressionists whose contributions have been revisited in recent years.

•    A rare-to-market opportunity, Untitled is only one of four paintings from the last year of Joan Mitchell’s life to ever arrive at auction thus far.

 

ⁱ Joan Mitchell, quoted in Yves Michaud, "Conversations with Joan Mitchell, January 12, 1986," in Joan Mitchell: New Paintings, exh. cat., Xavier Fourcade, New York, 1986, n.p.
ⁱⁱ Sarah Roberts, “Painting,” in Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 309.
ⁱⁱⁱ Joan Mitchell, transcript of an interview with Yves Michaud, n.d. [August 7, 1989], with Mitchell’s edits, quoted in Sarah Roberts, “Painting,” in Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 304.
^iv John Ashbery, Joan Mitchell 1992, New York, 1993, n.p.
^v Joan Mitchell, quoted in Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, New York, 2011, p. 184.