“In terms of sheer largeness of vision, of solving painterly problems with an almost incredible audacity, these oversize pictures from the 1970s have few rivals in all of modern American painting […] It can be argued that these works mark Mitchell’s ascendancy to a level that few artists have attained, an achievement that would set the stage for her work to come.”
—Jane Livingston

Combining stillness and action, tranquillity and turbulence, Joan Mitchell’s expansive Canada II unfolds in symphonic waves of rolling, rising brushwork, its highly activated surface stirred by an invisible, elemental energy. Executed in 1975, just one year after Mitchell’s breakthrough solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art and the year before her first show with prominent art dealer Xavier Fourcade, the work belongs to a period of significant critical and creative growth for the artist, her reputation as one of the great masters of postwar painting secured. Breathtaking in its scale and fierce elegance, this vast triptych is the second of a suite of five numbered works known collectively as her Canada paintings – all held in private collections with the exception of Canada I, now held in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Testament to the artist’s deep devotion to the natural world and commitment to capturing its physical sensations, the Canada paintings draw on her memories of bright, bitterly cold winters growing up in the Midwest, and of the various trips taken with her long-term paramour the painter Jean-Paul Riopelle to his homeland. Deeply lyrical and reflective, the quieter palette of Canada II is especially evocative of Mitchell’s unique ability to communicate a polyphonic emotional cadence with precision and exactitude, her pitch-perfect control of colour, shape, and gesture all making the ‘painting seem spacious, intuitively balanced, and ephemeral in feeling.’ⁱ

Snow, Space, and Canada

 

Born in Chicago in 1925 and already a published poet at just ten years old, Mitchell’s young life was infused with music, art, and poetry. Although a dermatologist by trade, Mitchell’s father was himself an amateur painter, while her mother Marion Strobel was a well-regarded poet and literary editor. Against this backdrop Mitchell’s early commitment to the idea of becoming an artist seems almost inevitable, although as a highly accomplished athlete she would go on to push her painting practice into uniquely physical territory, her deeply embodied approach to mark-making and gesture seeing her working on a monumental scale that not only rivalled but even surpassed the scale and ambition of the all-over canvases produced by the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. A champion tennis player, diver, and horse rider, the young Mitchell was also a highly accomplished figure skater, even dubbed ‘Figure Skating Queen of the Midwest’ for her competitive successes in that discipline.

“I think of white as winter. Absolutely. Snow. Space. Cold. I think of the Midwest snow […] ice blue shadows.”
—Joan MitchellSupremely graceful, figure skating is physically highly demanding, involving a complex blend of speed, power, grace, and balance. Trained by retired Swiss ski-jumper Gustave Lussi, Mitchell learned to focus her attention in the core of her body, and to be deliberate and precise in her movements. In terms that foreshadow later discussions of the artist’s remarkably physical relationship to the canvas, one Chicago Tribune reporter made special mention of Mitchell’s finesse ‘floating over the ice of the Arena like a butterfly over a poppy field – making incredibly beautiful swoops.’ⁱⁱ While this deeply embodied sensibility would directly inform her painting practice in later years, her memories of skating were also deeply interwoven with the dramatic Canadian landscape following an intensive training program there that she undertook in the summer of 1940. She would return to Canada many years later with Riopelle, notably early in the autumn of 1956 in the early days of their long and tempestuous relationship, where the two reconciled at the holiday home of Riopelle’s dealer Gilles Corbeil following a particularly fraught period. Mitchell’s biographer Patricia Albers evokes a sense of the complex interaction between Mitchell’s own, internal emotional landscape and the terrain, detailing one episode from this ‘early-winter interlude on the edge of a dense beech, maple, and evergreen forest carpeted with ferns’ where Riopelle constructed a small cave out of ice which especially delighted Mitchell, the two climbing inside and making love in the snow.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

As Mitchell is often quoted as saying, ‘I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed.’ Rather than attempting to convey a physical likeness observed from outside of herself, Mitchell’s landscapes emerge from a more interior space, evoked through her remembrance and summoning of physical sensation such as light, movement, and sound. Bearing particular relevance to the present work and the Canada series more broadly, it was on this 1956 Canadian sojourn that Mitchell completed her magisterial Hemlock, now held in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art. Alternating between shorter and longer brushstrokes which activate and agitate the entire surface of the work, the lyrical exchanges between deep, dark greens, pulsing flashes of brighter pigments, and the dominance of more spacious passages of opalescent whites anticipates the concentration of these spatial and tonal relationships in the Canada paintings.

 

Borrowing its title from Wallace Stevens' 1916 poem ‘Domination of Black’, Hemlock visually corresponds to the reeling repetitions of Steven’s lines as inner and outer worlds collide, colour, sound, and sensation tumbling together in sonorous, rhythmic unity. Visually recalling the skeletal forms of Piet Mondrian’s early tree paintings, Hemlock retains a strong architectonic structure, expanded and diffused through her gestural and rhythmic brushwork as it builds to its emotional crescendo. Drawing on the strong visual resonances between these works and Mondrian’s trees, curator Paul Schimmel went further still, his 1984 essay ‘The Lost Generation’, privileging Mitchell’s work as epitomising ‘a shift in abstract expressionism from chance, hazard and the uncontrolled freedom of the unconscious to a new direction with breath, freshness, and light within a highly structured armature.’^iv Placing white both beneath and in front of these more dominant, darker colours Mitchell confounds any easy distinction between foreground and background here, a stylistic feature of Mitchell’s work that is radically extended across the wide horizontal expanse of Canada II which – like its sister paintings from this small series – loosen the more rigid structures of these earlier works, appearing more delicately ‘diffuse in their dissolution of forms into a luscious impasto of blues, browns, and whites.’^v

 

By the 1970s, Riopelle had started extending his Canadian visits, investing in a home and business ventures in the mountain village of Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson. Travelling out to meet him in the autumn of 1974, Mitchell was taciturn, feeling her partner become increasingly emotionally distant. Given the close emotional connections between her lover and this rugged terrain, and her notion of landscape itself as offering her ‘enormous protection from people who were hurting me’, the breathtaking Canada paintings are especially poignant in their high-keyed lyricism. Mitchell in fact gifted one of the works – a stunning, smaller four-panel work dominated by the rhythmic interchanges between ethereal, creamy whites and softly vibrating shapes - to Riopelle, renamed Returned after his rejection of it.

Mitchell and Monet: A Continuum

 

Having spent much of her career living between France and New York, in 1967 Mitchell relocated permanently to Vétheuil, where Impressionist master Claude Monet had lived and painted between 1878 and 1881, a period especially notable for his own attempts to capture the physical sensation and distinct atmospheric effects of winter light and snow. In her enormous, light-filled studio Mitchell lived in close communion with the elements and seasons, creating vast, multi-panelled canvases that place her within a grand tradition of French landscape painting and in especially close dialogue with Monet, whose triumphant late Nymphéas operate in the same complex emotional register as Mitchell’s work from this period, recording their deeply sensitive response to the natural world and translating those sensations in paint.

 

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Painted in 1975, just one year after the major solo presentation of her work at The Whitney Museum of American Art which propelled the artist to new levels of international critical acclaim, Canada II is a breathtaking example of Joan Mitchell’s unique approach to abstraction.
   

• The work is the second in a numbered series of five works which all explore the artist’s responses to her experiences of the physical sensations, embodied memories, and emotional resonances provoked by the Canadian landscape. One example from the series, Canada I forms part of the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. 
   

• Today Mitchell’s reputation as one of the great masters of American abstraction is stronger than ever before, with major solo exhibitions and thoughtful museum pairings of her with other artists more prevalent than ever.

 

 

ⁱ Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 133.

ⁱⁱ Chicago Tribune, quoted in, Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, New York, 2007, p. 78.

ⁱⁱⁱ Joan Mitchell, quoted in, Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, New York, 2007, p. 242.

^iv Paul Schimmel, 'Joan Mitchell's Sixth Sense', Mitchell Trees, exh. cat., Cheim & Reid, New York, 2014, n.p. 

^v Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, pp. 134-136.