“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.”
A cross the expansive face of Allo, Amélie, the full force of Joan Mitchell’s unencumbered gestural vocabulary initiates a nuanced dialogue between color and contour, technique and abandon, intellect and emotion. Executed in 1973, during Mitchell’s relocation in Paris, the present work is a resounding example of her uninhibited creative confidence during the height of her career. A performative arena where light, color, movement, and texture are choreographed, Allo, Amélie showcases Mitchell’s ability to create highly stimulating compositions. The painting is inspired from Jean-Paul Riopelle's daughter's name, Sylvie, whose daughter, Amélie, was born in 1973, the year the painting was created. It corresponds to another painting of the same era, Bonjour Julie, which celebrates the birth of Riopelle's granddaughter, Julie, in 1971. The present work underscores Mitchell’s masterful use of the brush through her combination of broad strokes with more intricate passages as well as translucent veils of dripping paint. It is in the mesmerizing coalescence of these diverse applications that Allo, Amélie derives its ultimate painterly presence.
“I carry my landscapes around inside me, ...I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with."
In 1959, Mitchell permanently relocated to Paris after spending the initial decade of her career in New York City, where she was one of the leading female voices in the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement. From her earliest days as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, Mitchell focused her energie on the long-established genre of landscape, finding great success with her abstract reinterpretation of its entirety as an artistic subject. In 1967, Mitchell relocated to a two-acre estate in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris overlooking the Seine. The countryside presented Mitchell with a proximity to nature that filled her with inspiration. The home at Vétheuil was surrounded by an expansive garden in which Mitchell planted sunflowers and other vibrant flora. Undoubtedly, Mitchell was never more in step with her predecessors – Monet, Van Gogh, and Cézanne principal among them – and her full immersion in her surroundings brought an inimitable sense of joy to the paintings she executed between late 1967 and the mid-1970s.
Image © The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
This change in setting in Mitchell’s life infused her painting with a newfound appreciation for light and color. Strokes of sunflower yellows, sky blues, and soft rose pinks pervade most of the right side of this work, which resemble a sunrise or sunset over the Seine. The layered white paint that fills the other half of the painting is rendered sublimely and an example of Mitchell’s mastery of balancing compositions to create a sense of calm and tranquility that mirrors her experience living in the French countryside. Allo, Amélie is altogether archetypal of the inspiration Mitchell gleaned from her surroundings in Vétheuil.
"That particular thing I want can’t be verbalized. . . . I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.”
Mitchell separates her painting into figure and ground, rejecting the notion of the all-over composition championed by the first generation Abstract Expressionists. The painting instead implies a presence, or area of fastidious focus, that anchors the composition and demands close inspection. Although Mitchell directs much of her painterly energy into the center of the canvas, she does not neglect the negative space. She activates her canvas through subtle tonal modulation and paint handling, creating a vibrating aura around her central “subject,” and sharpening its form. Untitled is both the artist’s initial impression on the canvas and her reassessment. This engagement with both positive and negative space speaks to the role of contrasts as the locus of meaning in her work.
"Meaning and emotional intensity are produced structurally, as it were, by a whole series of oppositions: dense versus transparent strokes; gridded structure versus more chaotic, ad hoc construction; weight on the bottom of the canvas versus weight at the top; light versus dark; choppy versus continuous strokes; harmonious and clashing juxtapositions of hue – all are potent signs of meaning and feeling."
As with the most quintessential examples of Mitchell’s celebrated corpus, Allo, Amélie possesses a visual authority that summons the viewer to imagine the physicality of Mitchell’s creative process while experiencing the intoxicating expressiveness of its outcome. As the artist herself expressed, “I don’t set out to achieve a specific thing, perhaps to catch a motion or to catch a feeling. Call it layer painting, gestural painting, easel painting or whatever you want. I paint oil on canvas – without an easel. …I try to eliminate clichés, extraneous material. I try to make it exact. My painting is not an allegory or a story. It is more of a poem.” (the artist cited in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, California, 1996, p. 33)
Artists on Artists: Stanley Whitney on Joan Mitchell's Fearless Career and the Drama of Painting
