“In most of her multipanel paintings, the vertical line acts as beat dropped into the visual flow to complicate the act of viewing and force is into a sequential form of looking – first as a whole, then at each unit, and then at the dialogues amongst the units.”
A rare female presence in the otherwise male-centric world of the New York Abstract Expressionists, Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career. Her inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. One of the few artists of her generation to embrace multi-panel compositions, Mitchell over time refined and expanded her approach to the format, orchestrating a distinctive balance between continuity and rupture both within and across the composition. The horizontally oriented, panoramic expanse of these paintings is ideally suited to landscape—an important and enduring subject for Mitchell that she linked directly to memory:” (…)and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with” (the artists cited in: John I. H. Baur, Nature in Abstraction: The Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture to Nature in Twentieth-Century American Art , New York 1958, p. 75).
After her permanent move to France from New York in 1959, she continued to expand her abstract vocabulary by responding to her natural surroundings in a way that recalls Claude Monet’s Impressionist views of his gardens at Giverny. In 1968, Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, about 35 miles northwest of Paris. Her property overlooked the Seine, which would become the main source of inspiration for her paintings from this time. During the early years at La Tour focused solely on creating works on paper – a very fruitful period for Mitchell. The drawings represent a significant body of Mitchell’s works; the sheets feature loosely drawn yet largely recognizable natural forms: trees, flowers, views – both broad stretches of river and views of stacked landscapes framed by windows. Compositions oscillate between forms, showing how easily rivers could become tree and vice versa. Her terrace view at La Tour was a memory that would feed a number of large scale quadriptychs in the following years. This includes La Seine, from 1967-68, which bears strong compositional resemblance to the present work and was one of the very first large scale quadriptychs the artist ever painted.
The sheets in Untitled function as distinct episodes or stanzas that convey sensory responses and feelings that unfold over time, while the picture plane alternatively asserts itself and fades away into hazy atmosphere. Untitled is a cool, wintry composition, with strokes deployed in whiplash lines – precise accelerated gestures – that skate across expanses of white background. The two interior sheets mirror each other, as do the outer two, framing the center. The intentionally left areas of negative space create the impression that the colors and forms are emerging from the ground. Each of the elements has its own logic, its autonomy, while working in relation to the other, coming together in perfect harmony of the vertical composition dancing across the multi-sheets.
What makes Mitchell great is her ability to infuse paint with an endless range of feelings. That is what gives her paintings their staying power, why they are one of the towering achievements of the postwar period. Her art could be simultaneously raw, tough, evanescent and vulnerable. At a time when painting had died once again, and the smart money was on Conceptual Art, Mitchell showed that paint had not lost its power to communicate contradictory and elusive feelings, wisps of thought and slippery memories, tumult and calm, the tragic and joyous, often combined in the same work.