Joan Mitchell

Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York
Christie's, New York, November 7, 1990, lot 7
Private Collection, San Francisco
Christie's, New York, November 14, 1995, lot 10
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Bern, Klipstein and Kornfeld, Joan Mitchell, October 1962, no. 12
New York, Xavier Fourcade, Inc., Joan Mitchell: The Sixties, April - May 1985, n.p., illustrated in color and illustrated in color on the cover

Michel Waldberg, Joan Mitchell, Paris, 1992, p. 90, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition overall. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This work is framed in a gold faced wood strip frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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In 1955, after eight years in New York City, Joan Mitchell moved away from the capital of the art world, home to her fellow, mostly male, Abstract Expressionists – Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock. She took up residence first in Paris and then in Vétheuil, the tiny village known for Giverny, Monet's famous estate and garden.  Like Monet, whose impressionistic interpretations of local landscape change drastically according to the viewer's distance from them, so too does Joan Mitchell's visceral use of color. With each nearing step, hues get increasingly nuanced, an element of the work certainly related to Mitchell's own practice of removal: "I spend a lot of time looking at the work. I paint from a distance. I decide what I'm going to do from a distance" (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Joan Mitchell, March – May 1974, p. 8).

In Vera Cruz, executed in 1960-1962, dusky reds give way to crimsons marbleized with ivory, while crude browns cede a copper earthiness that almost glints in the light. It seems that all of the painterly techniques for which Mitchell is famous – the quick brushstrokes, the languid drips, the calligraphic lines, the dense impasto, the thin base coat – are synthesized in Vera Cruz which means "true cross'' in Spanish. Pale periwinkles and delicate whites lay the groundwork for the thick, palette knife-applied deep greens and orange in the most concentrated passages. Mitchell's paintings of the 1950s and 1960s move toward tightly centered compositions from looser knots of paint, and Vera Cruz combines traits of both. The lush green that plays a primary role in so many of her works throughout the coming decade is both loose and frenetic, bringing a lyrical cohesion to the hint of a sprawling center. Mitchell, never too concerned with particularly balanced compositions, seeks harmony through color rather than from form alone. Organic, burgeoning, and vital, Mitchell's work mimics the very process of nature itself.

Abstract paintings, that, if anything, resemble lush bursting flowers at their most figurative, compel, rightly or wrongly, a certain degree of psychological projection. There is something undeniably carnal about Mitchell's energetically applied paint. And anything that announces `Life' with such force also at least whispers of `Death'. Self-possession is a precondition for what Linda Nochlin referred to as Mitchell's "rage to paint." To create something simultaneously so violent and so organic, especially on such a large scale, requires, without question, a great commitment on the part of the artist. Mitchell struggled throughout her life with moody tendencies and a profound sense of isolation; but painting, she explained, "is the opposite of death, it permits one to survive, it also permits one to live." (Jane Livingston in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art [and travelling], The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, 2002, p. 64). Even the most cursory of glances makes obvious the urgency of Mitchell's practice. The isolated units of her abstractions are emotive, and it is difficult not to lend them human qualities: smears indicate regret, while streaks suggest unbridled joy; drips appear melancholy, splatters angry.  It is as if the paintings are literal maps of Mitchell's heart and mind; the harnessed properties of spatial relations, color, and brushwork form a sort of mental landscape. The brush, with the sensitivity of a seismograph's needle, can detect the slightest fluctuations in mood.

The early sixties proved a prolific yet emotionally draining period for Mitchell. Personal heartbreaks and cross-hemisphere relocations seem to have propelled a stylistic break from her compositions of the fifties, in which form and color were more uniformly distributed across the canvas. The newer paintings show a growing preference for centralized masses of unrestrained color.  These works are transcendent but not chaotic like the subsequently titled "Black Paintings" created between 1963 and 1967. Rather, these schematic landscapes reveal beautiful solutions to the potential meaning of abstraction and to the visual possibilities within a strictly gestural process.

Certainly recognized in her lifetime by American institutions and critics, Mitchell's work is increasingly lauded posthumously for its ability to remain original in an age of paradigm shifts. Though ingratiated into the New York City art world before moving to France, Mitchell's deliberateness and control established her as cut from a different, though related, cloth from her fellow Abstract Expressionists. In 1951, Mitchell was included in the fabled Ninth Street Show organized by Leo Castelli. She held her first solo exhibition at the New Gallery in 1952, and just one year later, the revered Stable Gallery took her on – a considerable accomplishment for any artist, but particularly for a young woman. Supported and encouraged by the reigning dealers and artists of her time, Joan Mitchell's formidable skill was unleashed upon the art world with whirlwind force.

Though her approach is anything but ordinary, Mitchell considered herself a traditional painter, and it was perhaps this move away from metropolitan New York and to the bucolic country side of France that allowed Mitchell to reacquaint herself with the influences she held most dear. Though surely of a piece with her contemporaries in New York, Mitchell's reverence for nature and her interest in impressionistic self-expression, especially in the context of her new French home, aligns her with Monet and van Gogh, early masters of the methods she too would champion. The large majority of Mitchell's works are tethered to familiar landscapes, memorized forms, and visual recollections. Memory hauntingly persists in Mitchell's work, and a lacuna is made obvious between the time in which an emotion was felt and the time in which Mitchell recorded it on canvas. The frenzied layering of paint and the violent juxtaposing of color suggest that sensations can not only remain present in vestigial ways or survive fully in tact, but perhaps even be magnified by the prism of time. Mitchell's lush canvases, which sought not to represent nature but to capture the emotions and memories that could be inspired by nature, radiate life and growth. These meditations on place and the moments they once held are expression of a deep engagement with life.