Joan Mitchell

Robert and Betsy Miller, New York
Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Joan Mitchell, October - November 1989, n.p., illustrated in color
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Birmingham, Birmingham Museum of Art; Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum Fort Worth; Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, June 2002 - May 2004, pl. 56, pp. 190-191, illustrated in color

Michel Waldberg, Joan Mitchell, Paris, 1992, pp. 250-251, illustrated in color
Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, fig. 99, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The two canvases are framed together in a wood strip frame painted white.
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Emerging as a centerpiece of her first show at the Robert Miller Gallery, New York in 1989, South is cited frequently in the subsequent literature on Joan Mitchell as an unequivocal masterpiece of her late period that courses with the same energy, dynamic color and structural fortitude that marked the greatest of the works from her first decades. The 1989 exhibition of her recent work capped a decade of rejuvenation for Mitchell, sparked by a revival and reappraisal of her career amid curators, art critics and collectors. Mitchell had joined some of her colleagues at the Xavier Fourcade gallery in New York in 1976 and France, her adopted home for many years, honored Mitchell with an exhibition of her recent paintings at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1982. Revelatory exhibitions such as Paul Schimmel's Action/Precision: the New Direction in New York: 1955-1960 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1984 elicited long overdue dialogues about the importance of the acolytes of de Kooning and Pollock in their own right, Mitchell foremost among them. This cultural renaissance reached its climax with the retrospective of Mitchell's work at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University in 1988 which traveled to prestigious museums that included the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. This revitalizing period is given visual expression in the paintings of 1989 including South which were hailed among critics and public alike. In a review of the Robert Miller show, Michael Brenson described the nine paintings as "lucid and fresh. They are also ambitious and unapologetic, ...Part of what is so impressive about them is their confidence. Ms. Mitchell seems to have thrown herself into them with complete assurance that her journey over and through the canvas would lead her where she wanted to go and that the journey itself would be rewarding....Ms. Mitchell's paintings retain many characteristics of gestural Abstract Expressionism. She attacks the canvas. Her brushwork can be calligraphic. The paintings seem fast, but in fact they can only be fully appreciated with sustained attention. They suggest scrolls without beginning or end, filled with questions and answers that can probably never be completely deciphered." (Michael Brenson, "An Art in Motion: Joan Mitchell's Abstract Expressionism", The New York Times, November 3, 1989).

Despite the potential difficulties of painting after hip surgery, Mitchell's drive to paint in 1989 was unadulterated and unstoppable. The scale of the paintings in this series and the seriousness of Mitchell's ambition are reflected in their direct and blunt titles: South, Land, Rain and Mountain among them. The series of works that bracket the 1989 paintings are more indicative of her traditional lush landscape paintings - the La Grand Vallée of 1983-1984 and the Sunflowers that begin in 1990- and one feels Mitchell purposefully sets the paintings of 1989 apart. Comparisons to late period works by Claude Monet such as The Garden from 1900 are poetic: both artists reveled in the verdant landscape of rural France and Mitchell's home in Vétheuil was not far from Monet's fabled garden and studio in Giverny. Entering the elegiac, final years of their career, Mitchell and Monet produced startling canvases of energy that defy time and age. Both capture the flux and changeability of the moment within a decentralized space constructed of multiple, flickering strokes of paint. Substance and space seem to dissolve into compositions of color and light.

For her part, Mitchell's paintings of 1989 - just 3 years prior to her death - are appropriate valedictory works as conveyed by Jane Livingstone in the catalogue for Mitchell's 2002 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. "..Mitchell continued to create some of the most assuredly opulent paintings of her career. One of the most fully achieved, strictly Abstract Expressionist compositions of her late period is South ..., a diptych whose allover, replete palette and driving brushwork hark back to some of the artist's most completely resolved works of the 1950s. For this work, she summoned all the old chops, showing herself and her audience one last time that her life as a disciple of de Kooning and Pollock and the rest had paid off...  South's energy is frantic, unmitigated, with lacerating swipes of blood-red paint crisscrossing many other layers of rapidly worked lattices of pattern and chromatic incident. It buzzes and weaves." (Jane Livingstone in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, 2002).

As opposed to the series of La Grande Vallée in which Mitchell's colors and strokes were densely merged and tightly interwoven, South and the other works of 1989 exhibit a more open construct in which brilliant white becomes an equal partner with her signature blue and the highlights of yellow, orange, pink, lilac, black and red that activate the seductive swirl of her canvases. A sense of light and space is allowed back into the churning cosmos of strokes in paintings such as South and Klaus Kertess eloquently relates this series to the great influence of Paul Cézanne's brilliant use of planes of color and discrete brushstrokes to form complex spatial fields. As Kertess elaborates in his insightful 1997 monograph on Mitchell, "..the 1989 paintings are animated by torquing waves of mostly shorter, straighter strokes, once again clearly visible as individual marks. Each stroke is responsive to the color, light, shape, and directionality of those surrounding it and becomes a unit of intuited liquid architecture. An ecstatic agitation courses through these paintings, as much from the pleasures of mark making as the remembrances of landscape. Two of these paintings, South and Mountain are homages to Cézanne's works inspired by the landscape of Aix, and Mitchell's strokes more openly approach landscape configurations, as they also do in Land. ...the hotter light, the bristling atmosphere, and the implication of volume, brought about the generous diffusion of white and pulsing overlaps of strokes [that] indeed call to Cézanne..." (Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell, 1997, pp. 40-41).