Joan Mitchell

Jean Fournier et Cie, Paris
Private Collection, Paris
Private Collection, Europe
Sotheby's, New York, May 13, 2003, Lot 24
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This painting is in very good condition overall. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a wood strip frame with gold facing.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Joan Mitchell's painting Le Temps des Lilas - much like the heartbreaking arrangement the eponymous song of the 19^th century French Romantic composer Ernest Chausson - is a lush and glorious rendering of emotion. Its rich color palette and spirited brushstrokes bring the love aria's dramatic crescendos and vibrant strings to life on canvas, exhibiting once again the strong affinity of music with Mitchell's art. "Music puts me more available to myself," Mitchell once explained. Poet Nathan Kernan has interpreted this statement as an act of "making available her deepest, unconscious self" through a state of "heightened, almost passive attention. Attention to the most fleeting sensations; to her feelings; to remembered images of landscape, which she carried with her and which she re-visualized as marks made on canvas." (Exh. Cat., New York, Cheim & Read, Joan Mitchell: The Presence of Absence, 2002, n.p.).

The operatic Le Temps des Lilas is the story of two lovers whose romance blossomed with the spring, only to fade away with the onset of winter. Invoking the bittersweet nature of love, the song mirrors the emotional turmoil Mitchell was experiencing around the time she painted the present work. Rendered in 1966, on the heels of the psychologically dark and turbulent Black Paintings (1960-1964), Le Temps des Lilas marks the glorious emergence of newfound optimism. Here, Mitchell's felt experience of hope amid loss and confusion is evidenced by the painting's colorful array of rapid brushstrokes and dense swathes of vibrant color.

In the early 60s, Mitchell internalized the pain of death and sickness in the so-called Black Paintings: her father, as well as her dear friend, the painter Franz Kline, passed away and her mother became severely ill. Though none of these canvases are literally colored in black, they appear tortured and weighted down by heaping paint, as if physical manifestations of Mitchell's hurt. Curator Klaus Kertess has explained, "Mitchell's painting did not simply become the passive reflection of her emotional landscape, but made its own demands on that landscape." With the fading of these darker paintings around 1964 and the creation of new works, including Le Temps des Lilas, however, "her painting seemed to call for a brighter nature and a return to the coloristic brio that had emboldened her painting in the late 1950s. ...in 1966, the painting began slowly to call to clearer hues and light." (Klaus Kertess, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1997, p. 30).

Indeed, there is playfulness in the circular gestures atop the canvas where multiple shades of blue collide not only with each other, but also with bright purples and greens. The thin paint drips in the lower third of the canvas, meanwhile, add lightness to the piece, and the red accents in the painting's upper center further enliven the fusion of colors. As such, the painting conjures Mitchell's other primary source of inspiration: the verdant French landscape surrounding her studio and home in Vétheuil located near Giverny, the site of Claude Monet's epic garden and home. The vivid staccato of the lilacs and greens in Le Temps des Lilas and the implied swaying and shimmering of the blooms is indicative of the affinity often noted between Monet's and Mitchell's mutual engagement with their surrounding landscape and environment.

Mitchell, who relocated from New York to Paris in 1959, was just as profoundly inspired and influenced by European Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters - Matisse, Cézanne and van Gogh - as by her American contemporaries. And though Abstract Expressionist masters such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann admired and supported her work, Mitchell's disengagement with New York afforded her the freedom and space to create a highly idiosyncratic oeuvre.

Over the passing of time, Mitchell has been historicized as a leading female voice in the otherwise mostly male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement. Her work, meanwhile, has come to be defined by pointed emotion, appreciation for the physical acts of painting, as well as a deep enjoyment of color. Of her particular love for the color blue, in fact, Kertess surmises, "If Mitchell had had to choose but one color out of which to make a rainbow, it would certainly have been blue. Whether the blue that makes darkness visible, the blue of water, the blues in Cézanne, van Gogh and Matisse, the blue of morning glories or delphiniums, or 'the blues' of jazz and sadness, blue was critical to the life of Mitchell's painting."  (Ibid., p. 29).

Le Temps des Lilas is an exquisite example of Mitchell's penchant for blue. An affecting aqua blue jumps forth from the canvas, and its concentrated presence in the upper portion of the painting calls to mind Mark Rothko's seminal work Blue, Green, and Brown (1952). Similar to Le Temps des Lilas, Rothko's composition is dominated by a vastness of blue, subtly underlined by smaller bands of green and brown. Like Rothko's color gradation then, Mitchell's painting suggests a similar downward progression - in this case, the dense color concentration and active swirl at the top of the composition steadily disperses, ultimately breathing life, light and beauty into the composition.