 Thank you so much for coming today. It's a beautiful September day, so I appreciate you all being here My name is Rebecca Taffel and I work at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation I'm the director of programs there and I work with Elizabeth Sackler to provide additional support to the Sackler Center here at the Brooklyn Museum And I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome Patricia Alvers here today Thank you so much for being here We've had a great year so far of having biographies on wonderful women artists We've had a biography on Alice Neal, one on Lee Krasner, and I'm so happy to add Joan Mitchell to To the list of wonderful programs we've had so far For the past five years the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art has continued to fulfill its commitment to the past present and future of feminist art Using its award-winning exhibition education spaces the Sackler Center strives to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions Dialogue and debate about feminist art theory and activism Take place in the Sackler Center's forum Groundbreaking exhibitions are held in its feminist art and her story galleries Currently these galleries feature the historically groundbreaking show Materializing six years Lucy LaParde Lucy R. LaParde and the emergence of conceptual art It's a wonderful exhibition that Catherine Morris our curator has been working on for a long time It's amazing And it explores Lucy LaParde's hugely significant 1973 book. So if you haven't seen it Please go see it afterwards. There's a wonderful catalog that the The Center produced that's really exceptional as well But above and beyond an exhibition just an exhibition space the center is a Place for open and free discourse Conversation and the exchange of ideas We celebrate dialogue and debate Dr. Sackler could not be here today because some of some ongoing health issues But she asked me to express how delighted she is to have Patricia join us here today To illuminate the life and work of Joan Mitchell one of the few women to thrive and find success during the aggressive and male Dominated West Village scene of abstract expressionism Determined abrasive intense difficult rude and these were the types of words her friends used to describe her She was she was an artist whose work whose abstract work at the same time was beautiful lyrical and graceful Patricia albers explores these complexities and contradictions of Joan Mitchell's life with skill and great detail in her book In his review of the book in the New York Times critic Jed Pearl wrote that quote Patricia Albers has written a book about Mitchell that I cannot imagine will ever be improved upon So graceful and incisive is her account of the artist's hell-bent life in lyrical art According to New Yorker quote like Mitchell's vast canvases Albers impressive Book ought to be experienced in the morning for it can animate the entire day and Booklist named the book Joan Mitchell lady painter one of the top ten biographies of 2011 if you haven't rec read it yet I highly recommend it. I enjoyed it immensely Patricia albers is a San Francisco Bay Area writer and teacher Her most recent book is Joan Mitchell lady painter a life the first biography of the New York School painter published by not Albers first book shadows fire snow the life of Tina Modati was based in part on her discovery in the attic of an Oregon farmhouse of a trove of Modati photographs and letters that American photo praised as Adding quote an amazing chapter to one of the most passionate lives and art Shadows fire snare received a starred review in publishers weekly and was named by the library journal as the best book of 1999 Albers also organized the exhibition Tina Modati and the Mexican Renaissance for Modena Museum in Stockholm at the City Museum of Helsinki and the all photo photography festival in France Herald it in a front page story in the mold as quote the The first great exhibition Modati exhibition in France. It drew the largest crowds of any exhibition in the festival's 31 year history She's the recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grants and you cross foundation writing residency She's currently working on the first biography of Hungarian born photographer Andre She also teaches modern art history and the history of photography at San Francisco State University Please help me welcome Patricia Albers So thank you Rebecca for that lovely introduction. It's a great privilege for me to be speaking at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and thank you to all of you for coming out on this beautiful afternoon In 1972 the painter Joan Mitchell Received a letter from Marsha Tucker a curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Whitney Museum Tucker was offering Mitchell a solo exhibition at the Whitney two years hence But Mitchell forwarded the letter to her then dealer David Anderson of Martha Jackson Gallery With a note about this Whitney bit, which of course we cannot do and Then she ticked off the reasons why First because the only work she would want to show would be traveling at that time Second she objected to Tucker's plan to pair her exhibition with an exhibition by the painter Lee Krasner Mitchell felt that her work clashed with Krasner's But also she said she smelled the ghettoization of women artists Tucker was using her Mitchell ranted to build her own reputation as a feminist curator Anderson disagreed plus he said it would be nuts to turn down the Whitney So at this point this was 1972 Mitchell's career had been in doldrums since well for about 10 years of 60s pop art had displaced abstract Expressionism and that was the label that was typically given to John Mitchell's work Moreover Mitchell had been living in France for the past 13 years Since 1967 in the village of Vita which is about 35 miles northwest of Paris So off the power grid of the art world In the 60s, she'd had relatively few opportunities to show her work in 1963 64 66 and 70 she had had no solo shows at all and In her entire career She'd had only one museum exhibition and that was a show that had closed six months earlier at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York All the same she adamantly did not want to be among the female artists being rediscovered by feminist critics and curators in New York Anderson met with Tucker and Persuaded her to decouple Mitchell show from Crazner's and then he started in a working on Joan again and More foot dragging in suit But eventually she backed into a yes I Cannot commit myself to anything. I Might paint well in the next two years, and I might not disaster Don't want to fall flat on my face on half a floor at the Whitney Of course, I'll paint and do my best. Do we need the Whitney? I'll take a crack at it Mitchell spent the next two years painting her show for the Whitney Including 10 single canvases and 12 multi-panel works among them nine big dip ticks the largest nine by 24 feet It was a monumental achievement Still that show which opened on March 26th 1974 was not widely reviewed After all the 70s was a decade of pluralism It was the time of process art body art earthworks performance art almost anything it seemed except painting and especially painting as romantic calling Painting was supposedly dead Mitchell responded by throwing out her chest and proclaiming herself a OH abstract expressionist old hat and In fact her show was warmly received by the public including by many young artists who had never before seen her work Most of these paintings were what Mitchell called her field and territory paintings So paintings that she thought of as sanctuaries for Particular people or dogs that she loved Sanctuaries that were inspired like all of her mature work by memories of her feelings About particular places experienced at particular times Typically she wouldn't say which ones So in the case of wet orange for example one of these field and territory paintings We do know That she told a friend that something she saw possibly a wet flower Made her fall in love with this particular orange right here Even though orange was a color that she had long disliked And then she decided to pair that orange with a lavender blue of the goal was blue cigarette pack No doubt the fields and bodies of water around the village of victory Also play a role in this marvelous assortment of rectangles Now as I mentioned most of the paintings in that show were multi-paneled Mitchell's favorite format again as in wet orange is a horizontal Triptych made up of three vertical panels What she's doing here and in fact in all of her multi-paneled works is Not telling a story as in a cartoon panel But rather conveying a kind of sensory overload Giving us four images all at the same time the first one the second one the third one and the whole and Doing that was one reason why she loved that triptych format Another reason was because of the contrast between the straight cuts between the panels and The very hand-done quality of her marks She was also interested in all the things she could make happen around those cuts Emphatically stopping the colors in some places and in other places such as here implying their continuity Moreover she liked the fact that the vertical cuts Undermind the panoramic ramming sense of landscape You do it one way she said and then deny it and That's an idea that she put into practice in many ways in both her life and her art Mitchell's studio in victory was not huge and Here then is a an image of her painting area in that studio Notice for example that beam across the ceiling so that beam was nine feet two inches high and That limited the height of her painting the width was a problem too So when she did these large multi-panel works She typically could not fit all three panels side by side in her studio So I said some of these paintings were up to 24 feet wide So when she was doing works like Les Bleuets, which we see here and this one is 19 feet wide She would work on panels one and two and keep panel three in her head Or she'd work on panels two and three and keep panel one in her head She had an extraordinary visual memory Often in fact she did not see an entire triptych Until it was in the gallery or in this case in the museum where it was going to be shown and Yet pictorially She knew exactly what she was doing so to finish this story then of the Whitney exhibition three months before the show Tucker visited Mitchell at her home in order in order to interview her and make final arrangements for the show So this in fact is that house in vatari as you can see it's up on a cliff We're looking up from the road in front of it in front of this road was a field and in front of that was the river Sen so Tucker then walked through the front door of this house and When she did Mitchell yelled Hello, or madam Whitney has arrived and she did not bother to get up from her chair In the days that follow she baited and her rang Tucker However when Mitchell's companion the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riapel Tried to flirt with Tucker Mitchell shouted and I'm omitting the obscenities here She's here for my work and don't you forget it Riapel responded by throwing a plate of fried eggs at Mitchell's head and Tucker too had to duck the critic Peter Sheldahl Once called such stories and there are many Joan Mitchell sacred monster trading cards So it's an understatement to say that Mitchell was a mass of contradictions She was nasty and brutal and wise and kind She hurt and embarrassed people and yet she was extremely generous Especially to young artists and especially to young female artists She bought their work at ridiculously high prices And she gave them money art supplies studio space Liquor and fancy French desserts and often did so with great sensitivity and tact In her essay for the Whitney catalog Tucker generously wrote of Mitchell's overwhelming Intellectual and physical energy her vast curiosity and her blunt disconcerting honesty Mitchell's attitude toward feminism was equally self-contradictory For example, she believed that feminist activists were inferior artists who organized to cover up their inferiority and She refused to carry the flag of feminism in any way Yet from an early age she defied gender expectations In her review of Whitney of Mitchell show at the Whitney the critic Barbara Rose recalled a 1957 article in Life magazine. It's the article here is titled women artists in ascendance So this was an article that had featured five prominent female artists Helen Frankenthaler here Grace Hardigan Nell Blaine Jane Wilson was on a separate page and down here. We have Joan Mitchell Mitchell Hardigan and Frankenthaler in particular had made an indelible impression on Rose She wrote quote with their huge paintings Standing there confidently in paint splattered jeans When their contemporaries were all wearing tweedy classics in the suburbs Terrorized by the feminine mystique So where does this contradictory creature at John Mitchell come from? John Mitchell was born in 1925 Born and raised in Chicago The younger daughter in a wealthy ambitious and accomplished family Her maternal grandfather had been an engineer who designed bridges erected the load bearing structure for the Statue of Liberty and worked on some of the earliest steel frame skyscrapers His engineering drawings which Mitchell kept all her life were important to her for their rigorous construction Her mother you see here on the right Was a lyric poet who instilled in Joan a lifelong love of poetry The art form she considered most analogous to her own Mitchell wanted for her art. She said the feeling in a line of poetry Which makes it different from a line of prose Meaning I think in part that as with lyric poetry What Mitchell's work says is Inseparable from the way in which it is said as for her father He was a dermatologist an enthusiastic amateur artist and a Stern taskmaster who ordered his daughter to earn top grades Bring home sports trophies and do accomplished works of art and she did her childhood name was bullet head and it fit But her father also told her that because she was a girl. She would always be second rate Apparently he never got over the fact that she had not been born a boy according to the family story He had filled out the paperwork at the hospital when she was born and he had written Under name had written John and then of course he had to make a fast change So he just crossed out the H and that's how she got the name jump In any case when she was 12 he required that she choose her life's work She hesitated between writing and art, but finally chose art and then he responded Art you can't draw. How can you be an artist? You can't draw So Jones relationship with her father was a very mixed bag He inspired her Competed with her challenged her undermined herself confidence and scared her although he forbid her to show any sign of fear Nor did he allow her to quote diddle with things For the next 55 years she devoted herself Single-mindedly to her art although in high school. She was also a nationally ranked figure skater After graduation she attended Smith College and then she transferred to the school of the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied anatomy Art history and life drawing which was the core of the school's curriculum as a student Joan Mitchell joined the Communist Party and Engaged with socially concerned art Much of her student work Consists of melancholic and poetic depictions of working people beggars and waves Inspired by Picasso's painting of the blue period like old guitarist Which was and still is in the collection of the Art Institute and by the stark and dramatic Prince of the German artist Keithy Colwitz Who dignified the suffering of the powerless and poor? Joan admired Colwitz for her draftsmanship and viewed her as a role model a wealthy woman Who was nonetheless committed to social justice and commanded respect as a champion of the people? Joan spent the summers of 1945 and 1946 living in an apartment in Guanajuato, Mexico With a view of a mountain that was called La Bufa She knew Cezanne's work of course from the Art Institute And she admired the aliveness and the rigor of his landscapes as well as the way he addressed his shifting Perceptions of space as he moved through it In La Bufa her work here on the right she takes cues from Cezanne and Especially his many paintings of the Mont Saint-Victoire this mountain in southern France that Cezanne painted repeatedly So like Cezanne She Conceives of her painting in terms of angled planes She sets up linear Continuities among objects at various distances. So that's happening here for example And she's playing off rupture and continuity With that bisecting of the image so anticipating the strategies that she would use in those later multi-paneled works after graduating 1947 Joan spent 13 months on a fellowship in France where she painted intensely Yet felt increasingly uncertain about both her subject matter and her style In 1949 in France she married Barney Rossett Who had been her schoolmate at Francis Parker School in Chicago? And who later at Jones urging purchased the then tiny publishing company Grove Press In the 1950s after Barney and Joan divorced so this was a short-lived Marriage Rosset became the American publisher of Samuel Beckett Henry Miller and many others and a champion of First Amendment rights In many ways he challenged and changed American publishing and American culture So Mitchell and Rosset then married 1949. They were divorced in 1952 But almost all of their lives. They had a very close relationship. It was a scrappy Brother-sister kind of thing close but fraught So going back then to 1949 After the marriage Mitchell and Rosset then moved to New York City and In New York Joan painted this work figure and the city Which is probably a self-portrait and In any case such a failure She felt that even as she was working on it. She knew she would never again paint the human figure But what next? One day a few months later she walked into the Whitney Museum, which was then on 8th Street downtown and She was stunned by Willem de Kooning's attic. This was the first time she had ever seen de Kooning's work Seeing that painting and later others by de Kooning transformed her own art De Kooning's raw Muscular canvases gave her permission to shed the vestiges of that academic training and to paint with more freedom and immediacy They also gave her permission to acknowledge her love of paint as material substance and To explore its intrinsic qualities She learned to from what de Kooning called his leaps of space and From his interlocking forms in his unstable figure ground relationships meaning the way he undermined the traditional relationship between the objects he depicted and their their backgrounds and Then finally de Kooning opened up for her the the many many possibilities of abstraction Her first self-consciously important work after this encounter with de Kooning's work Was cross-section of a bridge Now bridges had long been one of Jones favorite subjects things to her engineer grandfather But what her earlier bridge images had missed and Abstraction could accommodate she now realized were her feelings about bridges and I'm talking about feelings in both the Emotional and the physical senses of the word For example a cross-section of a bridge offers us glimpses of a patch of water. They're that that blue triangle Reflections possibly some cables over there on the left At the same time as it evokes the sensation of being in the flux of Water and light on the underside of an urban bridge by 1954 when Mitchell was doing paintings like this one so paintings that have to do with her feelings about weather and urban space She had long since started hanging out at the Cedar Tavern the artist club So these were both places where progressive downtown artists would meet to talk drink debate and so forth And she'd become friends with de Kooning with the painter France Klein The poet Frank O'Hara and many others She had also participated in the landmark 9th Street show She'd had two solo shows in New York City, and she was a regular in the important stable annual And yet she felt she wasn't living up to her own standards This 1954 was a year of crisis both personal and professional and it was a crisis Severe enough that she made a half-hearted attempt at suicide She told one friend that it wasn't much fun being nuts What did she mean? Well as far back as kindergarten Joan had known that she experienced the world differently For most people One day in kindergarten the kindergarten teacher had mentioned to the class the red a on their alphabet chart And Joan had jumped up and said no no the a isn't red. It's green and The other kids had of course given her that you're so weird look and it she sat down and climbed up In other words she had synesthesia as I'm sure many of you know Synesthesia is an innate Lifelong involuntary condition in which when one of the senses is stimulated That sense responds and another one does too Some synesthetes see sounds Others hear flavors and still others taste shapes in Certain forms of synesthesia things like letters Numbers and personalities Trigger colors flavors or shapes Joan Mitchell had at least four forms of synesthesia First she had colored letters meaning that she saw the letters of the alphabet in color So her a for example was always that kind of fern green But as she points out there in a note to a friend This chart that she made doesn't truly convey the effect for one thing The colors of synesthesia are not the colors of pigment, but the colors of light Joan also saw sounds music included as Abstract colored shapes moving as if on a screen in front of her So these were shapes that varied consistently with pitch Timber and volume Now colored letters and colored sounds are very common forms of synesthesia In addition Mitchell had two rare forms She experienced colored personalities and colored emotions For her hope was literally yellow Wasn't that hope made her think of yellow, but yellow was what hope was Loneliness was dark green and clingy and Depression was silvery white Absolute horror. She said just horror Moreover Mitchell had idetic memory, which is anecdotally related to synesthesia. Although the research remains sketchy She stored important Memories in what she referred to as her mental suitcase or her mental album of photographs. I Carry my landscapes with me. She said and She was able to call them up in their sensory and emotional fullness to relive them in effect Such perceptions said Mitchell were very very present for her And yet apparently she never knew that synesthesia is a named Normal and shared condition now known to affect about five percent of the population Synesthesia had been known and studied since the early 19th century However, during much of the 20th century it fell by the wayside and it wasn't until 1993 which was the year after Mitchell's death that the publication of a book titled the man who tasted shapes Brought synesthesia back to wide scientific and public attention Today neuroscientists are able to test for synesthesia using functional magnetic resonance imaging fmri Which measures local increases in oxygenation? an indirect sign of neural activity and Meanwhile debate continues over conceptual models for synesthesia and Research promises not only a better understanding of the phenomenon itself But also a brain development of the links between emotion and reason and Perhaps the very nature of consciousness by 1955 Joan Mitchell had survived some hard one battles with herself and It turned a negative into a positive by not now intentionally using her synesthetic perceptions in her art She started drawing on her felt visual memories of particular trees Fields lakes rivers and so on color sound Her feelings about landscape The flow of consciousness and paint itself became congruent Hudson River Dayline for example Colossus in the center of the canvas as if upon the artist's plane of consciousness and uses her newly distilled exuberant and luminous color If a painting was successful and she felt that Hudson River Dayline was Then motion is made still like a fish trapped in ice She said it is trapped in the painting My mind is like an album of photographs and paintings. I do not conceive Now I hasten to add that to say that Mitchell used her synesthesia in her art is Not to say that she was illustrating her synesthetic perceptions or that her neurology Explains her art. She was a very complex artist who Used every tool available to her including her synesthesia If one has Precisely colored feelings for example, that's an excellent tool, but still one has to make skilled use of it The point is that to reduce her to a case would be to disregard her visual intelligence her deep knowledge of art history and Her eventual creation of a distinct visual language Some of Mitchell's greatest paintings date from the late 1950s In George went swimming at Barns Hole, but it got too cold She chose as her subject memories of her feelings About a certain late summer afternoon at the beach namely Barns Hole Beach in Amagansip With her beloved French poodle George and there we see Joan and George at that beach She'd like to start her paintings by Putting herself into a mental space thinking about Some positive experience some experience of love and Here then those feelings about George and that afternoon Manifest themselves in this area. So this was the first area. She worked on intensely You can see those yellows other warm colors But then as her thoughts strayed To a hurricane that had swept over the tip of Long Island that same summer 1954 that was linked in her mind to this very difficult time for her The painting took on a colder more ominous Cast up here with these blues and whites 1957 was also the year when Mitchell was the subject of an important article in art news And art news was more or less the house organ of abstract expressionism So art news had this long-time signature series, which was called so-and-so paints of picture In which a writer would follow step-by-step the artist's process of creating a work of art And also interview the artist along the way about his or her ideas methods and techniques In the case of Mitchell paints a picture the writer was the then fledgling critic Irving Sandler So the article starts out then with Mitchell working on a painting called bridge and that's what we see her doing here She's in her studio working on bridge But this was a painting that she in fact never finished Because she felt that it lacked accuracy and intensity So she was going to junk it However Sandler and another friend dropped by her studio just as that was about to happen She was going to rip it apart and they persuaded her to stop a Few weeks later Mitchell called Sandler to say that she was leaving for Paris But that if he was over at her apartment within half an hour He could have bridge and if not it was going out with the trash so he dashed over to Mitchell's apartment bridge was saved and Eventually Mitchell did accept it as a finished work of art and today it is a promised gift to the Brooklyn Museum So Mitchell paints a picture then continued by contrasting her experience with bridge With that in doing her next painting George went swimming at Barnes Hall, but it got too cold So Joan did have Exposure she did have critical support in the 1950s And yet this was a time when most women Mitchell included Felt they could not aspire to a place in art history or for that matter to equal chances of getting a show the conventional wisdom held that women couldn't paint the way men could as if it was a biological thing and That in any case men often had families to support so they should get preferential treatment Many galleries had unspoken quotas for women I don't love to tell the story of showing her work to one New York dealer and being told G Joe if only you were French and male and dead According to the painter Jane Freiliger the critic Clement Greenberg advised another dealer Not to take any women at all because they just get pregnant and to an extent Mitchell internalized such attitudes. I thought I had it easier she once said Because I never even thought that I could be in the major competition being female and Yet she did compete She was fiercely ambitious She reasoned that if things were really tough for women then women had to be really tough Women artists who complained were winers and crybabies in Joan Mitchell's book Her own response to the situation was to become one of the boys to drink swear Have affairs and paint big paintings with the best of them to run with the pack So here we see her then at the scene of some of that action the cedar tavern And I have one quick cedar tavern story for you because I think that it epitomizes her mode of operation So one evening she was at the cedar. She was drinking at the bar When up comes the painter Landis Lewitton He was 33 years older than Joan a painter who was deeply respected for his knowledge of the craft of painting So he comes up Behind her then and he reaches around and cups one of her breasts in his hand Without missing a beat Joan swings her arm down and hooks Lewitton between the legs The place froze So why did she not make common cause with other women? Well, that seemed pointless Because as her friend the painter Miriam Shapiro said speaking of the same period Women didn't really respect each other. I Don't think that another woman at that time really cared about my opinion of her work said Shapiro We talked about our love lives shared each other's romances But I can assure you we never came together over painting So here then we see Joan Mitchell Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hardigan at the opening of one of Frankenthaler's exhibitions three of them Hardigan and Mitchell in particular saw a lot of each other and there were a lot of good times between them But there was also competition and backbiting Hardigan said that Mitchell had talent and Virtuosity but lacked the real thing Mitchell dismissed Frankenthaler whose work involved pouring thinned pigment on raw canvas as That tampon painter beginning in 1955 Joan Mitchell spent long periods in France and in 1959 she moved to Paris Why move to Paris when New York and all it represented were so important to her Well because she had fallen in love with the French Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopel who lived in Paris So Riopel is not widely known in the United States But in Canada he is considered the leading 20th century modernist and his name is a household word so here then we see the two of them in those early years and We also see two of their works on the top is Mitchell's canvas to the harbour master and Below is Riopel's titled landing so these two they were very mutually supportive, and I think they were mutually influential as well Mitchell was inspired by Riopel's work to activate her often empty edges for example Riopel was inspired by Mitchell's to take greater risks to experiment with brushstrokes as form and At times to make work that was almost lyrical After she settled in France Mitchell's palette changed She began using many deep greens cerulean blues and pinks and corals Her work retains its New York swagger, but also partakes of European pastoralism The work is sometimes panoramic as In the six by ten foot Grand Carrier, which is today in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art And even more than in earlier works There's a highly disruptive syntax here that makes it impossible to process the work in a rational way Mitchell's paint is swiped Dripped dry brushed Slathered applied with many kinds of brushes Rubbed on with fingers or rags. You can see what probably fingers right here And sometimes even stuck on like a wad of gamma There are lines like live wires appear for example and As here these patches that are like fine mist And yet despite all this incident and variety The paintings are always carefully structured You know the stereotype of the abstract expressionist painter of course is that she's simply you know Flunger feelings on the canvas Yes, Joan Mitchell did paint in the physical whole body manner of the athlete She once was and yes, she did take advantage of accident But she always worked from a mental image from a careful plan For her picture whose evolution she would stop and ponder from the opposite end of her studio After every few strokes She would apply her paint often with great energy And yet overall she was a slow painter I Stop Look and listen at railroad tracks. She said I Really want to be accurate for that kind of accuracy. She looked to among others Bach Whose music she played obsessively in the early 60s Like Bach she was seeking something abstract Yet emotionally precise 1962 also saw the emergence of pop art a movement for which Mitchell had little but scorn In her paintings of the early 60s, it's almost as if the embattled Mitchell was saying Take that pop art. Take that. This is what real painting looks like in 1967 she purchased the property in Vitaire Which was a house as I said overlooking the Sen it included the big house up on the hill But also a smaller house on the road below where the Impressionist Claude Monet Had lived between 1878 and 1881 Mitchell often had an ecstatic response to nature and Nowhere is this more evident Then in work like my landscape to when other works from this period late 60s early 70s So my landscape to then being a kind of image poem in which water is paint and paint is water and Hills and fields laps into lines and shapes Colors and light and then reassert themselves as landscape experienced at a moment of intense and unnameable Revelation her new house had a large garden Where she grew vegetables and flowers especially sunflowers which she loved and intensely felt Sunflower feelings now became one of her favorite subjects Whether young or mature Sprouting or dying Sunflowers often brought her a sensation of psychic merging. I Become the sunflower the lake the tree she said I no longer exist In the early 50s She had addressed and tried to overcome such feelings through psychoanalysis Now she embraced them and used them in her art blue Plays an important role in Mitchell's work of the 1970s partly because of the weather and light in the valley of the Sun So her house then near the river Sometimes she said there were these moments when she would experience magical late in the day At times when everything seemed to turn blue But her blues were not only about her feelings for the sin They were also about the other bodies of water. She knew and loved especially Lake Michigan and in fact she claimed that every painting she ever did began with the Lake Michigan of her Chicago childhood Like idyllic memory painting for Joan Mitchell collapsed time and space and escaped terminations sadness and death Moreover painting was the place where she confronted and dealt with the circumstances of her life When Riopelle left her after 24 years together she painted la vie en rose a Four-panel painting that's approximately nine and a half feet high by 22 feet wide and is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum Rose had been Riopelle's nickname for Mitchell and of course the title refers to to Edith Piaf's signature song Mitchell's la vie en rose is a work of passion but also restraint It's tender and bleak Animated and empty Similarly after Mitchell was diagnosed and treated for cancer of the jaw in 1985 She turned still in a state of despair to painting Among other works she did faded air one so a painting that seems in precarious balance In which that that spiky scrawl of pigment on the left Pitches diagonally toward that rising tower of scribbles on the right The painting's emotional trigger she told a friend Had been quote the tragic and beautiful sunflowers dying in autumn and The fall cool sun that cold yellow Superb in this painting. She also uses we see right here cobalt green Which is an unusual Semi-transparent bluish green verging on gray That became one of her fetish colors around this time and a very unhappy one said the artist Moreover faded air one takes inspiration from box coral cantata number 78 Specifically from its ascending aria Throughout her career Mitchell Looked and learned from everyone and she did a lot of savvy borrowing Cezanne Matisse and Van Gogh were her gods So here then is an example particularly direct example of That relationship with Van Gogh's this is a kind of homage to Van Gogh an artist to whom she felt deeply indebted For the ways in which she addressed color space and mark making and With whom she felt a deep kinship, you know for both artists Painting was a way to make life bearable By now Mitchell had been forging ahead for three decades Saddled all the while with the somewhat disparaging label Second-generation abstract expressionist While staying true to the path she had set in her fifties She had continued to make her own rules and her art had continued to evolve For Mitchell painting was far from exhausted She was one of those artists who doesn't fit easily into a standard narrative She herself said the moment something is clarified. It is dead over the years She had often referred to herself as a lady painter So this was a phrase that she took from the fact that back in Chicago in the 20s and 30s Her mother had often been referred to as a lady poet and To give you an example then of how Mitchell Joan Mitchell used the phrase So 1988 she was in San Francisco for the opening of her traveling retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art At this point she was 63 years old her health was fragile Because of her cancer of the jaw she had many problems with her gum and her teeth She'd had one hip replacement. She needed another Her arthritis was getting worse and she wore thick yellowish magnifying lens glasses So here she is walking through the installation of her show at the museum and She doesn't like anything She doesn't like the way the museum is laid out She doesn't like the installation She doesn't like the other exhibitions in the museum And she doesn't even like her own work So she starts apologizing to the curators for the ways in with which her paintings fall short and Then suddenly with a sweep of her arm and a shift of her tone. She says Not bad for a lady painter She kind of tosses her hair. I Think everything is magnificent And then it's a kind of mock aside I'm trying to act like a male painter, you know where you say that everything you do is magnificent So I think then that this phrase lady painter Ironic defiant Aggrieved but not whiny Says a lot about who Joan Mitchell was one of Mitchell's last paintings Completed shortly before her death from lung cancer in 1992 is the nine by 12 foot mere sea a painting whose bold strokes Vivid colors and vast space make the viewer feel small How Mitchell could do such a painting when she was dying of cancer remains a mystery So in mercy then we see five forceful Calligraphic shapes one of them Down here white on white Which she uses as shorthand for her lifelong adoration of painting The lake is here The sunflower the tree The blue and the orange The white Van Gogh Cezanne Matisse and the great abstract expressionist mark fear fury Aloneness and love Thank you, I would be happy to answer any questions Yes Because she wasn't ready circumstances weren't right and yet she was always very sad not to have And many many is of course we're working the quotes come from many of them came from her letters, which People like Barney Ross said and also Close friendships kept all their lives and I was lucky enough No Why John Mitchell well John Mitchell first of all because I think she's an extraordinary artist and I So admire her work also There has never been a biography of John Mitchell or when I started really a full biography of any of the female abstract expressionists and I also realized that people who had known her well were getting on And many people I interviewed for this book were in their late 70s early 80s Many of them have now passed on so I was lucky to be able to speak with them When they were they were still able to tell their stories and I visited with some remarkable people and Got some remarkable insights from them Yes Okay, did she expect people to understand Thinking yes in terms of the synesthesia No, she didn't I mean she was always quite The personal meaning of her work to her that was one thing and and that was something private She wasn't going to talk about it. She didn't expect people to get it people could Interpret her paintings as they like and find in them something that they meant to Yes So why I think that term second generation implies second rate, implies that someone came along and invented abstract expressionism and that she was a follower. Her own point of view about that was that everyone was there at the same time exploring and whether old or young, the artists were all held in it together. And in fact I think even the term abstract expressionism sort of fits at the end of her life but she was doing something that went beyond just that. She used that as a kind of starting point and kept going. I love your topic. You need to cry. You raise your heart again. You do raise your heart again now. You need to know more about her. Yeah, she was very good at the same thing. Yes. Since her work involved a new stage, she kept going with different explorations to figure out your term that would fit more to the end of her production. How long she worked? Well, when she got to her house or... Is there another term within the abstract expressionism that you would say? What would I call her last word? You've not answered any questions. I don't have a term as such. As I said, she took inspiration from many, many artists and kept evolving. So I think it was definitely a European cast to her work at the end. It was more miracle than the work of many abstract expressionists. She talked about wanting to forgive her own ego as she painted. So that's something that seems quite different from the idea of putting a cell on canvas. She would say that the work was not really about her. It was about the landscape. And I don't know what she called us except the art of environmental. Thank you all for coming here. Thank you.