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Her recurrent use of panel painting enabled her to control the composition of her paintings in which strident, overlapping colors create tension, while contributing to overall harmony. In Two Sunflowers (1980), and Cypress (1980), two works from the collection, the yellow seems to explode: it is the color of sunflower petals or the sun on a summer day. Several splinters of purple and black lines barely disturb the main color, structuring the space as though it were flowering. An economy of means gives Joan Mitchell’s work intense rhythm. |
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While Joan Mitchell took part in the abstract expressionist movement in the United States during the first half of the 1950s, the artist highlights the singularity of her work, which is characterised by the intensity of her palette, her constantly reconsidered search for colour and light, and her intimate bond with landscapes. 'I carry my landscape around with me,' she once declared. Inspired by her memories, the feelings of them, and by the work of great modern masters (Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, and Monet, among others), Mitchell also found inspiration and equivalences in music and poetry. |
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Her recurrent use of panel painting enabled her to control the composition of her paintings in which strident, overlapping colors create tension, while contributing to overall harmony. In Two Sunflowers (1980), and Cypress (1980), two works from the collection, the yellow seems to explode: it is the color of sunflower petals or the sun on a summer day. Several splinters of purple and black lines barely disturb the main color, structuring the space as though it were flowering. An economy of means gives Joan Mitchell's work intense rhythm. |
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While Joan Mitchell took part in the abstract expressionist movement in the United States during the first half of the 1950s, the artist highlights the singularity of her work, which is characterised by the intensity of her palette, her constantly reconsidered search for colour and light, and her intimate bond with landscapes. 'I carry my landscape around with me,' she once declared. Inspired by her memories, the feelings of them, and by the work of great modern masters (Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, and Monet, among others), Mitchell also found inspiration and equivalences in music and poetry. |
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Her recurrent use of panel painting enabled her to control the composition of her paintings in which strident, overlapping colors create tension, while contributing to overall harmony. No Room at the End (1977) is composed of two entirely painted panels; the greens and yellows on the left contrast with the blues on the right. |
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In three works displayed in the collection, River (1989), Beauvais (1986), and South (1989), colorful contours stand out against a white background that evokes both landscapes and trees. Paradoxically, Mitchell’s later work is one of unbridled vitality. |
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The composition of these diptychs is reminiscent of a poem with their stanzas and repetition. Even if the spectator finds themselves immersed in her paintings, she painted them to be viewed from a distance, and all at once. This painting entitled River is inspired by the Seine that flowed not far from her studio in Vétheuil, the village where Claude Monet used to paint around 1880. These two artists had many things in common: their constant observation of nature, the way they paid special attention to their use of colour and capturing light effects, the large scale dimensions of their artworks (when we think back to Monet's Water Lilies), paintings that pay little attention to horizons or perspective. |
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Her recurrent use of panel painting enabled her to control the composition of her paintings in which strident, overlapping colors create tension, while contributing to overall harmony. Tilleul (1978) is a close-up of a tree reveals a section of the trunk. Midnight blue and red lines evoke branches, while the white of the canvas is the white of light filtering through leaves. |
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At the pinnacle of her talent in the early 1980s, Mitchell explicitly reintroduced the landscape, as evidenced by the work presented here: Untitled (1979). Toward the end of her life, the abstract 'motifs' alternating light and colour showed a progressively freer touch. |
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In three works displayed in the collection, River (1989), Beauvais (1986), and South (1989), colorful contours stand out against a white background that evokes both landscapes and trees. Paradoxically, Mitchell’s later work is one of unbridled vitality. |
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Merci, which means 'thank you' in French, is one of the latest and most concise paintings in Mitchell’s body of work. To feel gratitude is to recognize one’s reliance upon things outside of oneself; for Mitchell it was a way of connecting with nature and the things she loved. She said, 'In one of his so many beautiful letters, [van Gogh] says he gives gratitude to the sunflower because it exists. And I give gratitude to trees because they exist, and that’s all my painting is about.' Merci's elevated passages of electric color have significant weight, yet attain lightness through the balance of other formal elements: of warm and cool colors, of color against white canvas, of vertical brushstrokes that follow the path of gravity and organic, knotted brushstrokes that float. The size and fluidity of the gestures indicate a physical rigor and sense of urgency; Mitchell was ill and knew she had little time left to paint. |
Dataset Card for "mitchell"
11 Joan Mitchell's work and descriptions (image-text pairs). Texts are from the Collection in the Foundation Louis Vuitton. Images are from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
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