Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter

Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter

â€œGee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead.â€ â€”New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950s

She was a steel heiress from the Midwestâ€”Chicago and Lake Forest (her grandfather built Chicagoâ€™s bridges and worked for Andrew Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American Revolutionâ€”Anglo-Saxon, Republican, Episcopalian.

She was tough, disciplined, courageous, dazzling, and went up against the masculine art world at its most entrenched, made her way in it, and disproved their notion that women couldnâ€™t paint.

Joan Mitchell is the first full-scale biography of the abstract expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s, â€™60s, and â€™70s; a portrait of an outrageous artist and her struggling artist world, painters making their way in the second part of Americaâ€™s twentieth century.

As a young girl she was a champion figure skater, and though she lacked balance and coordination, accomplished one athletic triumph after another, until giving up competitive skating to become a painter.

Mitchell saw people and things in color; color and emotion were the same to her. She said, â€œI use the past to make my pic[tures] and I want all of it and even you and me in candlelight on the train and every â€˜loverâ€™ Iâ€™ve ever hadâ€”every friendâ€”nothing closed out. Itâ€™s all part of me and I want to confront it and sleep with itâ€”the dreamsâ€”and paint it.â€

Her work had an unerring sense of formal rectitude, daring, and discipline, as well as delicacy, grace, and awkwardness.

Mitchell exuded a young, smoky, tough glamour and was thought of as â€œsexy as hell.â€

Albers writes about how Mitchell married her girlhood pal, Barnet Rosset, Jr.â€”scion of a financier who was head of Chicagoâ€™s Metropolitan Trust and partner of Jimmy Roosevelt. Rosset went on to buy Grove Press in 1951, at Mitchellâ€™s urging, and to publish Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, et al., making Grove into the great avant-garde publishing house of its time.

Mitchellâ€™s life was messy and reckless: in New York and East Hampton carousing with de Kooning, Frank Oâ€™Hara, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, and others; going to clambakes, cocktail parties, softball gamesâ€”and living an entirely different existence in Paris and VÃ©theuil.

Mitchellâ€™s inner life embraced a world beyond her own craft, especially literature . . . her compositions were informed by imagined landscapes or feelings about places.

In Joan Mitchell, Patricia Albers brilliantly reconstructs the painterâ€™s large and impassioned life: her growing prominence as an artist; her marriage and affairs; her friendships with poets and painters; her extraordinary work.

Joan Mitchell re-creates the times, the people, and her worlds from the 1920s through the 1990s and brings it all spectacularly to life.
Country USA
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2011-05-03
UnitCount 1
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9780375414374

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2011-05-03
UnitCount	1
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9780375414374

Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter

You might also like...