Joan Mitchell Retrospective

"Music, poems, landscape, and dogs make me want to paint. And painting is what allows me to survive. " - Joan Mitchell.

This exhibition was a great opportunity to acquaint myself with the works of Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), whom I previously knew very little about. This retrospective situated in the lower ground floor space of the ark-like Fondation Louis Vuitton served as a useful appetiser to get to know Mitchell's oeuvre before going on to the main course of the Monet Mitchell exhibition which opens up a dialogue between her paintings and those of the later paintings of Monet on the upper floors of the Fondation which featured in my last post. This retrospective takes a chronological look at Mitchell's career from the first abstractions painted in 1950s New York City, to paintings produced in the period in which she spent travelling back and forth between France and the United States in the 1960s, as well as the very large paintings of the 1970s when she was based in Vétheuil on an estate, a part of which coincidentally included a gardener's cottage which was Monet's former home. I was most interested to learn about the period from 1949 onwards when Mitchell moved to New York and became part of the circle of the Abstract Expressionists which included legendary names like Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.  In this circle Mitchell became one of the few women to win recognition for their art in that particular scene. Mitchell took part in the landmark Ninth Street Show of 1951, organised by Leo Castelli, in which none of the artworks sold, but was pivotal in introducing the art of the Abstract Expressionists to the world. The mood and tone of Mitchell's art was strongly influenced by her "feelings", and she likened these "feelings" to a form of poetry. Mitchell mixed with writers and poets and personal reflections, memories and her intuitive feelings all informed her work. Unlike Monet, Mitchell did not work from direct observation in her landscape paintings, they are all based on memories. Mitchell told art critic Irving Sandler, "I carry my landscapes around with me." Mitchell had said that "she admired the late, but not early Monet," and I found the opposite in my opinion to be true of her work. I was particularly attracted to Mitchell's early and mid-career paintings, the later works not so much. The textures, mark-making and use of colour were so complex and captivating at times in the early works. Pieces of this period were more considered and nuanced, whereas the later works although energetic and dynamic, were done on a larger scale using a broader brush, with unmixed paint straight from the tube. They just appear to be less sophisticated and a little too repetitive in their execution to my eyes. This said though, as a collection in this space the whole of Mitchell's oeuvre (especially the earlier pieces) made for a particularly powerful and moving statement and body of work.

Joan Mitchell Retrospective

until 27th February

Fondation Louis Vuitton

8 Av. du Mahatma Gandhi, 

75116 Paris, 

France