Joan Mitchell at SFMOMA
Fearless, Glorious Self Expression
A Joan Mitchell retrospective featuring over 80 of the artist’s works opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in San Francisco on September 4. The show runs through January 17, 2022, and explores the life and career of one of the young leaders of the Abstract Expressionism movement.
Joan Mitchell was born in 1925 in Chicago, Illinois, and made a name for herself in the 1950s male-dominated art world of New York City. Her career spanned from her first solo exhibition in New York in 1952 to her death in France in 1992. She spent nearly four decades in France. Her work includes oil paintings, prints, and drawings, and she mostly remained faithful to her unique signature gestural abstraction style for most of her life. Her images draw on landscape, memory, poetry, and music, seeking to unify physical experience with the psychological and emotional. She was also visibly inspired by different places: paintings like The Bridge (1956) and Evenings on 73rd Street (1957) are responses to the urban environment of New York City, and the rural French landscape can be perceived in works such as South (1989). Paintings like Ode to Joy (A Poem by Frank O’Hara) (1970–71) and La Vie en Rose (1979) also reflect her passion for different art forms such as music and poetry. Her most outstanding works from various points in her career will be in the show, along with rarely-seen earlier paintings that established her career. Visitors will also have the opportunity to view sketchbooks, drawings, letters, and photographs, allowing the opportunity to examine this artist’s complex life and career.
Joan Mitchell, The Bridge, 1956; Fredriksen Family Art Collection; © Estate of Joan Mitchell; photo: Kris Graves
The exhibition is co-organized by SFMOMA and the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and co-curated by Sarah Roberts, Andrew W. Mellon Curator, and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, and Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Programming & Research Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University. Siegel commented on Mitchell’s works, stating that: “Across her life, Mitchell experimented with how painting could embody physical experience and also the complexity of the inner self. Ultimately, she sought to get beyond the boundaries of that self to connect with the world: a poem, passage of music, a dog—even a tree. Her fearlessness in making both grand and small gestures resulted in works that inspire us to connect to our feelings and bodies, to nature and to other beings… She challenges our ideas about great art. Mitchell was not simply ‘making it’ in an environment created and occupied by men, she was actively remaking painting and its possibilities. The exhibition and the book reconsider the art of the postwar era and the extended impact of feminism’s burgeoning possibilities in the 1970s and ‘80s—thinking through what it means to live a life with art at its center.” Roberts has stated: “Mitchell’s glorious paintings radiate with the vitality, feeling and sweeping color we usually experience only in the natural world. On a grand scale, she contended with and remade the possibilities of abstraction, personal expression and landscape. After so many months of restriction due to the pandemic and the limitations of art online, Mitchell’s subtle surfaces and moving color will offer visitors a transporting visual experience and remind us of the irreplaceable and overwhelming power of seeing art in person.”
After its presentation in San Francisco, Joan Mitchell will be on view at the BMA from March 6 through August 14, 2022. A version of the exhibition will then open at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris in fall 2022. In addition, SFMOMA’s presentation will include ten paintings not traveling to other venues. This retrospective brings together all the different works that defined the artist’s career, painting a clear picture of who she was and her enormous impact on the art world.
