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Joan Mitchell: The Expatriate Artist Comes Home
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14184 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1988 |
2,498 Words |
| Author
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Louise Sheldon
Louise Sheldon is a free-lance writer on the arts living in
Washington, D.C. A former associate editor of Smithsonian and
an assistant editor of Life, she has written on various
aspects of Russian culture. |
Joan Mitchell has earned an international reputation as one of the strongest, most talented and independent American contemporary artists. Color and light radiate from her paintings, recording images long retained and nurtured in her mind. Living in France since 1959, she is an Abstract Expressionist of the younger generation that emerged in the early 1950s. Today, even her most recent works continue to convey the power, vibrancy, and sureness of the postwar New York School.
Strong Individualist
A strong individualist in a profession that destroys the weak, Mitchell is unconcerned with the passing styles that have rocked the American art scene. She is guided by her tenacious belief in herself. Over four decades, her painting has evolved but has never changed course. The excitement generated by this first retrospective exhibition of fifty-four large-scale oil paintings by this expatriate yet very American artist is long overdue.
Her sources of inspiration are deeply rooted in her childhood. Born in Chicago in 1926, she was unusually well versed in literature at an early age, as her mother, Marion Strobel, was a lyric poet and coeditor of Poetry magazine. Their home was frequented by eminent literati such as T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, and Dylan Thomas. Throughout her life, she has associated with poets. Many of her paintings have been inspired by the works of English and French poets--Samuel Beckett, Jacques Dupin, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery.
Mitchell began painting when she was ten. An outstanding art student, she studies first at Smith College and then at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After she completed her studies, a traveling fellowship brought her to New York.
But it was Chicago, rather than New York, that had lasting meaning for Mitchell. In her later work, one finds many references--the lake, fields of wheat, the paintings in the Art Institute, the bridges designed by her grandfather. A stunning early work, Cross Section of a Bridge, based on her grandparent's engineering drawings, was painted in 1951 when she was twenty-five. She had already turned from realism to abstraction. Its organic shapes and crisp broken lines reveal the influence of Arshile Gorky, a pivotal artist in the transition between European Surrealism and American abstract painting. But Mitchell's color is more vibrant, her directional lines broader and more converging than Gorky's. The painting's impact is smashing;
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