I’m not sure when I realized that Joan Mitchell was my favorite abstract painter, but I do know it was a gradual process. Partly that time-lag is due to the overwhelming critical attention paid to Mitchell’s male counterparts like de Kooning, Pollock and Rothko. But recognition of Mitchell’s achievement is growing, in part due to books like Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, but also due to the simple fact that great work will ultimately find its audience.
Looking at the paintings in Joan Mitchell, edited by Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel and published to accompany an exhibition co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I can’t help but lament the years when I wasn’t devoted to her work. Consider just four examples of her genius: the glorious explosions of purple and gold in “Two Pianos”; the undulating squiggles of orange and blue in “Ici”; the big bold blues of the triptych “Bonjour Julie”; and the fiery impact of black on white — or white on black in “Mooring.” If Van Gogh (a hero of Mitchell’s) had been an abstract expressionist, one feels these were directions he might have taken himself.
No doubt about it: Joan Mitchell would be worth buying if it simply contained these gorgeous reproductions of Mitchell’s paintings. However, the book also attempts to explain Mitchell’s overall project as an artist. In addition to the more scholarly essays by Roberts and Siegel, there are a number of short, innovative pieces. Composer Gisèle Barreau discusses Mitchell’s relationship to music (“the tones, shared and secret, magnetic wives, crashing loudly, wave after wave, without beginning or end''); Eileen Myles visits Mitchell’s Greenwich Village (“I admire the newel, the curling metal grip of the balustrade, the handrail leading up to the fancy ass door of the building”); Paul Auster traces the connections between a poem by Jacques Dupin and Mitchell’s painting La ligne due rupture (“La ligne de rupture” is a difficult poem. But Joan didn’t like smooth, easy things. She liked knotty things”).