Eighty pieces in show
SFMOMA exhibition emphasizes painter’s work, not personal life
a semblance of how she felt in particular places, to suggest, for instance, a weathered cypress tree against an ocher wall (in her massive “Girolata Triptych”) or the curving river Seine (“Sans Neige”) through a brash use of color, scale and texture. Mitchell admitted she could never mirror nature, nor was that her ambition.
“My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan or fields, or water. It’s more like a poem, you know?” she can be heard saying in SFMOMA’s recorded audio tour of the exhibition.
“People are so comfortable with French impressionism, and those paintings are not realistic landscapes either,” noted Roberts. “They’re also aiming at capturing an essence of season or time or light. Mitchell just lets go of those representational aspects even more.”
Roberts recalled her initial inspiration for the Mitchell retrospective as an encounter with an untitled 1961 painting about eight years ago at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The canvas, now on view in San Francisco, swells with color, deep scrawls erupting from its center.
“It stopped me in my tracks,” said Roberts. “The color surprised me
most. It kind of pushes the edge of ugly, flooded with lavender and pink and a scatological brown. It’s very large at 118 by 78 inches, and I had not seen anything of that scale with such a combination of freedom, ambition and risk-taking with the color. It’s a very brave painting.”
What came across most about Mitchell over the course of studying her work was “the complexity of her personality,” Roberts continued.
“She was lots of different people in a lot of ways. She was very mercurial, and the archives make clear how complicated a person she was. We wanted to really make a point in the exhibition and catalog of not flattening that out, of letting her be that complicated.”
When curators Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel began the process of assembling an exhibition as capacious as “Joan Mitchell,” the 80-work survey of the revered abstract painter’s work that opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Saturday, Sept. 4, they were mindful from the outset of their research that art historical scholarship has all too often defined a female artist by the highs and lows she’s experienced outside the studio — by her loves and losses, family drama and breakdowns — despite the scope of her artistic achievements.
“Women artists’ lives are often sensationalized and made into a gossipy soap opera,” rather than being viewed as secondary to the quality of the work itself, said Roberts, SFMOMA’s head curator of painting and sculpture.
While Mitchell’s life (1925-92) was rife with fascinating details — a privileged Chicago girlhood steeped in poetry and 19th century art; national competition as a young ice skater; numerous turbulent relationships with fellow artists, including Samuel Beckett — Mitchell herself never cared for labels about her gender or lifestyle. She chafed at being associated with the abstract expressionists, despite being the rare female artist who managed to succeed in New York’s male-dominated 1950s art circles.
Throughout the four decades she spent in France after decamping there in 1959, Mitchell made her most distinctive abstract paintings at home in the village of Vétheuil near Monet’s Giverny gardens. She drew largely on landscape and memory, and kept her love of painting itself central.
Roberts and Siegel, a senior curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art (where “Joan Mitchell” travels in March), were intent for the SFMOMA exhibition on “putting the work first,” said Roberts, “to convey a more complex portrait of her as an artist and a person” than had been possible in Mitchell’s lifetime. (Mitchell died of lung cancer at age 66.)
Roberts was surprised, and motivated, by the realization that “a full scholarly project had never been done on Mitchell,” in part because the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective in 2002 was organized while the Mitchell estate was still being settled.
Siegel and Roberts spent three years studying Mitchell’s remarkable oeuvre of bold, inventively colored, immersive canvases (some as tall as 10 feet), which were produced over five decades in two continents. The resulting exhibition — and lavishly illustrated 374-page catalog — presents a compelling reconsideration of Mitchell’s career and her significance to postwar painting on both sides of the Atlantic.
SFMOMA’s presentation includes several from the museum’s own holdings, including her stunning multi-panel 1989 painting “Bracket” from the museum’s Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, and the circa 1970 “Sans Neige,” which was restored after being hidden in storage in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art for 40 years.
“We saw hundreds of her paintings and stopped counting at around 500,” said Roberts, adding that they also interviewed 100 people who knew the artist. “What we recognized early on was that the level of commitment to painting was present from a very early age. Art was always at the center of her life. Where we chose to bring in the biography is because it shows up in the work.”
On the canvases are Mitchell’s emotional responses to her environments, the captivating vistas she saw from her windows — whether across Lake Michigan, New York’s East Village, Paris or Vétheuil. The landscapes aren’t representational, instead Mitchell was striving to convey