JOAN MITCHELL

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THIS AUTUMN, TO CELEBRATE THE PICTORIAL GENIUS OF THE AMERICAN-BORN ARTIST, PARIS’S FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON HAS PUT HER IN DIALOGUE WITH THE IMPRESSIONIST MASTER CLAUDE MONET.

In April 1967, Joan Mitchell was shown a property listing for a “magnificent residence,” La Tour, in Vétheuil in the Val-d’oise: located on Avenue Claude-monet, it enjoyed a “spectacular view” of the River Seine. The timing was fortuitous, since the American painter, who had lived in Paris since 1959, and her partner Jean-paul Riopelle were looking for a second home not too far from the capital. A wealthy heiress since 1966, Mitchell had the funds to purchase and run the property, which came with a hectare of land. At first, in 1967 and 1968, she went there at weekends and on holidays, welcoming her friends, some of whom were broke. Before 1968, she made no works on canvas at La Tour, instead using paper, a flexible, malleable and easy to transport medium that allowed her to paint outdoors, dressed in just a swimsuit and accompanied by her dogs. Working directly from life in this way was part of a “return to nature”

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that had begun a few years earlier in her work and which challenged several taboos, starting with that of inward-looking, self- sufficient, “self- reflexive,” ex nihilo American Abstract Expressionism. What’s more, the village where La Tour was located was closely connected to Impressionism, Claude Monet having lived there between 1878 and 1881 – La Tour overlooks, not to say overshadows, the master’s humble home. Although Mitchell never claimed the slightest Impressionist lineage and was always wary of making simplistic connections, the symbolism is strong, especially since in Vétheuil she experienced a range of perceptions and sensations similar to those Monet had experienced eight decades earlier. In her own way, she responded to exactly the same variations of light reverberating on this bend of the Seine, where the river flows between the chalk plateau of the Vexin ( on the right bank) and the alluvial plain of Moisson (on the left).

In Vétheuil, Mitchell freed herself from the dogmas and taboos of an Abstract Expressionism that was losing momentum, weakened by the rise of Pop art and minimalism, not to mention conceptualism. Not at all keen on being associated with a second generation of phallocentric action-painting artists, Mitchell found the necessary distance in the Val-d’oise to stop worrying about games of affiliation, classification and categorization, as well as peace from all the noise of Paris, which at that point was exacerbated by the events of May 1968, which she considered “dreadful.”

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Cut off from the world, both politically and artistically, she could reinvent her own universe, forgetting rules, prejudices and the sense of history imposed by Modernist critics, blurring the lines and accepting the French roots she had put down, however conflictual she may have found them, not to mention consolidating her link to that “awful thing called nature.” This is how Mitchell spent the last third of the 1960s, at a time when many of her peers, from Barnett Newman to Clyfford Still, were seeking a tabula rasa that would emancipate them from the Old World and any allegiance to exogenous factors. With a hint of provocation, Martha Jackson’s prestigious New York gallery, which exhibited Mitchell for the first time in 1968, emphasised this “French connection” in its blurb: “From France, Joan Mitchell is sending 14 new paintings ... The entire series was painted on the banks of the Seine, a site made famous by Claude Monet, who lived and worked nearby.”

Searching for a non-negotiable freedom, Mitchell had already sought distance from the New York school in the 1950s, even though she knew how to belong to it too. As Irving Sandler wrote in Artnews, in 1957, “Joan Mitchell is a painter who hates aesthetic labels,” one who “finds particularly distasteful moral insinuations concerning ‘good’