Harbor December (1956) To the Harborbormaster (1957)
The Baltimore Museum of Art had to wait two, long, pandemic-years to open its Joan Mitchell retrospective. But finally, Harbor December and To the Harbormaster’s jittery wine-dark reds and cold-water greens are lapping the walls in Gallery 1, while the joyously mercurial La Vie en Rose and the exuberant Salut Tom warm the walls deeper in the exhibition.
Mitchell was born to old-school wealth in watery, windy Chicago in 1925, spent some early obligatory years on the East Coast, and was a contemporary of the abstract expressionists who broke painting’s rules and assured the triumph of the New York School. But Mitchell was of that scene, not in it. Or in it but not of it. She began traveling to Paris starting in the mid-fifties, after successfully showing with the East Village heavy hitters at the Ninth Street Show, and ultimately bought a property in Vétheuil, northwest of Paris, where she, her paints, and her army of German shepherds lived until her death in 1992. Her paintings are a dynamic blend of Abstract Expressionism’ hardscrabble muscularity and France’s vibrant Post-Impressionist affair with life and color.
As a synesthete, color was the lens through which Mitchell felt and saw the world. She was also an athlete, and her physical engagement with her canvases is evident. The intense verve of her work surprises over and over, and to walk through the galleries at BMA is to be awestruck. Never mind the violent darkness of some of them, nor what you may know about her prickly personality, her turbulent relationships, her fraught romance with scotch. Though she could be, at times, angry and bitter, her expressions in paint, even of her darker or more confused feelings, are rife with her urgent love of life.
With many of the pieces on loan from private collections, and so rarely seen in public, the chronologically arranged show presents some small early pieces of figurative work along with photos, books of poetry by friends, and a looped video interview with the painter in her Vétheuil studio. There’s also a supplemental soundscape of letters, music, and poetry guiding the viewer through the galleries. The listener is privy to a personal tour of Mitchell’s thoughts and inspirations, from her early pieces that experiment with cubist obfuscation on through the creation of her masterworks and late paintings, including an homage to one of Van Gogh’s final paintings, Wheat Fields with Crows. Mitchell’s painting, an eight-foot-long diptych of wind-whipped evergreen and gold blowing across a mostly white ground is slyly titled No Birds. No omens, no doom, just the dark swirling wheat beneath a weather-heavy sky interspersed with… Wait. Is that pink!? Is the weather breaking? La Vie en Rose, indeed.
No Birds (1987)
Speaking of La Vie, if you’re lucky enough to live in New York City, that painting is usually on display at the Metropolitan Museum in their Modern and Contemporary Art wing. Ironically, (or perhaps not), this quintessential Joan Mitchell work came out of a particularly dark and artistically dry period in the mid-1970s, as did the absolutely sunny Salut Tom. Both pieces are among her largest, each one a quadriptych, with the four panels stretching together to a stunning twenty-two and twenty-six feet, respectively, and reaching upward of nine feet in height. Patricia Albers, in her 2011 biography of Mitchell, Lady Painter, calls La Vie’s “four movements…a symphony…Joan’s tour de force emotional reckoning” of her long, turbulent relationship with fellow artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, which finally imploded when he and Mitchell’s young protégé, Hollis Jeffcoat, became a couple and ran off together. While the painting is stunning on its own, knowing the backstory makes the moody intensity of the work even more potent.
La Vie en Rose (1979) Salut Tom (1978)
The same could be said for Salut Tom. Not only is the painting also part of this period of loss and despondency, it’s a post-mortem homage to Mitchell’s great friend Tom Hess. Hess was the longtime editor of Artnews and, as such, championed Mitchell and her contemporaries. His death, at 58 from a heart attack, was a devastating shock. Yet Mitchell’s luminous yellows interspersed with airy puffs of white and sky blue are a celebration rather than a dirge.
Many print reproductions don’t do Mitchell’s work with color justice. But the installation images on BMA’s website give a taste of the sheer WOW of the show. It’s on display in Baltimore until August 14 and will travel to the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris from there.
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Author: Sharon Preiss
