Joan Mitchellby Curt Barnes... The eye can't rest too lovingly on any one stroke, no matter how deft or luminously colored, but is rushed past to the next, and the next, so that we aren't conscious of strokes or paint at all, finally, but only of speed, energy... |
 © Joan Mitchell |
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The Whitney Museum has distinguished itself with a beautifully installed retrospective of the work of Joan Mitchell, a second-generation abstract expressionist who established herself in New York before emigrating to France in the late 50's. Aroused by the show, the print media have recently been full of tributes to this artist, and it seems that 10 years after her death she is finally getting her due. I had long admired the Museum of Modern Art's representative canvas, Ladybug, from 1957, without stopping to think how few other paintings I had seen by Mitchell, particularly from that era. The upside of that neglect is that the current show presents a large number of substantive paintings that we have not become tired of seeing many times over, either in reproduction or in person. And they are indeed dazzling, from early to late. |
| No doubt the popular vote would go to the late works painted in France, including polyptichs up to twenty feet long that recall the rich color interminglings of Monet and Bonnard. Field for Two, a smaller work from 1973, combines shimmering pastels with strong tonal contrasts a la Bonnard. The book on Mitchell is that she fused a lyrical, New York School gesturalism with a French Impressionist's palette, and it's no coincidence that many of the works suggest landscapes without depicting any literal trees or hills. These later paintings are full of characteristic contradictions that energize the spaces and create pulsations of life: dense areas of pure hue offset by subtly modulated browns and grays, tightly packed quadrants playing against stretches of vaporous pastels, impastoed areas juxtaposed with turbulent brushwork. Mitchell's later years alternated between a chromatic sumptuousness and virtuoso turns that often look (misleadingly) as if they were painted in 15 minutes, and she never seems to have stopped expanding her compass or to have relinquished her reputation as an American sauvage. |
| But it is the early works here that are really a revelation. The paintings from her New York period are said to have evolved under the influence of deKooning and the other macho brushmen, and these works are often hurried past to get to the ³mature² Mitchell. But the show makes clear that from the mid-50's Mitchell was her own, ahem, person, doing fully achieved work like no one else. And in terms of quality the Modern's Ladybug--on view here--was no fluke: its complex matrix of varicolored brushstrokes, obviously and daringly improvisational, explode outward, daring the eye to hold them in a synthesis. Evenings on Seventy-third Street , painted 1956-57, and Untitled, 1957, succeed almost equally well. With these matrices of linear brushwork Mitchell achieves, time and again, a genuine alchemy, converting the most direct of means to the most engaging of visual mysteries. On a white ground (a most banal and familiar point of departure for a painter, after all) are slashed strokes, paint spatters, blobs with an irregularity of interval and shape that challenge easy coherence. |
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| . . . most dynamic of
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| Mitchell was obviously attacking the canvas without a formal plan, improvising in the moment, each stroke a reaction to the ones that came before. The result of these additions is a kind of visual house of cards, in a sense, forming the most precarious but also most dynamic of structures. The eye can't rest too lovingly on any one stroke, no matter how deft or luminously colored, but is rushed past to the next, and the next, so that we aren't conscious of strokes or paint at all, finally, but only of speed, energy. Then if we step back to take in the macrocosm, and a unique overall structure, we sense that matter has become energy only to suggest matter on another level. But then we're again brought into the mix again for another visceral trip on the roller coaster. And we begin to notice something else: the white ground begins to be discernible as definite, positive shapes that acquire energy of their own and flip forward in space. Here again Mitchell doesn't allow them to give the reassurance of predictable intervals but plays catch-me-if-you-can with the eye. We finally become aware of an overall energy but can't focus on its source, can't deconstruct it. For the antecedents of this particular alchemy we may look in vain at Mitchell's immediate New York School predecessors. In my experience only Mondrian's painterly works, his abstractions of trees from 1911-12, suggest the organic gridwork of these early Mitchells. But Mondrian placed his shapes with great deliberation and care; Mitchell's pace seems breathtaking, her attitude brash and bold. And here Mondrian's planarity has become an elastic, muscular ectoplasm, often barely contained by the edges of the canvas. |
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Perhaps because any state implicitly implies its opposite, Mitchell may have turned from her dazzling matrix of brushstrokes and their seeming defiance of materiality to compositions featuring great, opaque blobs of dark color, almost palpable in their density and weight. (In addition to those at the Whitney, Untitled, 1964, is on view at Cheim & Read.) There is a kind of perversity and grittiness in this technique and its color choices, as though she¹s using spit and mud and offal and making it shimmer and dance. With her later pallette, when huge strokes of pure cadmium orange play across several feet of canvas, this grittiness seems to be absent, and I, for one, miss it. |
| In the galleries of earlier work are several small paintings, some of them self-assured masterpieces accomplished with the seeming ease of a master violinist tossing off Paganini encores. Untitled, 1960, from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Untitled, 1958, from the estate of the artist, are cases in point. After physically dominating her large canvases Mitchell must have found these smaller sizes manageable indeed.In the galleries of earlier work are several small paintings, some of them self-assured masterpieces accomplished with the seeming ease of a master violinist tossing off Paganini encores. Untitled, 1960, from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Untitled, 1958, from the estate of the artist, are cases in point. After physically dominating her large canvases Mitchell must have found these smaller sizes manageable indeed. |
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| One caveat: there are 60 canvases here, and it 's predictable that not all are winners. In spite of the winnowing process of a retrospective, some of these entrants are merely pleasant. But the best are altogether miraculous, records of an artist¹s encounter with a bare canvas in which all the forces of will and chance worked together. These are paintings of phenomenal poise, of continuing vitality and mystery, among the best of the past century. -- Curt Barnes |
| The Paintings of Joan Mitchell was at the Whitney Museum. Three shows of Mitchell's work ran concurrently at New York galleries: Tibor de Nagy, Lennon/Weinberg and Cheim and Read. |
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