Steidlville

This is the first comprehensive survey of Joan Mitchell’s works on paper. Mitchell called herself a “visual” painter, to distinguish her work from that survey of the Pop, Minimal and Conceptual painters of her own and younger generations. Drawing on remembered images of landscape that she “carried with her,” Mitchell was not content to make “pretty” abstractions but challenged herself and the viewer with paintings that sometimes could seem deliberately provocative, pushing the limits of her own sense of beauty. As a non-ironic, dyed-in-the-wool abstractexpressionist, she worked in an idiom that was well established when she began, and was subsequently considered “passé” by some, as was painting itself. In this sense, her achievement has rightly been compared to that of Soutine and late Bonnard, artists who also did not “innovate” formally but found greatness by working within an existing painterly language and using it to explore and expand personal territory.