Steidlville

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Cheim & Read, Joan Mitchell: Sunflowers presents a body of work by the artist, including major paintings, as well as a selection of pastels and prints, which turns on the theme of the sunflower. The catalogue includes an essay by critic Dave Hickey, whose text offers a compelling context for these fraught and beautiful works.

Born in 1925, Mitchell earned her degree from the Art Institute of Chicago before establishing herself in New York as a formidable talent in the early 1950s. An instrumental force in the New York School and a leading practitioner of Abstract Expressionism, she has since been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, and examples of her work hang in nearly all major public collections of modern art. While New York fostered her early artistic career, Mitchell left the city and the United States for Paris in 1959, finally settling in Vétheuil, a town on the Seine abut an hour outside the capital. There, in 1969, she embarked upon her great sunflower paintings. Brilliant yellows and oranges variously punctuate and dominate Mitchell’s sunflower abstractions, thus conveying a certain sense of promise. “It’s a yellow painting. There’s hope,” Mitchell once explained. In his deeply felt and carefully articulated account of Mitchell’s art, Hickey brings this hope into perspective, stripping it of any sentimental charm in an act that pays homage to Mitchell’s own practice.