I had written about two shows at SF MoMA that I hadn’t been able to see due to pandemic. Finally I got to see them. Though I had been deep into the Joan Mitchell archive and bio this summer, I was still unprepared for the riotous color and wild abandon of the work and its very emotional effect. One photo of Mitchell (far right) with other members of the Saddle and Cycle club in Chicago of 1935 when she was only 10 years old reminded me that even as she declared for poetry or painting at an early age, her autocratic father, though determined she should be exposed to art, had pushed her towards more socially acceptable pursuits like riding and ice skating. In this colorized photo that appeared in the local paper, Mitchell already stands out with her slouchy pose and ubiquitous glasses. All eyes are on her.
Joan Mitchell's Tumultuous Life
After a suicide attempt in 1954 brought on by the wild nights at the Cedar Bar where she became a 'brawling, destabilizing demon when drunk", a tumultuous relationship with the painter Mike Goldberg and her father's death, Joan Mitchell painted this City Landscape in 1955. It was the very height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, yet each painter had found his or her own way,
"I don't go off and slop and drip," she said, obviously referring to Jackson Pollock, "I stop, look, and listen."
Learning About Joan Mitchell
My story about Joan Mitchell's life and work timed with the retrospective of her work at SF MoMA opening this week appeared in Air Mail News over the weekend. In learning more about Mitchell, I began to see beyond her fairly reductive reputation as a very talented but very volatile artist.
I hadn't understood how her childhood, while privileged, had betrayed her earliest impulses towards art and poetry and that she had to fight her way past a controlling father to be able to study art and reject the life of an ice skating princess.
I didn't know that she had helped her first husband, Barney Rosset, who went on to become a fearless publisher, imbue new life into Grove Press. And that her other relationships with men who were also painters were fraught. Mitchell was not great at commitment to anything but her work.
Mitchell felt she had to be as tough as one of the guys to be taken seriously. At the time, even among the other strong women of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the 50's, this was unusual.
I hadn't realized that the pull of Paris and of France, where she ended up living, was at first a place where she felt uninspired. She bought a property where Monet had lived, and she both enjoyed and, at times, resented the connection.
Most importantly, I hadn't known that her dramatic paint strokes and large canvases had been inspired by artists like Van Gogh and Cezanne, and had roots in the sunflowers and bridges that she could see from her window. That she remembered landscapes and didn't need to have them in front of her. And that her abiding painterly energies went towards expressing the feelings that she had--and not some 'abstract' idea of things. Joan Mitchell opened my eyes. Link to the story in my bio.
Photo: Loomis Dean, Life Picture Collection
Women Artists Take Over San Francisco
In the past weeks, we have been looking at some wonderful, all male artists in the Bay Area and London (Joan Brown the notable exception).
This week there are two, very different, simultaneous shows opening in San Francisco that are light years from those groups.
Two Chicago-born women artists, Judy Chicago and Joan Mitchell, are taking over the De Young and SF MoMA. It's a moment worth celebrating. Though their trajectories and practices are wholly different, it's a reminder that other breakthroughs were going on as the figuratives in London and the Bay Area had returned to the human body for inspiration.
Chicago (nee Cohen) is one of the leading figures of American feminist art. Through painting, textiles, installations (notably The Dinner Party, likely her most well-known work)and perhaps most importantly pedagogy, Chicago galvanized art practice in the women's movement both by her teaching at Cal Arts and Fresno and by the founding of Womanhouse and its successor, the Women's Building in LA. (This aspect of her practice was front and center in the stimulating exhibition Wack, Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoCA in 2007.) Chicago aimed to demonstrate how women artists had been routinely marginalized. She conjoined her own personal practice with education--a true sisterhood. For some observers, this is still a tough pill to swallow.
Though Chicago began in minimalism which was in ascendance in LA at the time, she broke away from this movement and began working with acrylics and sprayed and painted forms that explored a visual language that could impart her feelings about women's sexuality.
In 1972, Chicago began a series Women and Smoke, early performative works in the California desert. Immolation, pictured here, is symbolic for me of the explosion of radical thinking about women and art that Chicago incited and encouraged. Image two is one of her beautiful plates dedicated to Virginia Woolf, 1975-8 from The Dinner Party which memorialized the contributions of women who had made similar important strides.