Joan Mitchell

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Lore & Background

Mitchell was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of dermatologist James Herbert Mitchell and poet Marion Strobel Mitchell. She studied at Smith College for two years but wanted to be a full-time painter, then attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), earning her BFA in 1947 and her MFA in 1950. After moving to Manhattan in 1947, she wanted to study at Hans Hofmann's school but attended only one class, declaring, 'I couldn't understand a word he said so I left, terrified.' A $2,000 travel fellowship allowed her to study in Paris and Provence in 1948–49, and she also traveled in Spain and Italy. She married American publisher Barney Rosset in September 1949 in Le Lavandou, France; they divorced in 1952. In the 1950s, Mitchell was active in the New York School, maintaining a studio in Greenwich Village and frequenting the Cedar Tavern and The Club. Her work was exhibited in the landmark 1951 'Ninth Street Show' alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Hans Hofmann. Her first solo exhibition was held at the New Gallery in New York in 1952. She met Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle in 1955, beginning a relationship that lasted until 1979. She also met author Samuel Beckett that year, and their relationship was both personal and intellectual.

Reader's Guide

Joan Mitchell's significance lies in her role as one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim. Her emotionally intense style and its gestural brushwork were influenced by nineteenth-century post-impressionist painters, particularly Henri Matisse. Memories of landscapes inspired her compositions; she famously told art critic Irving Sandler, 'I carry my landscapes around with me.' Her later work was informed and constrained by her declining health. Mitchell's paintings, drawings, and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections around the world, and have sold for record-breaking prices. In 2021, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Baltimore Museum of Art co-organized a comprehensive retrospective of her work. The Fondation Louis Vuitton presented an exhibition of the work of Mitchell and Claude Monet from October 2022 to February 2023. In her will, Mitchell provided for the creation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a non-profit corporation that awards grants and fellowships to working artists and maintains her archives.

Did You Know?

• Mitchell's maternal grandfather, Charles Louis Strobel, died in April 1936, leaving her an inheritance of two-thirds of his $500,000 ($11.6 million in 2025).
• In 1956, Mitchell painted one of her breakthrough works, Hemlock, named after the 'dark and blue feeling' of Wallace Stevens' 1916 poem Domination of Black.
• Mitchell was a regular at the Cedar Tavern and The Club, an invitation-only loft space on Eighth Street where she participated in panel discussions throughout the 1950s.
• She told art critic Irving Sandler, 'I carry my landscapes around with me.'
• Mitchell's father, Dr. James Herbert Mitchell, served as president of the American Dermatological Association; her mother, Marion Strobel, served as co-editor of Poetry.