Joan Mitchell
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Joan Mitchell
(b Chicago, 12 Feb 1926; d Paris, 30 Oct 1992). American painter. She studied at Smith College in Northampton, MA, from 1942 to 1944, and then at the Art Institute of Chicago (1944-9) and at Columbia University in New York (1950). From 1950 to 1955, when she had a studio on St Mark's Place, in the heart of Greenwich Village in New York, she was part of a close-knit community of abstract painters and was profoundly influenced by Abstract Expressionism, especially by the work of Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline. However much she was affected by their work, however, her aim was less to express emotional states than to convey her experience of landscape, as in City Landscape (1955; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.).
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Mitchell, Joan, 1926-92, American abstract painter, b. Chicago, studied Smith College, Art Institute of Chicago (B.F.A., 1947; M.F.A., 1950). A vibrant colorist, she was one of the finest painters of the second generation of abstract expressionism. In Manhattan during the 1950s Mitchell encountered action painting, developing friendships with such artists as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline and becoming part of a male-dominated art world. Her emotionally intense paintings of the 1950s feature slashing strokes of vivid color. From the next decade on she moved to equally intense canvases in which linear elements are joined by large gestural blocks, skeins, or cascades in lush colors. In 1959, Mitchell settled in France where, rejecting the movements that dominated art from the 1960s on, she continued to paint in an abstract expressionist style. Usually very large, sometimes in multipanel format, her often radiantly lyrical paintings incorporate both turbulence and control and are frequently inspired by landscapes and poetry.
Bibliography
See biography by P. Albers (2011); K. Kertess, Joan Mitchell (1997); J. Livingston et al., The Paintings of Joan Mitchell (2002).
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Oxford Grove Art
The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
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Mentioned in
Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter
(1992 Visual Arts Film)
Obscene
(2007 History Film)
Absolution
(1995 Album by Carol Noonan)
Only Witness
(1997 Album by Carol Noonan Band)
If Women Ruled the World
(1998 Album by Ethel Ennis)
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