Biography: Joan Mitchell

JOAN MITCHELL (American, 1926 –1992)

Joan Mitchell’s reputation has increased dramatically in the past few decades, and she’s now considered one of the major Abstract Expressionists. The Chicago native received her formal training in the mid-1940s at that city’s Art Institute. After a year in Europe, she moved to New York, where she fell in with the Abstract Expressionists and was considered a “second-generation” member of that movement. She moved to France in 1955, spent most of her life there, and died in Paris. Mitchell often painted big, both in terms of the size of the canvas and the seemingly all-out, vigorous, somewhat aggressive style that exuded an energy not unlike Willem de Kooning’s work. Mitchell’s wild mark making took place within risky but exquisite, precise compositions that often evoked landscapes. The Whitney Museum in 2002 organized a traveling Mitchell retrospective. Her work is in many prominent museums throughout the world, including New York’s Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, Washington, D.C’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Phillips Collection, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Champs, 1990, Lithograph, 94/125, 30 x 22 inches, $ 1,700