Though a leading voice in the Abstract Expressionist movement and one of their rare women artists to achieve critical and financial success in her lifetime, Joan Mitchell painted in a manner subtly distinct from her Abstract Expressionist peers. Hers was an idiosyncratic style defined by a varied use of color and with a modulated intensity of paint application. Writing of Mitchell’s work in comparison with Jackson Pollock’s critic and curator Klaus Kertess remarked, “The downward drips and splashes and centralizing arching of her strokes have an in-and-out dynamic that is unlike Pollock’s more lateral thrust of paint flung with the canvas on the floor. Pollock’s paintings are more all-engulfing; his ‘I am nature’ is very different than Mitchell’s being with nature in memory.”
Such engagement with memory and landscape are embodied in the at once ballet and pugilistic Untitled. As a child, Mitchell, a Chicago-native, frequently visited the Art Institute of Chicago where she became acquainted with Impressionist landscapes by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh. Though abstracted, aspects of the landscape remain throughout her oeuvre and in the storm-like tempest of marks from which Untitled builds its momentum.
In early 1950s Mitchell moved to New York and quickly became enmeshed in the avant-garde along with Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan and Franz Kline, participating in important and formative gallery exhibitions including the seminal 1951 9th Street Show. It was only after Mitchell began splitting her time between New York and France in 1955 (ultimately permanently relocating to France later in the decade), however, that Mitchell reached her greatest artistic heights, culminating in the present work. Here, passages of unbridled expression are tempered by strategically placed painterly elements, bringing together gestural flair and the variability and ferocity of the natural world. Rich colors, unmixed on the brush, coalesce together onto the surface, crafting a sense of dimensionality and physicality.
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