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Lot Essay
Joan Mitchell never wanted to create recognizable figures, she wanted to reflect emotion. An abstract painter since the early 1950’s, Mitchell had always been inspired by landscape, nature, and poetry and the feelings they invoked in her. Never painting physical places themselves, she would transmit the emotional perceptions into her own visual language. Using bold colors and confident gestures, Mitchell was an influential figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement and executed as late as 1991, Pastel is a consummate example of why she was often referred to as being the last of the Abstract Expressionists. Using high quality dry soft pastels, Mitchell was able to obtain a richness of texture, color and transparency that is unrivalled amongst her contemporaries.
In Pastel, swathes of blue, yellow, black, orange and red are layered in a dramatic strata of color. These are not spontaneous gestures, instead Mitchell would work slowly and methodically making deliberate marks, lines and smudges. The wide and heavy strokes of blue that dominate the drawing evoke a body of water, a lake perhaps, with yellow beams of sun reflecting red, orange and yellow foliage. But this work is really about emotion, not physical forms. Avoiding the edges and corners of the paper, the pastel creates a finite, solid mass of color. The cool blue washes over the cutting strokes of the warm yellow red and orange. While the energetic strokes evoke the sense of gesture, movement, and intense emotion, the effect of pastel creates a suggestion of stillness and tranquility.
With her career beginning to emerge in the early 1950’s, Mitchell split her time between New York and France. Shown alongside painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Klein, Joan Mitchell quickly became one of the leading Abstract Expressionists of her generation. Over time, she would spend more and more time in France and in 1968 eventually moved full-time to Vétheuil, a village in the countryside outside of Paris, famously known to be a frequent subject of Monet’s landscapes.
Vétheuil was one of Mitchell’s greatest inspirations. The flora, the water, the sky, and the colors of the landscape conjured strong feelings for Mitchell, leading her to spend the final decades of her life there. It was here that she continued her signature style of abstraction through emotion rather than a physical representation of nature. Pastel represents the final years of Mitchell’s life and the inspiration that the French countryside that sustained her throughout much of her career.
In Pastel, swathes of blue, yellow, black, orange and red are layered in a dramatic strata of color. These are not spontaneous gestures, instead Mitchell would work slowly and methodically making deliberate marks, lines and smudges. The wide and heavy strokes of blue that dominate the drawing evoke a body of water, a lake perhaps, with yellow beams of sun reflecting red, orange and yellow foliage. But this work is really about emotion, not physical forms. Avoiding the edges and corners of the paper, the pastel creates a finite, solid mass of color. The cool blue washes over the cutting strokes of the warm yellow red and orange. While the energetic strokes evoke the sense of gesture, movement, and intense emotion, the effect of pastel creates a suggestion of stillness and tranquility.
With her career beginning to emerge in the early 1950’s, Mitchell split her time between New York and France. Shown alongside painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Klein, Joan Mitchell quickly became one of the leading Abstract Expressionists of her generation. Over time, she would spend more and more time in France and in 1968 eventually moved full-time to Vétheuil, a village in the countryside outside of Paris, famously known to be a frequent subject of Monet’s landscapes.
Vétheuil was one of Mitchell’s greatest inspirations. The flora, the water, the sky, and the colors of the landscape conjured strong feelings for Mitchell, leading her to spend the final decades of her life there. It was here that she continued her signature style of abstraction through emotion rather than a physical representation of nature. Pastel represents the final years of Mitchell’s life and the inspiration that the French countryside that sustained her throughout much of her career.