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Lot Essay
‘Everything about these luscious chromatic canvases speaks of the artist’s all-consuming lover’s quarrel with oils. Paint meets canvas in every conceivable manner: slathered, swiped, dry-brushed, splattered, dribbled, wiped with tags into filminess, smeared with fingers, slapped from a brush, smashed from the tube, affixed like a wad of gum – a glorious, visual glossolalia’
–Patricia Albers
With its vivid torrents of colour swept into a riotous dance, Joan Mitchell’s Blue Michigan is an ecstatic celebration of paint by an artist at the height of her creative powers. Vibrant ribbons of red, green and ochre cluster around a central explosion of blue, leaving drips, splatters and rivulets in their wake. The work was painted in 1961, shortly after Mitchell moved from New York to live permanently in France. It was a triumphant period of critical and commercial success, buoyed by the euphoria of her new Parisian home. The artist worked with newfound confidence and vigour, producing canvases that both rivalled and in many cases surpassed those of her male Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. With a title that evokes Lake Michigan – the artist’s childhood home – the present work marks a shift in her practice as Mitchell began to focus her free-flowing compositions around the centre of the canvas. Short agitated strokes of paint collide with longer strands of colour, imbuing the surface with a restlessness redolent of rippling water. The heart of the canvas, flooded with deeply saturated blue, becomes a centre of gravity for the entire composition, quivering like the eye of a storm. Expressive drips, daubs and splatters, reminiscent of Jackson Pollock, articulate a tonal spectrum that moves from vibrant pinks and soft earth tones to almost translucent veneers of colour. It is a vivid, tumultuous evocation of home that simultaneously captures the thrill of the artist’s ascent to the international stage.
Coming to prominence as a leading artist of the 1950s New York School, Mitchell distinguished herself from her contemporaries through her unwavering devotion to natural landscape. Typically titled retrospectively, her paintings never seek to emulate their subject matter, but rather evolve gradually as residual traces of phenomena buried in her psyche. ‘I would rather leave nature to itself. It is quite beautiful enough as it is’, Mitchell explains. ‘I certainly never mirror it. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with’ (J. Mitchell, quoted in M. Tucker, Joan Mitchell, New York 1974, p. 6). In this respect, her work is frequently compared to that of Vincent van Gogh, an artist who, along with Paul Cézanne, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Philip Guston, represents one of Mitchell’s most important influences. Having grown up overlooking the dramatic splendour of Lake Michigan, water was undoubtedly one of Mitchell’s most prominent themes, lending itself to the increasingly turbulent nature of her technique. ‘Mitchell’s paintings from 1960 to 1962 are marked by a spirit of heightened passion and spontaneity’, writes Judith Bernstock. ‘Free-wheeling arm-long strokes swoop across the canvas, twist and tangle with drips and splatters, and often terminate in thick globs of paint. Most works of 1960-61 present an array of contrasts: broad, robust strokes of vivid and deep colour concentrated at the centre are played against delicate trailing lines of shimmering whites and highkey tones that dart inward from the thinly painted and stained surrounding areas’ (J. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York, 1988, p. 57).
Like de Kooning and Pollock – both friends of the artist – Mitchell poured herself into painting with an unrelenting physical rigour, involving her whole body in the act of applying pigment to canvas. Unlike many of her peers, however, she was at pains to maintain a degree of conscious influence over the results. ‘I paint from a distance’, she explained. ‘I decide what I’m going to do from a distance. The freedom in my work is quite controlled’ (J. Mitchell, quoted in Sandler, ‘Mitchell Paints a Picture’, ARTnews, October 1957, pp. 44-7, 69-70). With their masterful balancing of calculated and unplanned effects, the paintings of this period helped to secure Mitchell’s position within the male-dominated ranks of Abstract Expressionism. The artist’s biographer Patricia Albers pays tribute to the works of this era in a manner that speaks directly to Blue Michigan. ‘As delectable as they are raw’, she writes, ‘her paintings court chaos with their sweeps of disrupted syntax, surpassing the viewer’s ability to process them in a conscious way. Deep greens, orange reds or persimmons, and cerulean blues – colours she used over and over again – well up into patchy cumuli suspended in thinned whitish washes… Everything about these luscious chromatic canvases speaks of the artist’s all-consuming lover’s quarrel with oils. Paint meets canvas in every conceivable manner: slathered, swiped, dry-brushed, splattered, dribbled, wiped with tags into filminess, smeared with fingers, slapped from a brush, smashed from the tube, affixed like a wad of gum – a glorious, visual glossolalia’ (P. Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, New York 2011, pp. 286-7).
–Patricia Albers
With its vivid torrents of colour swept into a riotous dance, Joan Mitchell’s Blue Michigan is an ecstatic celebration of paint by an artist at the height of her creative powers. Vibrant ribbons of red, green and ochre cluster around a central explosion of blue, leaving drips, splatters and rivulets in their wake. The work was painted in 1961, shortly after Mitchell moved from New York to live permanently in France. It was a triumphant period of critical and commercial success, buoyed by the euphoria of her new Parisian home. The artist worked with newfound confidence and vigour, producing canvases that both rivalled and in many cases surpassed those of her male Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. With a title that evokes Lake Michigan – the artist’s childhood home – the present work marks a shift in her practice as Mitchell began to focus her free-flowing compositions around the centre of the canvas. Short agitated strokes of paint collide with longer strands of colour, imbuing the surface with a restlessness redolent of rippling water. The heart of the canvas, flooded with deeply saturated blue, becomes a centre of gravity for the entire composition, quivering like the eye of a storm. Expressive drips, daubs and splatters, reminiscent of Jackson Pollock, articulate a tonal spectrum that moves from vibrant pinks and soft earth tones to almost translucent veneers of colour. It is a vivid, tumultuous evocation of home that simultaneously captures the thrill of the artist’s ascent to the international stage.
Coming to prominence as a leading artist of the 1950s New York School, Mitchell distinguished herself from her contemporaries through her unwavering devotion to natural landscape. Typically titled retrospectively, her paintings never seek to emulate their subject matter, but rather evolve gradually as residual traces of phenomena buried in her psyche. ‘I would rather leave nature to itself. It is quite beautiful enough as it is’, Mitchell explains. ‘I certainly never mirror it. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with’ (J. Mitchell, quoted in M. Tucker, Joan Mitchell, New York 1974, p. 6). In this respect, her work is frequently compared to that of Vincent van Gogh, an artist who, along with Paul Cézanne, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Philip Guston, represents one of Mitchell’s most important influences. Having grown up overlooking the dramatic splendour of Lake Michigan, water was undoubtedly one of Mitchell’s most prominent themes, lending itself to the increasingly turbulent nature of her technique. ‘Mitchell’s paintings from 1960 to 1962 are marked by a spirit of heightened passion and spontaneity’, writes Judith Bernstock. ‘Free-wheeling arm-long strokes swoop across the canvas, twist and tangle with drips and splatters, and often terminate in thick globs of paint. Most works of 1960-61 present an array of contrasts: broad, robust strokes of vivid and deep colour concentrated at the centre are played against delicate trailing lines of shimmering whites and highkey tones that dart inward from the thinly painted and stained surrounding areas’ (J. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York, 1988, p. 57).
Like de Kooning and Pollock – both friends of the artist – Mitchell poured herself into painting with an unrelenting physical rigour, involving her whole body in the act of applying pigment to canvas. Unlike many of her peers, however, she was at pains to maintain a degree of conscious influence over the results. ‘I paint from a distance’, she explained. ‘I decide what I’m going to do from a distance. The freedom in my work is quite controlled’ (J. Mitchell, quoted in Sandler, ‘Mitchell Paints a Picture’, ARTnews, October 1957, pp. 44-7, 69-70). With their masterful balancing of calculated and unplanned effects, the paintings of this period helped to secure Mitchell’s position within the male-dominated ranks of Abstract Expressionism. The artist’s biographer Patricia Albers pays tribute to the works of this era in a manner that speaks directly to Blue Michigan. ‘As delectable as they are raw’, she writes, ‘her paintings court chaos with their sweeps of disrupted syntax, surpassing the viewer’s ability to process them in a conscious way. Deep greens, orange reds or persimmons, and cerulean blues – colours she used over and over again – well up into patchy cumuli suspended in thinned whitish washes… Everything about these luscious chromatic canvases speaks of the artist’s all-consuming lover’s quarrel with oils. Paint meets canvas in every conceivable manner: slathered, swiped, dry-brushed, splattered, dribbled, wiped with tags into filminess, smeared with fingers, slapped from a brush, smashed from the tube, affixed like a wad of gum – a glorious, visual glossolalia’ (P. Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, New York 2011, pp. 286-7).