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Lot Essay
Painted in 1964, only one year after the death of her father and a year when her mother was seriously ill, Joan Mitchell’s Violet Cypress demonstrates a darker side for the artist, appropriate to the intense emotions she must have been feeling at the time. A dense mass of alternating greens, blacks and purples seem to burst forth from the center of the canvas in Violet Cypress. The choice of these dark colors was a defining aspect of Mitchell’s paintings from this period, and she called her paintings of the mid-60s, “my black paintings,” referring both to the choice of color palette and, no doubt, the mood of the works (K. Wilkin, Joan Mitchell: The Black Drawings and Related Works 1964–1967, New York, 2014, p. 5). Black and green threads and smoky wisps of pigment contrast against the softer, pale white wash that constitutes the background of the canvas. Violet Cypress demonstrates Mitchell’s superior handling of color, composition, emotion and brushwork, as well as her ability to balance spontaneity and control.
Always a highly physical painter, Mitchell’s confident painterly gestures fill the canvas of Violet Cypress. The paint has been applied in a variety of ways, ranging from fluid, broad strokes to weighty impasto dabs, giving the work a vital sense of movement. The choice of cypress trees for the titles of this series of works have many indirect references, including Mitchell’s admiration of Van Gogh’s paintings of cypresses, the names of trees that deeply moved her or her remembrances of places seen on sailing trips around Corsica. Around the mid-1960s, Mitchell stated, "I'm trying to remember what I felt about a certain cypress tree and I feel if I remember it, it will last me quite a long time" (J. Mitchell, quoted in J. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 66).
By the mid-1950s, Mitchell was dividing her time between New York and France; in 1967, she finally settled in the village of Vétheuil, where she was powerfully influenced by the surrounding landscape. Mitchell’s work, although rarely painted directly from life, was inspired by the landscape, the flora, the water, the sky, the weather and the colors of Vétheuil, a landscape earlier visited and painted by Claude Monet. Mitchell’s style portrayed landscape, not in a literal way, but rather through the filter of memory, feelings and impressions. She remarked, “(m)y paintings aren’t about art issues. They’re about a feeling that comes to me from the outside, from landscape” (J. Mitchell, quoted in M. Tucker, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1974, p. 6). She used a powerful language of gesture, which sometimes took the form of single lines and sometimes the form of thickly applied, densely shaped masses, as depicted in Violet Cypress. Her choices of color sometimes suggest shadowy darkness, and other times intensely vivid, sunlit foliage, with a wide range of colors and lighting effects in between the two extremes. A synesthete who saw objects and emotions as colors, Mitchell pits colors against one another, while the rest of the canvas remained bare. Critics have noted that this crucial period in the mid-1960s when Violet Cypress was painted was the closest Mitchell ever came to creating a figure-ground relationship within the canvas (J. Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, p. 26; J. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 64).
Despite Mitchell’s love for France and its painters, the years Mitchell spent living in New York were also extremely formative for her. In 1950, she saw her first paintings by Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning and immediately sought them out in their studios. Though her work became influenced by their gestural expressionist style, she never imitated it. As Deborah Solomon stated, “What de Kooning was to flesh, Mitchell was to trees, sea and sky” (D. Solomon, "In Monet’s Light", The New York Times, 24 November 1991). She became one of the few women admitted to the influential Artists’ Club, and in 1951 exhibited in the Ninth Street Show with a group of artists, including Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, that would come to be known as the Abstract Expressionists. Mitchell shared their passionate belief in the physicality of painting itself and its ability to capture a fleeting feeling: “A passionate inner vision guided Joan’s brush. Like her peer Cy Twombly, she extended the vocabulary of her Abstract Expressionist forebears. She imbued their painterliness with a compositional and chromatic bravery that defiantly alarms us into grasping their beauty” (K. Kertess, “Her Passion Was Abstract but No Less Combustible,” The New York Times, 16 June 2002).
Suffused with movement, memory and passion, Violet Cypress is a superior example of Joan Mitchell’s deeply felt landscapes. The painting’s coloristic interplays and tactile staccato strokes build up to the writhing mass of pigment that at once startles and amazes the viewer, securing Joan Mitchell’s position as a master amongst the Abstract Expressionist painters.
Always a highly physical painter, Mitchell’s confident painterly gestures fill the canvas of Violet Cypress. The paint has been applied in a variety of ways, ranging from fluid, broad strokes to weighty impasto dabs, giving the work a vital sense of movement. The choice of cypress trees for the titles of this series of works have many indirect references, including Mitchell’s admiration of Van Gogh’s paintings of cypresses, the names of trees that deeply moved her or her remembrances of places seen on sailing trips around Corsica. Around the mid-1960s, Mitchell stated, "I'm trying to remember what I felt about a certain cypress tree and I feel if I remember it, it will last me quite a long time" (J. Mitchell, quoted in J. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 66).
By the mid-1950s, Mitchell was dividing her time between New York and France; in 1967, she finally settled in the village of Vétheuil, where she was powerfully influenced by the surrounding landscape. Mitchell’s work, although rarely painted directly from life, was inspired by the landscape, the flora, the water, the sky, the weather and the colors of Vétheuil, a landscape earlier visited and painted by Claude Monet. Mitchell’s style portrayed landscape, not in a literal way, but rather through the filter of memory, feelings and impressions. She remarked, “(m)y paintings aren’t about art issues. They’re about a feeling that comes to me from the outside, from landscape” (J. Mitchell, quoted in M. Tucker, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1974, p. 6). She used a powerful language of gesture, which sometimes took the form of single lines and sometimes the form of thickly applied, densely shaped masses, as depicted in Violet Cypress. Her choices of color sometimes suggest shadowy darkness, and other times intensely vivid, sunlit foliage, with a wide range of colors and lighting effects in between the two extremes. A synesthete who saw objects and emotions as colors, Mitchell pits colors against one another, while the rest of the canvas remained bare. Critics have noted that this crucial period in the mid-1960s when Violet Cypress was painted was the closest Mitchell ever came to creating a figure-ground relationship within the canvas (J. Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, p. 26; J. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, New York, 1988, p. 64).
Despite Mitchell’s love for France and its painters, the years Mitchell spent living in New York were also extremely formative for her. In 1950, she saw her first paintings by Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning and immediately sought them out in their studios. Though her work became influenced by their gestural expressionist style, she never imitated it. As Deborah Solomon stated, “What de Kooning was to flesh, Mitchell was to trees, sea and sky” (D. Solomon, "In Monet’s Light", The New York Times, 24 November 1991). She became one of the few women admitted to the influential Artists’ Club, and in 1951 exhibited in the Ninth Street Show with a group of artists, including Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, that would come to be known as the Abstract Expressionists. Mitchell shared their passionate belief in the physicality of painting itself and its ability to capture a fleeting feeling: “A passionate inner vision guided Joan’s brush. Like her peer Cy Twombly, she extended the vocabulary of her Abstract Expressionist forebears. She imbued their painterliness with a compositional and chromatic bravery that defiantly alarms us into grasping their beauty” (K. Kertess, “Her Passion Was Abstract but No Less Combustible,” The New York Times, 16 June 2002).
Suffused with movement, memory and passion, Violet Cypress is a superior example of Joan Mitchell’s deeply felt landscapes. The painting’s coloristic interplays and tactile staccato strokes build up to the writhing mass of pigment that at once startles and amazes the viewer, securing Joan Mitchell’s position as a master amongst the Abstract Expressionist painters.