Untitled
signed “J. Mitchell” lower right oil on canvas 80 5/8 x 69 3/8 in. (204.8 x 176.2 cm) Painted circa 1953. This work has been requested for inclusion in the artist’s forthcoming retrospective Joan Mitchell organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, to be held from March 21, 2021 - February 27, 2023.
The Nexus of Manhattan Willem de Kooning Excavation, 1950. The Art Institute of Chicago, Photo credit The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2020 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Untitled not only marks a pivotal moment in Mitchell’s development and biography; it is also a reflection of the intellectual and artistic climate of downtown Manhattan during the early 1950s. At the beginning of the decade, she was so irrevocably struck at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York by de Kooning’s Excavation, 1950, Art Institute of Chicago—the balance of gesture and all-over color of which is also palpable in Untitled—that she endeavored to meet him by any means possible. “On my way to find whoever knew him,” Mitchell elucidated, “I found Kline.”iv Immediately impressed by the black-and-white paintings that adorned Kline’s studio during her visit in the summer of 1950, she struck up a friendship with the artist—as well as with de Kooning soon after, whose abstracted cityscapes captivated her far more than his Woman paintings. Franz Kline Black, White and Gray, 1959. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2020 The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York In the spring of the following year, Mitchell relocated into a studio on Tenth Street just below Philip Guston’s, who at the time was executing his renowned early abstract works. The scintillating, lyrical fields with subtle chromatic contrasts that characterized these periods have a remarkable formal affinity with Untitled, and the paintings also share conspicuous compositional similarities. Indeed, according to Jane Livingston, the present work “shows Mitchell at the closest she ever came to emulating, or perhaps even foreshadowing, Guston’s early mature style.”v This tonal mastery and aesthetic are fused in Untitled with the expressive Abstract Expressionist and approach of Kline and de Kooning, which is hinted at in the fervor of strokes in the center of the picture. In this sense, the present work is a manifestation of the state of post-war art in New York in the early 1950s—passionate yet carefully considered, full of action and unquestionably personal. "One can parse the 1953 paintings for the influences of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Gorky, and de Kooning, and one can note that they marry the permission of New York painting with the rigor of Analytic Cubism, yet they were fully Mitchell’s own. Freely admitting the subjectivity of consciousness to their negotiations between the materiality of paint and feelings of weather and landscape, these were not pictures of the world ‘out there’ but rather pictures consonant with the world." — Patricia Albers It is impossible, however, to not also read Untitled outside of this specific Abstract Expressionist context. Of course, the work presaged Robert Ryman’s white impasto-rich paintings that would come some years later and embody the very monochromatism and gestural dynamism Untitled presents, but within a Minimalist context. The present work is also reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s white paintings from the early 1950s that united a European sensibility with American post-war artistic developments. But it also evokes the period’s first strains of postmodernism: moving away from his earlier White Paintings, in 1953 Robert Rauschenberg asked de Kooning for a drawing to erase in an act of art itself, challenging his contemporaries’ glorification of the artist’s hand. Though Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art perhaps had more of a conceptual tilt, it shares interesting formal similarities with Untitled as Mitchell’s gesture counteracts Rauschenberg’s anti-gesture. Representing opposing ends of the 1950s art historical spectrum, they both reflect the spirit of their time. [left] Robert Ryman Untitled, 1962. Whitney Museum of American Art, New
Untitled
signed “J. Mitchell” lower right oil on canvas 80 5/8 x 69 3/8 in. (204.8 x 176.2 cm) Painted circa 1953. This work has been requested for inclusion in the artist’s forthcoming retrospective Joan Mitchell organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, to be held from March 21, 2021 - February 27, 2023.
The Nexus of Manhattan Willem de Kooning Excavation, 1950. The Art Institute of Chicago, Photo credit The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2020 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Untitled not only marks a pivotal moment in Mitchell’s development and biography; it is also a reflection of the intellectual and artistic climate of downtown Manhattan during the early 1950s. At the beginning of the decade, she was so irrevocably struck at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York by de Kooning’s Excavation, 1950, Art Institute of Chicago—the balance of gesture and all-over color of which is also palpable in Untitled—that she endeavored to meet him by any means possible. “On my way to find whoever knew him,” Mitchell elucidated, “I found Kline.”iv Immediately impressed by the black-and-white paintings that adorned Kline’s studio during her visit in the summer of 1950, she struck up a friendship with the artist—as well as with de Kooning soon after, whose abstracted cityscapes captivated her far more than his Woman paintings. Franz Kline Black, White and Gray, 1959. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2020 The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York In the spring of the following year, Mitchell relocated into a studio on Tenth Street just below Philip Guston’s, who at the time was executing his renowned early abstract works. The scintillating, lyrical fields with subtle chromatic contrasts that characterized these periods have a remarkable formal affinity with Untitled, and the paintings also share conspicuous compositional similarities. Indeed, according to Jane Livingston, the present work “shows Mitchell at the closest she ever came to emulating, or perhaps even foreshadowing, Guston’s early mature style.”v This tonal mastery and aesthetic are fused in Untitled with the expressive Abstract Expressionist and approach of Kline and de Kooning, which is hinted at in the fervor of strokes in the center of the picture. In this sense, the present work is a manifestation of the state of post-war art in New York in the early 1950s—passionate yet carefully considered, full of action and unquestionably personal. "One can parse the 1953 paintings for the influences of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Gorky, and de Kooning, and one can note that they marry the permission of New York painting with the rigor of Analytic Cubism, yet they were fully Mitchell’s own. Freely admitting the subjectivity of consciousness to their negotiations between the materiality of paint and feelings of weather and landscape, these were not pictures of the world ‘out there’ but rather pictures consonant with the world." — Patricia Albers It is impossible, however, to not also read Untitled outside of this specific Abstract Expressionist context. Of course, the work presaged Robert Ryman’s white impasto-rich paintings that would come some years later and embody the very monochromatism and gestural dynamism Untitled presents, but within a Minimalist context. The present work is also reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s white paintings from the early 1950s that united a European sensibility with American post-war artistic developments. But it also evokes the period’s first strains of postmodernism: moving away from his earlier White Paintings, in 1953 Robert Rauschenberg asked de Kooning for a drawing to erase in an act of art itself, challenging his contemporaries’ glorification of the artist’s hand. Though Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art perhaps had more of a conceptual tilt, it shares interesting formal similarities with Untitled as Mitchell’s gesture counteracts Rauschenberg’s anti-gesture. Representing opposing ends of the 1950s art historical spectrum, they both reflect the spirit of their time. [left] Robert Ryman Untitled, 1962. Whitney Museum of American Art, New
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