Joan Mitchell

The latest episode of our conversation series, PROGRAM, explores the artist’s work via our recent exhibition Joan Mitchell: Paintings, 1979–1985. Painter Amy Sillman, art historian Erin Kimmel, and host Helen Molesworth examine the stylistic shifts on view in the show and debate how—or how not—to look at an abstract painting.

March 25–June 25, 2023

Offering a fresh view of two of the most experimental painters of the 20th century, Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape is the first exhibition in the United States to examine the complex dialogue between the work of the French Impressionist Claude Monet and the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell.

The exhibition explores the ways in which Monet and Mitchell engaged with the French landscape. Monet spent his final decades in rural Giverny, some 50 miles to the northwest of Paris, while, from 1968 until 1992, Mitchell lived at nearby Vétheuil, overlooking a house once inhabited by the French painter. Both artists addressed similar themes of trees, earth, water, and flowers as well as the inspiration of their own gardens. The exhibition explores the connections, both in subject matter and technique, that Mitchell shared with Monet. It also shows how her compositional formats, vibrant color, and gestural brushwork offer fascinating parallels with Monet’s.

Monet/Mitchell will present 24 paintings, 12 by each artist. Often monumental in scale and overwhelming in impact, these works highlight the fascination both painters had for expansive, panoramic formats.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a scholarly catalog, published by Hirmer, with contributions from Simon Kelly and curators from the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Musée Marmottan Monet. Monet/Mitchell is curated in St. Louis by Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art, and presented in partnership with the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Musée Marmottan Monet. The Saint Louis Art Museum will celebrate Monet/Mitchell with a free, public preview starting at 4 pm on Friday, March 24, 2023.

Learn more at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

October 5, 2022–February 27, 2023

Spanning ten galleries at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Monet – Mitchell: Dialogue and Retrospective presents the final leg of the artist’s critically acclaimed retrospective, previously on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Baltimore Museum of Art, and consists of monumental works spanning Mitchell’s career, a dozen of which are in the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton. A concurrent exhibition, Monet – Mitchell, presents Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell’s response to their shared landscape.

Both Mitchell and Monet lived along the banks of the Seine—in Vétheuil and nearby Giverny, respectively—for crucial periods of their lives, and both created work in response to this environment. For Monet, this resulted in his Water Lilies paintings, while Mitchell produced her signature abstract compositions, evoking memories and emotions associated with her cherished landscapes. Consisting of thirty-six works by Monet and twenty-four by Mitchell, Monet – Mitchell was organized in collaboration with Musée Marmottan Monet, which loaned twenty-five paintings by Monet for this presentation.

The exhibition also brings together two exceptional bodies of work: ten paintings from Joan Mitchell’s La Grande Vallée series (1983-84), brought together almost four decades after its fragmentary exhibition at the Galerie Jean Fournier in 1984, and Monet’s Agapanthus Triptych (ca. 1915–1926), which will be exhibited in its entirety for the first time in Paris. 

A new version of the Joan Mitchell Retrospective, previously shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and currently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BAM) through August 14, 2022, will be presented at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The exhibition will include some fifty works from Mitchell’s oeuvre, including her polyptychs from the 1970s, her tribute to Vincent van Gogh, No Birds (1987–88), and her version of Cézanne’s Sainte-Victoire, South (1989), among others.

To learn more about the exhibition, visit Fondation Louis Vuitton.

March 6–August 14, 2022

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presents Joan Mitchell, the long-awaited retrospective of the internationally renowned artist who attained critical acclaim and success in the male-dominated art circles of 1950s New York, then spent nearly four decades in France creating breathtaking abstract paintings that evoke landscapes, memories, poetry, and music. This comprehensive exhibition features 70 works spanning the artist’s career, including rarely seen early paintings and drawings, vibrant gestural paintings that established her reputation in New York, and enormous multi-panel masterpieces from her later years that immerse viewers with their symphonic color. Numerous loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe include works that have not been shown publicly in decades and never in a single exhibition. The BMA’s presentation also includes many archival photographs, letters, poems, and other materials from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, providing additional context about the development of the artist’s work and influences.

“Across her life, Joan Mitchell experimented with how painting could embody physical experience and capture a wide range of emotions—including grief, sensual pleasure, humor, joy, and a kind of metaphysical soaring in the face of death—as well as connections to people and places,” said co-curator Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Programming & Research Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University. “Mitchell also grappled with conflict between the social roles prescribed by her gender and social status and her desire for true creative freedom. She was not simply ‘making it’ in an environment created and occupied by men, she was actively remaking painting and its possibilities. This exhibition is an opportunity to ask what it means to live a life with art at its center and to reconsider the art and narratives of the postwar era.”

The retrospective coincides with the final month of the exhibition All Due Respect, which features new work by four artists with ties to Baltimore who have previously received Joan Mitchell Foundation awards. All Due Respect includes installations by Lauren Frances Adams, Mequitta Ahuja, Cindy Cheng, and LaToya Hobbs, and highlights Mitchell’s desire to support the lives and careers of working artists through her foundation.

Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) have announced a major retrospective of the work of Joan Mitchell for 2022.

Curated by BMA’s Katy Siegel and SFMOMA’s Sarah Roberts, the exhibition will trace the artist’s career from its New York beginnings to later large-scale abstract works made in France, where Mitchell lived from 1959 until her death in 1992. Some of the artist’s most famous canvases will be on view next to rarely seen paintings, works on paper, and materials including archival photographs and sketchbooks. ARTnews reports that the forthcoming exhibition, which is slated to open at BMA in March 2022 before traveling to SFMOMA, will be twice as large as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective in 2002, which presented some sixty works.

Joan Mitchell established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four-decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers. The artist’s intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. As New Museum of Contemporary Art founder Marcia Tucker observed in Marion Cajori’s 1993 documentary Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter, Mitchell “was one of the first women to provide—as an artist, as a painter—a role model, through the fact that she had sustained herself in this brilliant way. She made it possible for other people to do that, too—men and women who wanted to paint against the grain.”

Siegel emphasizes the forthcoming retrospective as an opportunity to revisit and reassess the artist’s oeuvre. “Joan Mitchell was working at an enormously high level for four decades, and people didn’t quite get it because she was a woman. I think people are ready to recognize her greatness,” the curator told Artnet; “With the pastels, the works on paper, the collaborations with poets, the small paintings that have almost never been shown, the transitional paintings between the huge masterworks that people are more familiar with, people are going to be amazed by the show and what it means to see Joan Mitchell in the fullness of her dimensions.”

David Zwirner announced exclusive representation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation in May 2018, and is planning an exhibition of the artist’s work for 2019. The news was featured in The New York Times.

Cover image: Joan Mitchell, Ici, 1992 (detail). Collection Saint Louis Art Museum. Funds given by the Shoenberg Foundation, Inc. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Women in Abstraction sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with 106 artists and more than five hundred works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s. By reviewing each artists’ specific contribution to the history of abstraction, the exhibition brings attention to the careers of artists who were sometimes unjustly eclipsed from the history of art. For instance, Joan Mitchell’s vast canvases envelop the viewer in their colorful, emotive gestures—generating a powerful sense of intimacy over intellectual abstraction, as advanced by many of her male colleagues.

Transcending the traditional reductionist hierarchies between high and low art, the exhibition presents a history that includes dance, the decorative arts, photography and cinema, with a museography that is punctuated with many documents, including films. The exhibition is multi-discipline with a global approach, including modernities from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, telling a story with multiple voices.

Most exhibitions devoted to the history of abstract art have often downplayed the fundamental role played by women in the development of this important artistic movement. Efforts by recent scholars have aimed to correct this wrong. The many recent monographs and thematic exhibitions devoted to women abstract artists now enable us to re-evaluate the importance of their contribution. This exhibition overturns several historical presuppositions concerning the chronology of abstraction and questions the old historical schemas, without however seeking to re-write a new one. Beginning with the observation that the history of art is constantly rewritten with the help of new narratives, Women in Abstraction presents the opportunity for yet another iteration of the history of art, one where the artists presented are definitively integrated. 

For its inauguration, the Espace Louis Vuitton Osaka presents Fragments of a Landscape, an exhibition gathering the works of two major American artists: Joan Mitchell, who began painting in the 1950s and is representative of postwar abstract expressionism, and Carl Andre, a sculptor who was an active member of the minimalist movement in the early 1970s. This presentation, part of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Hors-les-murs program showcasing previously unseen holdings of the collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul, and now Osaka, carries out the foundation’s intent to mount international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.

The juxtaposition of these artists reveals the richness of seemingly conflicting artistic currents, between violently colored expressive freedom and unvarnished geometric rigor. The shared radical nature of their approaches creates tension around and between their works and the space they occupy.

(New York, London, & Hong Kong – May 2, 2018) David Zwirner is pleased to announce its exclusive worldwide representation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which is committed to enhancing recognition of the work and life of acclaimed abstract painter Joan Mitchell. The gallery is planning a solo exhibition of Mitchell’s work for 2019 in New York.

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Her prodigious oeuvre encompasses not only the large-scale abstract canvases for which she is best known, but also smaller paintings, drawings, and prints.

David Zwirner will be the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s exclusive commercial gallery. In this role, David Zwirner will promote the legacy of the artist through curated exhibitions at its New York, London, and Hong Kong gallery spaces; the development of new scholarship on the artist’s work through publications and international exhibitions; and the sale of artworks consigned to the gallery by the Foundation.

As stated by David Zwirner: “The gallery is proud to be entrusted to help with the extraordinary legacy of Joan Mitchell, one of the most important and original American painters to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. Mitchell forged her own unique path, in life and in art, and her groundbreaking work remains unparalleled and relevant today. We especially look forward to partnering with the remarkable Joan Mitchell Foundation. It is serendipitous that, as our gallery celebrates its milestone twenty-fifth anniversary, so does the Foundation, and we are thrilled to be able to enter this exciting next chapter together.”

“Sustaining Joan Mitchell's legacy and fulfilling her vision to support and amplify the work of other artists are cornerstones of the Foundation's mission," said Christa Blatchford, Chief Executive Officer of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. “As we enter our twenty-fifth year, we look forward to partnering with David Zwirner to further engage audiences around the globe with Mitchell’s pioneering work, expanding awareness and scholarship of her inspiring practice.”

Born in Chicago and educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Mitchell moved in 1949 to New York, where she was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.

In 1951, Mitchell became one of the few female members of the exclusive Eighth Street Club, and, that spring, her work was included in The Ninth Street Exhibition, organized by charter members of The Club with the assistance of Leo Castelli, which helped to codify what became known as the New York School of primarily abstract painters. During her lifetime, Mitchell’s work was exhibited in solo presentations at numerous influential galleries in the United States and Europe, including Stable Gallery, New York (1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1965); Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1961); Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992); Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1968, 1972); Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986); and Robert Miller Gallery, New York (1989, 1991).

Her first institutional solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, was held in 1972 at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Subsequent museum presentations during Mitchell’s lifetime were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974, 1992); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; 1988–1989).

In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective of Mitchell’s work, which traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. In 2010, the Joan Mitchell Foundation organized Joan Mitchell in New Orleans, which included a symposium on her life and work, and three concurrent exhibitions at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. In 2015, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings was presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and subsequently traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Additional recent museum solo presentations include those at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2008; traveled to Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy and Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny, France, both 2009); and Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2010).

Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, through May 6, 2018. A room of Mitchell’s work is also included in The Long Run at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, through November 4, 2018. Mitchell will also be featured in Mary Gabriel’s forthcoming book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, slated for release on September 25, 2018 by Little, Brown and Company.

Mitchell’s work can be found in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, Japan; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka, Japan; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

For all press inquiries, contact
Julia Lukacher +1 212 727 2070 [email protected]

Image: Joan Mitchell, Posted, 1977

Through May 5, 2019

Presented at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Long Run focused on works in the museum’s collection that date from the latter part of the featured artists’ careers. The show included a room of five works by Joan Mitchell—three large paintings titled No Rain (1976), Wood, Wind, No Tuba (1980), and Taillade (1990), an etching called Sunflower IV (1972), and an untitled pastel work from 1992, the year of the artist’s death. Over the course of her more than four-decade career, Mitchell established a singular visual vocabulary rooted in the conventions of abstraction, yet with an inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color that set her apart from her peers. The artist’s intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time.

A review by Thomas Micchelli in Hyperallergic praises this reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection to include more works by women and artists of color, "proving once again that once museums cease reflexively returning to an established canon and approach their collections with a broader worldview, the results, more often than not, replace the so-so with the superb."

"It’s not that Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Willem de Kooning, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Cy Twombly are missing," he continues, noting that some of the most compelling rooms were those dedicated to a single artist, "but that their late works are met and matched by those of Agnes Martin, Melvin Edwards, Alma Thomas, Elizabeth Murray, Ed Clark, Joan Mitchell, and Joan Jonas, to name a few, who infiltrate the familiar halls of modernism with an unexpected aggregate of the ecstatic."

Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) have announced a major retrospective of Mitchell’s work in 2020 which will also travel to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York the following year. Curated by BMA’s Katy Siegel and SFMOMA’s Sarah Roberts, the exhibition will trace Mitchell’s career from its New York beginnings to later large-scale abstract works made in France, where she lived from 1959 until 1992. The show will be twice as large as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective in 2002, which presented some sixty works by Mitchell.

Image: Installation view, The Long Run, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017. © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Martin Seck

In 2012, Hannelore B. Schulhof (1922–2012), who collected with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof (1912–1999), bequeathed eighty works of postwar European and American art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to be housed at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. This exhibition is an opportunity to view the Schulhof Collection nearly in its entirety. Privileging formal artistic developments, this presentation provides insights into the art movements and styles that evolved and matured toward the end of World War II to the 1980s. Abstract imagery, as a quest into issues of color, form, and space as well as their interrelationships, characterized the postwar decades, becoming the foundation of the Schulhof Collection.

The display reflects this overarching abstract crescendo of minimalism and refinement, opening with works by artists such as Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Cy Twombly, and eventually arriving at the paintings and sculptures by Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol, among others. The works are grouped and arranged according to style, theme, and affinity, exploring notions that include but are not limited to gestural abstraction, materiality, the monochrome, the mark and the grid, hard-edged geometries and elemental form. This exhibition celebrates how, crossing continents and traversing cultures, the Schulhof Collection reflects a multitude of postwar artistic tendencies and a polyphony of voices. Living artists from both sides of the North Atlantic were the focus of these collectors, in the words of Mrs. Schulhof, with “equal commitment, throughout” (letter to James Wilder Green, director, The American Federation of Arts, New York, April 26, 1984, The Schulhof Collection Archives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice).

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents a retrospective of one of the twentieth century’s most prodigious artists, Joan Mitchell. The exhibition surveys the artist’s paintings from 1969 to 1973, aiming to secure her rightful place in the pantheon of (otherwise heavily masculine) abstract expressionist painters. The survey, envisioned by curators Jane Livingston and Marla Prather, features fifty-nine paintings—immersing the viewer in the intensity and vivacity of Joan Mitchell’s authoritative yet sensitive gesture. 

This exhibition is accompanied by an expansive catalogue featuring essays from the art historians Jane Livingston, Linda Nochlin, and Yvette Lee. Livingston draws from Mitchell’s personal papers, including her journals and extensive correspondence, to provide an illuminating interpretation of the artist and her work. Nochlin, who was a friend of Mitchell’s, discusses the artist’s experience working in a field dominated by men. A third text by Lee explores a distinctive and little-known suite of paintings entitled La Grande Vallée, created in 1983–1984.

This book includes an exhibition history; an extensive artist bibliography of related monographs, reviews, and filmed interviews; and color plates and listing of all the works appearing in the exhibition.