To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965

The years 1960 to 1965 marked a crucial turning point in Joan Mitchell’s career, following her decision to settle permanently in France in 1959. Moving back and forth between New York and Paris throughout the 1950s, Mitchell found in the French capital a sense of autonomy that had eluded her in the United States.

Immersed in the Parisian artistic milieu yet maintaining strong ties to New York, Mitchell deepened the emotional and formal complexity of her paintings. The early 1960s thus represent a moment of consolidation and transformation—when Mitchell, newly anchored in France, began charting a distinctly different course from that of her peers in both Europe and the United States.

Among the works on view is Mitchell’s 1963 untitled triptych, from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As Mitchell began to spend extended periods sailing, the rhythms of the sea—its vast horizons, shifting light, and intervals of motion and stillness—encouraged her to think in sequences rather than single gestures, leading to her growing engagement with multipanel works. The result was a body of work that mirrored the ebb and flow of her own creative process, embedding the passage of time and recollection within their structure.

During this period, Mitchell immersed herself in poetry and conversation with friends, while grappling with personal loss, the shock of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and bubbling social turmoil in both the US and France. Later in life, she cited these upheavals as crucial influences on the trajectory of her practice.

Characterized by dark, central masses of swirling brushstrokes in deep greens and blues partially obscuring rich tonal colors embedded beneath, the turbulent canvases from these years exchange the grounding armature that had structured much of her previous landscape-inspired work for more experimental compositional strategies.

Among the works on view is a grouping of rarely seen works on paper made using charcoal and crayon—sometimes in combination with watercolor—that extend Mitchell’s exploration of form and color in a different medium.

As the exhibition’s curator Sarah Roberts writes: “Never seeking to create direct representations of particular moments or to simply channel a single emotion or thought, [Mitchell] sought instead to render in paint something new that articulated the sum of experiences in all their complexity and ambiguity—to define a feeling.”

“By 1962, she had narrowed the range of hues to the darkest greens, browns, and blues, colors so deep that this group of works has frequently been referred to as the ‘black paintings,’ though true black was rarely included.” Roberts writes. “Mitchell concentrated her swirling central masses into floating islands of color within subtly varied, off-white fields.”

Roberts explains how in the years following, the artist “would shift again, opening the concentrations into constellations of loose, squared forms and tangled brushwork as she continually experimented.”