Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me

Joan Mitchell translated her intimate memories into bold painterly gestures during the rise of abstract expressionism. As the critic Robert Slifkin writes in a new David Zwirner Books title, Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me, “Art, for Mitchell, was always after life, and life was everything available to perception.”

Afterwards
Robert Slifkin

Joan Mitchell’s New York debut took place in 1951, during what many would consider to be the apogee of abstract expressionism, and her inclusion that spring in what came to be known as the “Ninth Street Show” placed her work alongside New York School luminaries such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Hans Hofmann. Nevertheless, because she was younger than these artists—and no doubt because she was a woman—she has long been associated with the so-called second generation of the movement.

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Images: Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1972 (detail); Installation view, Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me, David Zwirner, New York, 2019; Spread from Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me, published by David Zwirner Books, 2020