The Magic Eye

On the Art (and Life) of Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955

A couple years ago, I got the idea that I should spend a week in Paris by myself. Considering I have a boyfriend who could have gone with me and that, perhaps more pertinently, I don’t speak French, the decision was confusing to a handful of people I know. I was satisfied by my own reasoning for the trip — I wanted to travel alone, to be in a situation in which I’m entirely out of my element, at least once while I’m young. Also, JetBlue had a sale. Still, I could read the awkwardness in their eyes, the real questions not being asked, when they’d look at me and carefully go, “So… what are you going to do there?”

Really, what I wanted to do there was see the Joan Mitchell paintings at the Centre Pompidou. I’d still never seen a piece of hers in person then, the frenetic swipes and smears which I loved so much observed only ever through my various screens. A depressing thought! While it hadn’t been part of my decision to take the trip, in my loose planning it came to hold a kind of post-hoc, kismet-like significance for me — a chance to finally commune with Mitchell, my fellow Chicagoan-turned-New-Yorker, in the country that she made her ultimate home.

Not long after touching down at Charles de Gaulle, I began to realize the extent of my hubris. As it turned out, being alone in a country where you can’t properly communicate with the majority of other people is an alienating — and worse yet, often humiliating — experience. (This is something that most people could probably figure on their own, but like a lot of things, I had to find it out for myself the hard way.) With the first day of my trip thwarted by pathetic bouts of public weeping, I decided to scrap my plans and just go see the Mitchells.

In the museum at the Centre Pompidou, in a chafed and edgy mood, I scoured the Modern floor and found nothing. Then I did the same on the Contemporary floor, and also found nothing. Then I approached a gallery attendant and asked, in a kind of French that was probably no better than a dog’s, where the Joan Mitchells were. She screwed up her face.

“Comment?”

“Eugh…” I tried again, “Joan Mitchell?”

“Non.”

She was right. With yet more tears welling, I huddled into a corner and pulled up the museum’s website on my phone, and discovered then that not a single one of their Mitchells was on public view. I have done so many very stupid things in my life, and still, rarely have I ever felt like a bigger dumbass. Embarrassed, I took the seemingly interminable series of escalators back down to the gift shop where, at least, I found a postcard featuring Chasse Interdite (1973). For this, I would have to settle.

“Down and out in Paris” — this is how Mitchell described her move to the city, though her reasons for feeling as such were much better than my own. Her relocation from New York was spontaneous and, according to her, not completely by choice. She tells the story over 30 years after the fact, in Marion Cajori’s 1992 documentary Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Artist. She’d found herself there at the whim of her boyfriend, Jean-Paul Riopelle, a French-Canadian painter and alcoholic, who also happened to be married to another woman. “I never wanted to move here,” she explains to Cajori. “I felt like an outsider… profoundly.”

Obviously it’s easy to feel like an outsider in a foreign country, even if you’re not there dating a philandering drunk. But the sentiment — regardless of whether she was living in Paris or New York or her native Chicago — is a recurring theme in her biography, maybe even the defining one.

The operative word, though, is “felt.” If you take a cursory look at her life, it’s inarguable that Mitchell was an insider. She was a debutante, born in 1925 to a prominent Chicago family. She eventually married into an even wealthier one, to Barney Rosset, who during their marriage founded Grove Press and became an avant-garde literary taste-maker. The couple moved to Greenwich Village in 1949, and within a year, Mitchell managed to befriend Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline — both, by then, already established greats. In 1951, her work was included in the historic Ninth Street Show, and only a handful of years later, in 1956, her painting Hemlock was bought by the Whitney. At the time of that fateful move to Paris, in 1959, she was already regarded as one of the most prominent figures of abstract expressionism’s “Second Generation” (de Kooning and Kline, along with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, etc. being the First).

But again, we’re talking about feelings, not facts.

“And you were part of the expressionist group?” Cajori asks her in the documentary.

“I wanted to be,” she replies.

“Were you?”

“Well,” she continues to evade, “I thought they were marvelous.”

You could diagnose her coyness, her unwillingness to admit that she was in with the in-crowd, or that she was part of something historically significant, as a kind of feigned humility. But I would rather not. I don’t think it would be accurate, at least not entirely.

Cajori’s documentary — which was just restored and finally released digitally last month in celebration of Mitchell’s centennial — is great, but it doesn’t quite pick at this particular scab in the way that her biographers, Patricia Albers and Mary Gabriel, do. It makes sense that a visual work would focus more on the actual painting; it’s the edge an art documentarian has over an art biographer, who’s left to trade in merely history and gossip. I’m not a very visually literate person, though, so gossip is my way in through the kitchen.

On a professional level, yes, Mitchell was part of the expressionist group. Socially, however, things were a bit more complicated.

Here’s what Grace Hartigan, a fellow Second Generation painter, had to say of Mitchell’s arrival on the scene:

When I first hit the art world in the late forties, I was the only woman and I liked it. So the first blow was in comes Helen Frankenthaler with Clem Greenberg [the famed art critic, and Frankenthaler’s boyfriend]. I reluctantly made room for Helen and we actually became very good friends. Then in comes Joan Mitchell. Oy vey! ... I’ve never heard anyone swear like that. Male or female.

Hartigan “reluctantly made room” for Mitchell too, but they wouldn’t become very good friends. Despite her immense privilege and her almost immediate professional success, Mitchell never quite seemed to have an easy time fitting in. Her behavior throughout the 1950s — which in the documentary, Mitchell refers to only vaguely as a time when she was “in New York, living a messy life” — has been described by those who were there as “volatile,” “disturbed,” and “tiring.”

When she wasn’t painting, most of her time during this period was spent at the Greenwich Village artist haunt the Cedar Bar. She would knock back beer after bourbon after gin — the painter Alfred Leslie once said, unaffectionately, that she “had a liver like a shopping bag” — and, inevitably, what would start as a charming kind of boisterousness would quickly curdle into nastiness and rage. Very soon after coming onto the scene, she made a reputation for herself as an obnoxious, foul-mouthed drunk.

Even without the aid of booze, it seemed, she had a prodigious capacity for meanness and a complete disregard for boundaries. Her idea of a good prank, on vacation in the Hamptons, was to plant lice in her host’s bed. She would make passes at her friends’ husbands, in front of her friends. She picked fights with her own husband in public and would egg him on until the two of them were at each other’s necks, or at least had made an embarrassing mess of someone’s party. As her marriage with Rosset began to unravel, she picked up a habit of sleeping with almost anyone with whom she had even a passing interest. (One of the few close friends she had at this time, a younger painter named Marilyn Stark, reported to Albers that Mitchell once told her, unprompted, that she would like to have sex with her husband, but would refrain out of respect for her.) While still married to Rosset, she dated a con-man painter named Mike Goldberg who, with a forged check, attempted to draw $400 from Rosset’s bank account. Rosset didn’t press charges, but Goldberg was sent to a mental hospital upstate anyway; Mitchell continued to see him.

I’m relaying all of this only to illustrate that, clearly, Mitchell was someone who thrilled at chaos and destruction, which is not the kind of person that most people — even avant-garde ones — like to spend a whole lot of time around.

(One of the few who was impressed by her behavior, though, was Jackson Pollock. Pollock, by then living out on Long Island, would come to the Cedar Bar after his weekly therapy sessions in the city to get loaded. Usually he would approach some poor woman and grunt, “Wanna fuck?” And when he eventually did this to Mitchell, groping her ass, she simply turned around and grabbed him back between the legs. He found this hilarious, and they became friendly. It really is all about who you know.)

It probably should also be clear that Mitchell was a deeply insecure person. According to Albers and Gabriel, she considered herself to be horrendously ugly. Both biographers are quick to point out that she wasn’t actually — and she wasn’t, actually — but that’s beside the point. If someone so much as told her she looked nice, she would lash out as if she were being mocked. She once had a meltdown after a Life Magazine profile featured a picture of her, instead of only her work as she had requested. Years later, in a letter to Rosset, she summed up these insecurities quite succinctly: “I’m not much good but god knows not much else is either — and so to have a baby instead — no — just grow old and ugly — why not — and keep proving myself to everybody — better to get drunk.”

I think it’d be fair to say that her bad behavior was a kind of self-inflicted alienation; a way to keep “the scene” at arm’s length, because you can’t really be rejected if you never earnestly apply. Often, it seemed like she went out of her way to distance herself from her peers. Take, for example, her relationships with Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler. One of the biggest professional slights Mitchell endured was her exclusion from Tibor de Nagy Gallery — which then, in the ‘50s, was snapping up every other major player on the abstract expressionist scene. Bafflingly, she blamed her snub on “those two bitches,” Hartigan and Frankenthaler. (In reality, the culprit was Tibor de Nagy’s director Johnny Myers, who simply didn’t like her.) Mitchell had something of a vendetta against the two women — Frankenthaler especially, whom she referred to as “that Kotex painter” — but really, relatively little drama actually occurred between the three of them.

There’s a picture of Mitchell, Frankenthaler, and Hartigan together that’s easy to read perhaps too much into. It was taken in 1957 at the opening of Frankenthaler’s solo show at Tibor; in it, Frankenthaler has her arms around both Mitchell and Hartigan. Frankenthaler and Hartigan are leaning into each other, both of them looking directly into the camera with wide, even smiles. But Mitchell, swaddled in a dark, bulky coat, is looking away, her eyes cast down toward the floor and her mouth curled into a small, almost painfully bashful grin. While Frankenthaler and Hartigan appear to be having a good time, Mitchell just looks uncomfortable. She looks like she’s not really part of the group.

Mitchell’s paintings look similarly self-contained, much different than Frankenthaler’s or Hartigan’s, or even those of her mentors Kline and de Kooning. They tend to be as straightforward as the mode of abstraction will allow, given contextual shape by their titles — 34th St. and 7th Ave. (1951); August, Rue Daguerre (1956); George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold (1957). It’s like a Magic Eye: suddenly, the suggestion of Midtown buildings, or of the busy Paris street, or of the Hamptons beach where she liked to take her dog for a swim, comes into focus.

Maybe — probably — this is because of my visual illiteracy, but when I see a Pollock or a de Kooning or a Frankenthaler, most of what comes to mind for me is only their associated terms. Action painting, Color Field, soak stain. I can appreciate the pieces on an intellectual level, but I just don’t have an emotional response to them. There’s too much history. But for some reason, this isn’t the case when I look at a Mitchell. Even though I know more about her than any other visual artist, somehow still, her work feels untainted by its context. The cursory facts of the scene around which it was created feel basically irrelevant to my reading of it. Instead of looking like a product of expressionism at large — like an example of some bigger moment on the timeline — it just looks like a Mitchell. Like pure feeling, distilled in hot colors and lush lines.

Maybe in driving people away from her, in never really allowing herself to leave the fringe, this immediacy is what was ultimately protected. (Surely she hadn’t protected herself; she was so unhappy for so much of her life.) While I’ve learned about Pollock and de Kooning in introductory art history courses, and seen more Frankenthalers than I can remember in myriad modern art wings, I can’t say the same for Mitchell. If she’s even in the museum’s collection, as I’ve learned, you can’t necessarily expect her to be on view. Pollock, de Kooning, Frankenthaler — it’s not their fault, these insiders. It’s just hard to see through all of that context when it looms so much bigger and broader than the painting that’s in front of me.

The postcard version of Chasse Interdite that’s now tacked above my desk doesn’t do the original justice. The printer ink simulacrum of her moss green is nearly indistinguishable from her blood red, and forget trying to tell the difference between either of those shades and the various browns (which all look basically black anyway). Still, when I take a break from the wretched blue light of my computer screen and let my gaze melt into it for a moment, I feel a small sense of peace. That’s corny, but it’s true. And I know that it has nothing to do with how the card ended up on my wall. I think it’s all to do with Mitchell.

Annie Fell is the editor-in-chief of Talkhouse Music. Her writing has appeared in Pitchfork, SPIN, Forever Magazine, and elsewhere. She's on Substack at zitremedies.substack.com.