the idea of order at Vétheuil

Mitchell's lyrical, gestural evocation of landscape is better than a lot of what's around, but it's still pretty slight; her color is less than astonishing, the scale of her mark and its rhythm predictable.  The large pictures at Robert Miller seemed bombastic, their size rhetorical, rather than essential, while the smaller ones looked like Modern Art - I kept thinking of Mathieu.  Mitchell was a good painter - no small achievement - whose death is to be regretted. Was she an unsung genius, a force who might have changed the course of American painting, had she not been excluded from center stage by a male conspiracy, as her fans imply?  Hardly.

So wrote Karen Wilkin in the Summer 1993 issue of Partisan Review (vol. 60, no. 3, p. 464.)  I read her words at the time while a student just beginning to study art and looking to get some opinions, fast.  Among the sources available to me, Partisan Review was always special, though even I recognized its great days were gone (I also knew that Wilkin, who contrasted Mitchell unfavorably to Frankenthaler elsewhere in the article, had her own reasons for writing so.)  So I must admit that, in the absence of many opportunities to actually see Mitchell's paintings, this review set in my mind a certain received idea.  In time I'd get more opportunities to see her art and revise my estimation, but without ever developing a fully coherent opinion of my own.

I'm reminded of all this because I spent part of a dreary Saturday curled up with The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, the catalog from the 2002 retrospective at the Whitney Museum.  It's a lovely book, with numerous plates of paintings from all phases of her career.  Not surprisingly, the three essays offer a view different from the above, praising Mitchell as a great American artist.  Furthermore, while Wilkin mocked the idea of a "male conspiracy" that kept Mitchell down, the catalog does halfheartedly suggest such a theme, although the arguments for it are awkward and insufficient.  The lead essay, by guest curator Jane Livingston, states that Mitchell "was, among other things, a classic victim of her gender."  Perhaps, but the evidence for this statement doesn't follow in the rest of the text.  Linda Nochlin's contribution, where one might expect to find the point more forcefully argued, is vague and hardly about Mitchell at all.  Too bad, too, because when Nochlin actually discusses the work, she has some perceptive things to say.  Her remark that Field for Two "could almost be a Rothko, but a Rothko highly implicated in Hans Hofmann's 'push and pull'" hints at some of what's at work in a number of Mitchell's paintings.

The artworld of the 1950's that Mitchell emerged within was sexist in a blatant, overpowering fashion that seems almost unbelievable by today's still highly imperfect standards.  Far more important to her reception over the years, though, has been her status as a "second generation" Abstract Expressionist, especially one who moved away from that artworld.  Mitchell's work of the 1950's marked her as a key follower of de Kooning - the recently sold King of Spades might have been entitled Excavation Footnote - at a moment when that designation may have been more harmful than not.  Irving Sandler recalls in the Artforum oral history that Phil Leider vowed never to champion any second generation; Sandler suspected, although the catalog doesn't make this argument, that shifting trends in the artworld prompted her move to France.  In Clement Greenberg's dismissal of Mitchell as a "gestural horror", the emphasis lies on both words.  Once gone, Mitchell naturally didn't have a major role in the American art scene, though she continued to show in New York.  Livingston notes that a 1974 one-person show at the Whitney received a largely cool reception, but she doesn't provide examples.  If she had, the reader may have been reminded that, rightly or no, the critical environment of 1974, of all years, was not one in which a reevaluation of lyrical abstract painting was likely to happen.  Not Mitchell's fault, but part of the story.

Any slighting of the painter was a relative matter, in any event.  She had solo shows in New York starting in 1952 at the age of twenty-five - perhaps an indication of slow development today, but not then.  Her works steadily entered museum collections and were featured in exhibitions.  If you believe, as the authors of the catalog do, that her art stands at the highest level, then it's understandable that you might think she deserved even higher honors than she received in her lifetime.  Still, Mitchell wasn't exactly ignored.

So where do I come down?  I didn't see the exhibition.  While many of the works featured I've not seen in person, I have viewed many others since first reading Wilkin's early '90's review.  I'd say that while Mitchell produced fine work throughout her career, it's her canvases from the late '60's through the early '80's that really sing.  Her early work may be accomplished, but too often one can see the influences at play.  The work from the first half of the '60's has distinct stylistic concerns that at times makes it feel like a sideroad, while I feel that some of the airier canvases of the late '80s show a certain slackness.  The paintings from about 1967-1982, especially some of the large triptychs, are jawdropping in their invention and sense of color.  It's here that one sees most clearly what Nochlin was getting in her remark about Hofmann -  the blocks of color used as compositional anchors for Mitchell's exploration of the canvas surface.  In his exhibition review, Peter Schjeldahl remarked that "she might be seen as the last great foreign-born French painter, invigorating Parisian painterly sensuousness with American nerviness and New York School rigor."  I think this is a fair assessment, in that it underscores again her connections to de Kooning and Hofmann, while also suggesting how she stands somewhat apart and outside of the narrative of 20th century American painting.

Nochlin's essay posits a "rage to paint" on the part of Mitchell.  Given her literary interests and family background - her mother was involved in the early years of Poetry magazine - I was surprised that her essay did not make some use of Wallace Steven's "The Idea of Order at Key West".  Mitchell read Stevens closely, we are told in the catalog; and the imagery of the poem seems ripe for exploration in this context.  But that is a subject for another post.

(Two year old exhibition catalogs - now I really have Art in America beat...)

Comments

[Carolyn]

This is an absolutely lovely post. Have you seen this Nochlin-Mitchell exchange?

http://archivesofamericanart.si.edu/oralhist/mitche86.htm

[Miguel Sánchez]

Thanks, Carolyn. I did see that interview - and the catalog essays by Livingston and Nochlin draw heavily upon it as well. I had meant to link to it in the post, but forgot, so thanks again!