Abstract Expressionist Painter (1926 - 1992) 

Joan Mitchell, a member of the second generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, moved to New York in the late forties. There she met many of the Abstract Expressionist artists who greatly influenced her work, including de Kooning and Kline. She travelled to France many times in the fifties, where she became a prominent purveyor of American ideas about art. In fact, Mitchell developed a following in Europe before many of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists did. When the first generation of Abstract Expressionists concerned themselves with divorcing European influence and ideas, Mitchell ended up moving to France in the early sixties. She continued to work in her native American mode, becoming one of the best known American abstract painters, until her death in 1992. The following contains excerpts from Joan Mitchell, by Judith E. Bernstock, 1988, Hudson Hills Press, NY Mitchell began exhibiting with the Abstract Expressionists in the earlt 1950s and has remained a quintessential New York School painter despite the fact that she lived in France for thirty years (for twenty of them on a hill in Vetheuil above the gardener's cottage that was once Claude Monet's home). An uncompromising abstractionist, Mitchell nevertheless manages to convey her deep feelings about nature and landscape in her art. Mitchell was a second generation abstractionist. Not threatened by Europe, surrealism held little appeal for these artists. The lesser anguish in their work is offset by a greater sensuousness and insistence on the surface. The differences between the two generations of artists must be attributed to the different moments of time in which they matured. The crisis involving the existential identification of the artist with his work belonged to the period immediately following World War II and could not be maintained after 1953 - even by Pollock, de Kooning, or Kline - because the circumstances had changed. more text to come...