Joan Mitchell (1925–1992)

Joan Mitchell was an American “second generation” abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. She was a member of the American abstract expressionist movement, even though much of her career took place in France.

Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Shirley Jaffe and Sonia Gechtoff, she was one of her era’s few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim.

Her paintings and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections across the United States and Europe.

Mitchell studied at Smith College in Massachusetts and The Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her BFA in 1947 and her MFA in 1950. 

Mitchell is recognized as a principal figure—and one of the few female artists—in the second generation of American Abstract Expressionists.

By the early 1950s, she was regarded as a leading artist in the New York Schoo. In her early years as a painter, she was influenced by Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and later by the work of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, Jean-Paul Riopelle, among others. 

Her paintings are expansive, often covering two separate panels. Landscape was the primary influence on her subject matter. She painted on unprimed canvas or white ground with gestural, sometimes violent brushwork.

She has described a painting as “an organism that turns in space”