Joan Mitchell retrospective at SFMOMA
Joan Mitchell - Untitled 1992
From 4 September 2021 to 17 January 2022, SFMOMA in San Francisco presents a retrospective of the work of Joan Mitchell, one of the great figures of the Post War abstract art.
Source: SFMOMA, San Francisco. Image: Joan Mitchell, "Untitled", 1992; collection Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg; photo: courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.
"Joan Mitchell" is a comprehensive retrospective featuring some 80 works representing the artist's entire creative evolution, from paintings from the early part of her career, which have rarely been shown in public, to the large-scale multi-panel works common in the last phase of her career. After SFMOMA, the retrospective will travel to the Baltimore Museum of Art (6 March to 14 August 2022), and then to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in autumn 2022. In any case, ten of the works exhibited in San Francisco will not travel to the other two institutions.
"Mitchell’s glorious paintings radiate with the vitality, feeling and sweeping color we usually experience only in the natural world," explained Sarah Roberts, SFMOMA's Head of Painting and Sculpture. Katy Siegel, Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University, said Mitchell's work "challenges our ideas about great art. Mitchell was not simply ‘making it’ in an environment created and occupied by men, she was actively remaking painting and its possibilities".
Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell was one of the leading figures of the second generation of Abstract Expressionism. Younger than other painters of the movement, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, her youth did not prevent her from taking part in the important exhibition "Ninth Street Show," organised by Leo Castelli in 1951, when Mitchell was barely twenty-six. The painter remained in New York until 1959, when she moved to Paris. From this early phase of her career, the SFMOMA exhibition includes works such as "The Bridge" (1956) and "Evenings on 73rd Street" (1957).
In France Mitchell's style changed to darker tones. In 1967 the painter bought a house near Giverny (where Claude Monet lived in the latter part of his career), where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. The influence of French life and landscape is shown in works such as "La Vie en Rose" (1979) and "South" (1989).

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