“It is easy to get caught up in the drama of her privileged upbringing, her friends and lovers, her sometimes outrageous behavior,” Roberts observes. To take on this artist in 2021/22 is to time-travel between contemporaneous and contemporary concerns, It is to engage without eggshell-walking the central dilemmas of reckoning with Mitchell: How do we, if it is even possible, separate the artist from the persona from the person?Ĭentral to that reckoning are her struggles to compete and flourish as a “lady painter” (to borrow the title of Patricia Albers’ revelatory 2011 biography of Mitchell) in the heyday of male-dominated Abstract Expressionism. How to do justice to a figure as protean and complex as Joan Mitchell? Having culled more than 80 works and a treasure trove of archival photographs, sketches, drawings, and juicy personal correspondence, co-curators Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel have answered that quandary with a deftness born of deep research and keen insight, evinced by the exhibition’s intuitive flow and revelations brought forth in their probing, refreshingly unpretentious catalogue, published by SFMOMA and Yale University Press. It varies vastly from one quadrant to the next, will not be pigeonholed or hemmed in, contains Whitmanesque multitudes and as such is quintessentially American - even though the artist adored France and made arguably her most exultant paintings in her studio above the village of Vétheuil, an hour northwest of Paris, situated on the river Seine. A Mitchell painting is like Montana’s big-sky country. To the extent art-lovers gravitate toward works whose stylistic timbre resonates within our psyches, I have long felt a buzz upon beholding Mitchell’s lyrical abstractions, which marry large-scale demarcation of space and form with intricately calligraphic slivers of color and arcing black lines that can impart the look of stained glass. I would not, could not, have missed this show for the world. I call it a pilgrimage because Mitchell resides on a list I keep in my head called Top Five Favorite Artists of All Time. Just before Christmas I made a pilgrimage to “Joan Mitchell,” the long-anticipated retrospective in San Francisco.

Patricia albers joan mitchell