Joan Mitchell

(United States of America, 12/02/1925 - 30/10/1992)

George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold (1957)

Born in Chicago to a wealthy family, Mitchell was immersed in the city’s cultural elite from the very beginning; her mother was a poet and her father a doctor, which provided her not only financial security but access to artists of all kinds. 

Despite this, her childhood wasn’t all rainbows and daisies, as she had a complex and often abusive relationship with her father, who wished he had been born a boy and who instilled in her a competitive nature that drove her to compete in (and win) championships in figure skating, horseback riding and diving. By her early teens, however, she had already decided on pursuing a career as an artist and, with the financial support of her parents, began studying a BFA at Smith College and then her MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago, won a scholarship to study in Paris and Provence for a year before settling in New York in the summer of 1949.

Leaning hungrily further into abstraction, work was a welcomed influence of the New York scene and ‘Second Generation’ abstract artists who were pursuing the same. Here, she exhibited at the landmark Ninth Street Show in 1951 alongside Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner, and, in 1956, had her work acquired by the Whitney Museum.

Returning to Paris in 1955, Mitchell created eighteen works in her first six months in the city but struggled to show them with galleries disapproving of her being both a woman and American. Undeterred, she continued and, in 1982, became the first American woman to have a retrospective at the Musee d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. 

Though she lived permanently in France from 1959, she frequently travelled back to the U.S. and remained in contact with the abstract circles in New York, working continuously until hear death in 1992. Ever a generous supporter of artists, she formed the Joan Mitchell Foundation in her will, with a mandate to create direct support programs for individual artists.

Image: Joan Mitchell, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold (1957). Oil on canvas, 222.8 x 198.7 cm. Buffalo AKG Art Museum.