Joan Mitchell: An Illustrated Timeline

Joan Mitchell is born February 12 in Chicago, Illinois, to James Herbert and Marion Strobel Mitchell. She is the second of two daughters.

Mitchell's poem, Autumn, is published in Poetry magazine, where her mother is an editor.

Throughout her youth, Mitchell is active in competitive athletics, including horseback riding, diving, and figure skating.

Mitchell wins the Midwest Junior Pairs Title with ice skating partner Bobby Specht.

Mitchell places fourth in the Junior Women's Division of the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

She enters Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, as an English major.

Mitchell has her first solo art exhibition at her alma mater, the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago.

Mitchell transfers to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to study Fine Arts and spends her summer painting and making prints at Ox-Bow, an art colony operated by The Art Institute in Saugatuck, Michigan.

During the summers of 1945 and 1946, Mitchell travels to Mexico where she paints in Guanajuato.

Mitchell graduates and is awarded the James Nelson Raymond Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute. Due to post-war condi­tions in Europe, she will not use this fellowship until her 1948 voyage to France.

Her lithograph Tired Children (ca. 1947) is shown in the Fifty-first Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity at the Art Institute of Chicago and receives the Print Committee Prize.

Mitchell establishes residence with Barney Rosset at 1 Fulton Street in Brooklyn, where she continues to paint.

Mitchell travels to Paris where she rents a studio at 73 Rue Galande.

Mitchell leaves Paris for Le Lavandou on France's Cote d'Azur, where she and Barney Rosset live at the Villa le Pin. They are married on September 10, and begin their return to the U.S. later that month.

Mitchell receives a Master in Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In New York, she establishes a studio on 11th Street, and later 9th Street. She meets Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and becomes part of the downtown scene, spending time at the Cedar Bar and participating in discussions at the Artists' Club.

Mitchell has solo exhibitions at the Saint Paul Gallery and School of Art in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Bank Lane Gallery in Lake Forest, Illinois.

Mitchell moves to 10th Street and participates in the 9th Street Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture organized by Leo Castelli and the Artists' Club.

She studies Art History at Columbia University and French at New York University, and helps to estab­lish the avant-garde publishing company Grove Press with husband Barney Rosset.

Mitchell has her first solo exhibition in New York at the New Gallery.

She and Barney Rosset divorce and she moves to 60 St. Mark's Place. She develops a friendship with poet Frank O'Hara and becomes associated with his circle of writers and artists.

Mitchell participates in The Second Annual Exhibi­tion of Painting and Sculpture at the Stable Gallery in New York.

Her solo exhibition with the Stable Gallery opens in April.

During the summers of 1953 and 1954, Mitchell lives and paints on the east end of Long Island.

Mitchell travels to Paris where she meets painter Jean Paul Riopelle, with whom she will live for over twenty years.

Mitchell participates in Vanguard 1955, an important group exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Other exhibitions this year include the Pittsburgh International at the Carnegie Institute and the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She has her second solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery.

Mitchell meets Samuel Beckett, who will remain a close friend.

Mitchell is included in the traveling exhi­bition Recent American Watercolorists organized by the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Mitchell exhibits Color in Space (1956) and Hudson River Day Line (1956) in the important group ex­hibition Artists of the New York School: Second Generation at the Jewish Museum, New York.

The essay Mitchell Paints a Picture by Irving Sandler is published in ARTnews magazine, accompanied by photographs of Mitchell in her studio by Rudy Burckhardt.

Her third solo exhibition with the Stable Gallery opens.

The Whitney Museum of American Art purchases Hemlock (1956).

City Landscape (1954-1955) is included in the 18th Annual Society for Contemporary American Art Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and is selected for purchase for the perma­nent collection.

The paintings Ladybug (1957) and October Island (1956) are exhibited in the Interna­tional Young Artists section of the Venice Biennale.

Mitchell moves to Paris and leases a studio at 10 Rue Frémicourt with Jean Paul Riopelle.

The painting August, rue Daguerre (1957) is exhibited at documen­ta II in Kassel, Germany.

Mitchell has two solo exhibitions in Europe: at Galerie Neufville in Paris and Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan.

Tiber Press publishes The Poems, a collabo­ration between Mitchell and John Ashbery which forms part of a four-volume set of artist-poet collab­orations.

Mitchell's mother Marion Strobel is diag­nosed with cancer.

Mitchell is awarded the Premio Lissone.

Her painting Atlantic Side (1960) is included in the group exhibition American Abstract Expression­ists and Imagists at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

ARTnews magazine reproduces Skyes (1961) on its cover.

The exhibition Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1951-1961, is held at the Mr. and Mrs. John Russell Mitchell Gallery, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchases Ladybug (1957).

Mitchell has solo exhibitions at Galerie Jacques Dubourg and Galerie Lawrence, both in Paris; Klipstein & Kornfeld in Bern, Switzerland; and the New Gallery, MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mitchell's father James Herbert Mitchell passes away.

Mitchell's mother Marion Strobel Mitchell passes away on March 14.

Frank O'Hara dies in an accident on July 25 (this date later becomes the title of a suite of Mitchell’s paintings).

Mitchell purchases an estate overlooking the Seine in the village of Vétheuil, northwest of Paris.

She has her first solo exhibition at Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris in May and participates in the show In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara, a memorial exhibition and publication organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Mitchell has her first solo exhibition at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York.

She establishes permanent residence in Vétheuil.

Mitchell is awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Western College (now part of Miami University) in Oxford, Ohio.

Mitchell has her first major museum solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country: An Exhibition of Forty-nine Paintings by Joan Mitchell, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.

She creates a series of seven large-scale etchings with publisher Arte Adrien Maeght, Paris.

Mitchell receives the Creative Arts Award Citation in Painting of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, during a ceremony held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Mitchell's solo exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker, opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Mitchell creates numerous pastel drawings on paper with typed poems by friends Jacques Dupin, J. J. Mitchell, James Schuyler, Pierre Schneider, and Chris Larson.

Mitchell has her first solo exhibition with Xavier Fourcade Gallery, New York.

Mitchell's relationship with Riopelle ends.

Mitchell creates the Bedford Series, a group of ten large color lithographs published by Tyler Graphics Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York.

Edrita Fried, Mitchell’s former psychologist and longtime friend, dies of cancer. Mitchell titles a quadriptych painting Edrita Fried in her honor.

Mitchell has her first major European museum solo exhibition, Joan Mitchell: Choix de Peintures, 1970-1982, at the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris. She is the first female American artist to have an exhibition at the museum.

Mitchell's older sister Sally Perry dies of cancer.

Mitchell begins the Grande Vallée paintings, a suite of twenty-one monumental works inspired by a hidden valley in Brittany precious to dear friend Gisèle Barreau and her cousin during their child­hood.

Mitchell is diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and begins a series of treatments.

Mitchell is hospitalized for hip surgery.

Gallery owner Xavier Fourcade dies.

Mitchell receives the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association of America. Mitchell is the first artist to receive this newly established award.

She also receives an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is appointed Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

Mitchell's retrospective exhibition, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell: Thirty-six Years of Natural Expres­sionism, organized for the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, tours the United States with stops at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Joan Mitchell, edited by Judith E. Bernstock, guest curator of the exhibition, is published by Hudson Hills Press, New York, to accompany the exhibition; it is the first full monograph on the artist.

Mitchell is hospitalized for a second hip operation. After the surgery she leases a studio on Rue Cam­pagne-Première in Montparnasse, where she works on pastel drawings.

She receives the Grand Prix National de Peinture in France and has her first solo exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery, New York.

Limestone Press publishes Smoke, a book of Mitch­ell's etchings and poems by Charles Hine.

Mitchell receives the Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris in painting.

Mitchell returns to Tyler Graphics in Mount Kisco, New York where she and Ken Tyler collaborate on the Fields, Trees, and Weeds suites of prints.

Mitchell's first solo museum exhibition of drawings, Joan Mitchell: Pastel, opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In conjunction with the exhibition Joan Mitchell: Pastel, a monograph with an introduction by Klaus Kertess, is published by Robert Miller, New York.

Éditions de La Dif­ference, Paris, publishes Joan Mitchell by Michel Waldberg, the first monograph in French on the artist.

Poems, with text by Nathan Kernan and eight color lithographs by Mitchell, is published by Tyler Graphics Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York.

On October 30, 1992, Mitchell dies of lung cancer in a Paris hospital.