Joan Mitchell’s Story
Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) is widely recognized as one of the most significant American artists of the post-war era. Her abstract paintings are distinguished by their physicality, daring use of color, and personal interpretation of the natural world.
A native of Chicago, Mitchell studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon graduating in 1947, she spent over a year in France before settling in New York in late 1949. There, she became an active participant in the “New York School” of painters and poets, exploring different approaches to composition and gesture as part of the emerging Abstract Expressionist movement.
Over the next four decades, Mitchell dedicated herself to the single-minded pursuit of abstract painting of the highest order, while moving between New York, Paris, and later the French countryside in Vétheuil, where she made her home from 1968 until her death in 1992. Throughout her long and varied career, Mitchell drew on experiences and memories of the world around her—particularly views of cities, fields, rivers, lakes, and trees—as sources for her work. She once said, "I carry my landscapes around with me."
