Artists on Mitchell: Elana Herzog

As part of Mitchell’s centennial celebration, we’re launching a new series: On Mitchell, highlighting the work and voices of contemporary artists in dialogue with Mitchell's work across generations. We begin with New York artist Elana Herzog.

Coming of age in the 1970’s, I viewed Joan Mitchell as an important painter who had succeeded as “a woman in a man’s world”—someone to be admired because she had penetrated the inner circle of her male peers and adopted their language. But it was still their language, and she was implicitly secondary to her male counterparts. I was a student at Bennington College, where the critic Clement Greenberg was a big influence, and the explicitly feminist artwork that was being done at the time was not being taught there. Helen Frankenthaler, a graduate of the college, was an icon, and Mitchell was one of the few other female abstract painters I knew about at the time.

My personal struggle to find a voice and a language that did not feel dominated by patriarchy took me away from abstract painting and towards materials, methods, and imagery that I didn’t associate with the painting and sculpture that I knew. It wasn’t until years later that I understood that, while I considered myself a feminist, I carried an unconscious bias against these women artists.

Reconnecting with Mitchell’s work has been a part of coming to terms with this bias and allowing myself to engage her painting on a much deeper level. I deeply admire Mitchell’s independent personality and her ambition, but also the sheer insistence and solidity of her painting. Mitchell’s work participates in a conversation about whether or not abstraction can ever really be divorced from figuration, and also about how the gestural brush stroke is an expression of both an emotional and an intellectual process.

Mitchell’s use of multiple panels challenges the idea of the picture plane as a singular "window," and throws her paintings into the realm of epic narrative, as well as the landscape where it is so clearly grounded. In 2022, when I was an Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, I wanted to make a piece that contained several panels, as an homage to Joan. The resulting work consists of two panels, connected by a fold, or cleavage, if you will.

Elana Herzog was a 1999 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundaton's Painters & Sculptors Grant and a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center. Learn more about her work at elanaherzog.com.