51 Facts About Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and used pastel and made other works on paper.

Joan Mitchell was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s.

Joan Mitchell was one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim.

Joan Mitchell enjoyed diving and skating growing up, and her art would later reflect this athleticism; one gallery owner commented that Mitchell "approached painting almost like a competitive sport".

Joan Mitchell frequently attended Saturday art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and eventually would spend her summers of later adolescence in an Institute-run art colony, Ox-Bow.

Joan Mitchell lived on Chestnut Street in the Streeterville neighborhood and attended high school at Francis W Parker School in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

Joan Mitchell was close to her Parker classmate Edward Gorey and remained friends with him in later years, although neither cared for the other's work.

Joan Mitchell studied at Smith College in Massachusetts and the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her BFA in 1947 and her MFA in 1950.

Joan Mitchell married American publisher Barney Rosset in September 1949 in Le Lavandou, France.

In 1950 Joan Mitchell painted what would be her last picture with a human figure incorporated in the work Figure and the City, of which she said later "I knew that it would be my last figure".

Joan Mitchell was a regular at established artist gathering spots like the Cedar Tavern and The Club, an invitation-only loft space on Eighth Street where Mitchell participated in panel discussions and attended social gatherings throughout the 1950s.

Joan Mitchell maintained a robust creative discourse with fellow New York School painters Philip Guston, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, whose work she greatly admired.

In 1951, Joan Mitchell's work was exhibited in the landmark "Ninth Street Show," organized by art dealer Leo Castelli and by members of the Artists' Club; the show included work by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Hans Hofmann.

Joan Mitchell carried her large abstract painting across town with the help of Castelli.

Joan Mitchell said that she was once told by Hans Hofmann that she should be painting, which sounds very nice, but she took it to mean that the male artists were not threatened by female artists so much that they did not care if they advanced their artistic career.

In 1955, while in Paris, Joan Mitchell met Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, with whom she would have a long, rich, and tumultuous relationship.

In 1956 Joan Mitchell painted one of her breakthrough works, Hemlock, named by the artist after it was completed for what she called the "dark and blue feeling" of Wallace Stevens' 1916 poem Domination of Black.

In October 1957, the first major feature on Joan Mitchell's work appeared in ARTnews.

Also in the early 1960s, Joan Mitchell had solo exhibitions in Paris with Galerie Neufville and Galerie Lawrence.

Joan Mitchell had additional solo exhibitions in Italy and Switzerland.

In 1967, Joan Mitchell inherited enough money following the death of her mother to purchase a two-acre estate in the town of Vetheuil, France, near Giverny, the gardener's cottage of which had been Claude Monet's home.

Joan Mitchell bought the house "so she wouldn't have to dogwalk" and that came in useful for her 13 dogs.

Joan Mitchell lived and worked there for the remainder of her life.

Joan Mitchell often invited artist friends from New York to come on creative retreats to Vetheuil.

In 1968, Joan Mitchell began exhibiting with Martha Jackson Gallery in New York; she continued to exhibit with the gallery into the 1970s.

In 1972, Joan Mitchell staged her first major museum exhibition, entitled My Five Years in the Country, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.

In 1969 Joan Mitchell completed her first large scale triptych, the 16.5 foot wide Sans Neige.

In 1976, Joan Mitchell began exhibiting regularly with New York gallerist Xavier Fourcade, who was her New York dealer until his death in 1987.

In 1979 Mitchell completed two of her [what went on to be] best known large scale works, the polyptychs La Vie en Rose and Salut Tom.

In 1982, Joan Mitchell became the first female American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

In Paris, Joan Mitchell had a circle of artist friends, such as the composer Gisele Barreau and painters such as Kate Van Houten, Claude Bauret Allard, Michaele-Andrea Schatt, Monique Frydman, Makhi Xenakis, Shirley Jaffe, Zuka, and Katy Crowe.

In November 1984, Joan Mitchell commenced sessions with Parisian psychoanalyst Christiane Rousseaux-Mosettig in the Bastille area.

In 1984, Joan Mitchell was diagnosed with advanced oral cancer and a mandibulectomy was advised.

Joan Mitchell had quit smoking on doctor's orders, but remained a heavy drinker.

Joan Mitchell underwent hip replacement surgery at Hopital Cochin in December 1985, but with little success.

In October 1992, Joan Mitchell flew to New York for a Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Joan Mitchell died on the morning of October 30,1992, at the American Hospital of Paris.

Joan Mitchell painted primarily with oil paints on primed canvas or white ground, using gestural, sometimes violent brushwork.

Joan Mitchell even compared these feelings that influenced her paintings to poetry.

Joan Mitchell's work was featured in mid-career surveys in 1961 and 1974, and a major late-career retrospective toured in 1988 and 1989.

Joan Mitchell imbued their painterliness with a compositional and chromatic bravery that defiantly alarms us into grasping their beauty.

Joan Mitchell's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

In September 2021, a comprehensive retrospective, Joan Mitchell, opened at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Joan Mitchell's art is held in the permanent collection of over 100 public institutions worldwide.

Joan Mitchell's artwork has been extremely commercially successful, both during her lifetime and after her death.

Joan Mitchell earned over $30,000 in art sales between 1960 and 1962, while still in the middle of her career.

At the time of her death in 1992, Joan Mitchell was represented by Robert Miller Gallery in New York and Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris.

In 2019, Mitchell's multi-panel works were the subject of a solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York, entitled Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me.

That year, Joan Mitchell's canvases were the two most expensive works by any woman artist sold at auction, according to auction database Artnet.

Works by Joan Mitchell fetched $239.8 million in sales from 1985 through 2013, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg.

In June 2018, nine of Joan Mitchell's paintings were expected to sell for more than $70 million at the world's largest modern art fair, Art Basel.