This life story is a smart, sexy, full-bodied read. We get it all: from Mitchell’s Midwestern ancestors to her early success in New York’s art world to her deathbed in Paris. Drinker, lover, painter, traveler. Rude, crude, mean. What a life!
Joan Mitchell (1925 – 1992) was born to great wealth in Chicago. Her mother was a poet, her father a dermatologist. The younger of two girls, they’d wanted a boy.
What they got was a synesthete with a photographic memory who would stop at nothing to finish paintings for a show, get a man, nab an apartment. That said, Albers does a fine job showing the gentler side, documenting Mitchell’s grace in opening her home and studio to young artists. Mitchell could be very, very kind and very, very cruel, often in the same evening.
Mitchell is classified as an abstract expressionist, the post World War II art made in New York. But her move to France in the 1960s put her just up the road from Monet’s Giverney home, and her later works carry the unmistakeable deep blues of the French artists (Monet, Matisse) she followed.
Painting, color, memory transferred to the canvas, the physicality of her work: that’s the thread of this book. But the noise and brilliance of this read is in the life told. The extravagant childhood in Chicago’s Gold Coast, her bedroom view of Lake Michigan, her education at the exclusive Francis W. Parker school, the troubled relationships with family, friends, lovers.
Married briefly to a high school sweetheart (the publisher Barney Rosset, Jr.), Mitchell flaunted her sexuality by sleeping with any one she chose. In the 1950s Mitchell lived the bohemian life on St. Mark’s Place and summered in the Hamptons with fellow painters. In Paris she took up with Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, insisting he divorce his Catholic wife. For 20 years, she and Riopelle shared a home and studios in France, with beloved dogs and his visiting daughters. It couldn’t last: abortions, jealousy, booze set them in an endless battle. “At first shocking and disturbing, their fights quickly felt boring and sad.â€
Is it possible to love the life story of someone you don’t especially like? I did. Mitchell held her own in an art world dominated by men. She loved wildly. (Samuel Beckett, among others, gave her up.) Most impressive to me was Mitchell’s march to the grave: she never stopped working. “Frail, arthritic, semi-ambulatory, farsighted, dying of cancer,†she continued to paint huge canvases, make prints and work in pastels until her last days.
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