Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1925. As a young woman she attended Smith College and then the Art Institute of Chicago where she received her Master’s of Fine Art. Following her formal training Mitchell moved to Greenwich Village in New York, where she became part of the abstract painting community. The influence of the Abstract Expressionists on Mitchell’s aesthetic was profound, particularly the work of Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline. Despite her use of the same visual language as the Abstract Expressionists, her practice differed greatly, she approached her canvas’s carefully and methodically, unlike the “action painting” practiced by her peers. In 1955 Mitchell left New York for Paris where she spent a number of years before moving to the suburbs of Vétheuil, a city whose landscapes held the imagination of Claude Monet eighty years earlier. Mitchell remained devoted to the visual language of abstraction despite changing fashions. Mitchell faced a number of health crises in the late 1980s but she lived to see her first major retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art that opened in 1988. Mitchell succumbed to cancer a few years later in 1992. 
Joan Mitchell Paintings