Joan Mitchell
(1925 - 1992)
Joan Mitchell was an abstract artist whose exceptional career spanned more than four decades. She worked in a variety of mediums—including oil painting, pastel on paper, and printmaking—and is widely recognized as one of the most significant artists of the post-war era. Her approach to abstraction is distinguished for its physicality, daring use of color, and direct connections to her everyday experiences of landscape, people, poetry, music, and even her beloved dogs.
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Born in Chicago on February 12, 1925, Mitchell was raised in a household that valued the arts—attending the symphony, visiting museums, and reading poetry. She began studying painting seriously at age 11, and later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon graduating in 1947, she was awarded a travel fellowship that took her to France for a year, where her paintings became increasingly abstract. Returning to the United States in late 1949, Mitchell settled in New York, and within a year, she became an active participant in the “New York School” of painters and poets. Her work was exhibited in the famous “9th Street Show” in 1951, and she rapidly established a reputation as one of the leading young Abstract Expressionist painters.
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Mitchell achieved significant critical and commercial success in her lifetime, exhibiting regularly in New York and Paris throughout her career. The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major institutions began collecting her paintings in the 1950s. The Whitney Museum mounted a significant exhibition of her work in 1974. In 1982, Mitchell became the first female American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris. A retrospective exhibition, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell: Thirty-six Years of Natural Expressionism, toured the United States in 1988 and 1989, with stops at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
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Mitchell’s major awards and accomplishments include: Le Grand Prix des Arts (Peinture) of the City of Paris (1991); the Award for Painting from the French Ministry of Culture (1989); the inaugural Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association of America (1988); Honorary Doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1987) and The Western College, Oxford, Ohio (1971); and the Premio Lissone, Milan (1961).
