"Once Mitchell began painting sunflowers, she never stopped. 'Sunflowers are something I feel very intensely,' she said in 1986, nearly two decades after inaugurating her first Sunflower Series. 'They look so wonderful when young and so very moving when they're dying'… Mitchell would return periodically to the motif as a means of self-reflection throughout her career, inflecting each iteration with mood and season."
A symphony of explosive gesture and intimate emotional intent, Joan Mitchell's Bottom Yellow from 1981 is an exceptional embodiment of the rich surface textures and masterful brushwork that define the artist's output from this glorious phase of her career. In its cascading hues of lilac, blue, verdant green and goldenrod yellow, the present work speaks to the profound inspiration Mitchell drew from the flourishing bucolic landscape of her surroundings in Vétheuil, where she moved in 1968 after almost a decade in Paris. There, Mitchell began planting rows of sunflowers- her favorite blooms -in her beloved garden: flowers would which go on to spark a two-decade-long meditation on the motif and serve as inspiration for some of the most radiant paintings of her oeuvre. Exuberant ribbons of color leap and vault with unbridled energy across the surface of this mesmerizing painting, revealing a veritable tour de force of painterly mark-making within Bottom Yellow. Executed at the beginning of what is considered Joan Mitchell's most formative decade, Bottom Yellow represents a pinnacle in Mitchell's unique brand of Abstract Expressionism. Never before seen by the public, Bottom Yellow has notably been held in the esteemed collects ion of the Kinney family for over 40 years. Distinguished by its exceptional provenance, Bottom Yellow was selected by the family following a visit to Mitchell's home in Vétheuil, where they first saw the present work in her studio.
- 1950-1951
- 1955
- 1956
- 1956-1958
- 1967-1968
- 1974
- 1981
- 1982
- 1991
-
1950-1951After receiving a Master of Replica Handbags s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mitchell moves to New York City and befriends pivotal members of the New York School of painting, participating in Leo Castelli’s “Ninth Street Show” alongside abstract expressionists Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.
Poster for the Ninth Street Show, Leo Castelli Gallery, 1951 -
1955In 1955, Mitchell participates in the important group exhibition Vanguard 1955 at the Walker arts Center in Minneapolis. During this t.mes , she is also featured as part of the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Pittsburgh International at the Carnegie Institute.
Joan Mitchell in her Paris studio on Rue Daguerre, 1956 -
1956At the apex of her New York period, Mitchell paints Untitled in c.1956, an instrumental work betraying the influence of her Abstract Expressionist peers whilst retaining some of the essential inspiration the artist drew from the European Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Irving Sandler’s renowned essay “Mitchell Paints a Picture” is published in October of this year, marking the first major piece of literature published on Mitchell’s work.
Lot: 3
Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1956
Estimate: $1,500,000 - $2,000,000 -
1956-1958The Whitney Museum of American Art purchases Mitchell’s painting Hemlock in 1956. Two years later, the artist's paintings Ladybug and October are exhibited at the 29th Venice Biennale as part of the International Young Artists Section, a test.mes nt to Mitchell’s prominence as an artist.
Joan Mitchell, Hemlock, 1956, The Whitney Museum of American Art -
1967-1968After living in Paris for almost a decade, Mitchell buys a small estate north of the city in Vétheuil. Mitchell is deeply inspired by the surrounding idyllic landscape, one that was also an inspiration to Claude Monet. The larger space and higher ceilings enabled her to paint using thick impasto at an expansive scale without worrying about damaging the works when leaving the studio.
Claude Monet, Vétheuil in Summer, 1880 -
1974Mitchell's seminal solo exhibition curated by Marcia Tucker opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art, exhibiting twenty-two paintings completed in Vétheuil.
Whitney Museum of American Art, c. 1960s -
1981In 1981 Mitchell paints Bottom Yellow, drawing from the flourishing landscape of her surroundings in Vétheuil. Mitchell began planting rows of sunflowers in her beloved garden, flowers which would spark a two-decade-long meditation on the motif and serve as inspiration for some of the most radiant paintings within her oeuvre. Never before seen by the public, Bottom Yellow was selected by the Kinney family following a visit to Mitchell’s home in Vétheuil, where they first viewed the painting in her studio.
Lot: 16
Joan Mitchell, Bottom Yellow, 1981
Estimate: $3,000,000 - $4,000,000 -
1982Mitchell’s solo exhibition Joan Mitchell: Choix de Peintures, 1970-1982 opens at the Musee d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1982, making her the first female American artist shown at the institution.
Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, c. 1960 -
1991In the final years of her life, Mitchell’s work is deeply reflective of her struggle with mortality in the face of her declining health. Yves is one of such paintings, executed in the last year of her life and inspired by her close friend Yves Michaud. She expressed to Michaud a desire to capture his essence as if in a picture, eternally alive within the frame of the canvas. The same year, Mitchell receives the prestigious Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris in painting.
Lot: 10
Joan Mitchell, Yves, 1991
Estimate: $10,000,000 - $15,000,000
Following her move to Vétheuil, Mitchell found newfound solace in her idyllic surroundings and subsequently produced some of her most vibrantly colored, luxuriously textured, and harmoniously composed canvases. The inspiration of her garden in Vétheuil and her beloved sunflowers is remarkably compelling within the present work; rather than seeking to represent her flowers in literal form, however, Mitchell deftly summons the sensation of riotous organic growth within painterly abstraction, successfully evoking the sensation of gazing upon a glorious bed of brightly-colored blooms. Art Historian Jane Livingston writes that this series of paintings "embody Mitchell's final synthesis of her decades of excruciatingly hard-won expertise as a painter. She achieves an explication of all she has mastered in [an] intricate, ornate, recalcitrant style." (Jane Livingston, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, California 2002, p. 44) Although Mitchell's life was not wholly idyllic at her countryside home, her partner Jean Riopelle left her for another woman in 1979 and she suffered profoundly from this loss; she appeared to find a renewed degree of claritys and contentment in Vétheuil that was absent from her years in Paris, which were marked by recurring depression. In the following years, she found inspiration and relief in her profoundly moving and intimate paintings from this period.
Within Bottom Yellow, Mitchell invites the viewer to imagine the physicality of her creative process through an unencumbered gestural vocabulary. The rich vitality of the present work is complemented by its intimate composition, nimble tactility and deft brushwork, all of which present an intense dialogue with her Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. Complimented by the richly textured surface and vigorous mark-making, the exquisite beauty of Bottom Yellow is further rooted in Mitchell's profound, lifelong appreciation for the beauty of the natural world. A constant presence within her abstract painterly idiom, Mitchell's affinity for landscape fostered in her a strong connection to the French Impressionists and European Post-Impressionists. As Richard D. Marshall describes, "throughout her evolution as an abstract painter, Mitchell consistently sought to converge her interests in nature, emotion, and painting. Her subjects were landscape, color, and light and their interaction on a painterly field, and her energetic physical gestures were filled with a romantic sensibility." (Richard D. Marshall, "Joan Mitchell: The Last Decade, 1982—1992" in Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Joan Mitchell: The Last Decade, 2010, p. 8)
"Vétheuil would feed the artist's love of color, her feelings for trees and water and sky, her affinity for elevated views that recall other views, and her investment in painting traditions going back to the nineteenth century."
Mitchell's connection to and love for the verdant idyll of the French countryside fostered within her the conceptual freedom to create a highly idiosyncratic painterly style: one which marries the ethereal with the physical, the felt with the seen. In Vétheuil, secluded from the dominant narrative of Abstract Expressionism, her paintings began to exhibit the same sumptuousness of palette and exquisite awareness of light, color, and air articulated in the captivating en plein air paintings of her predecessors such as Claude Monet, who painted the landscapes of Vétheuil years before. Luxuriously layered and smeared upon the soaring canvas, Mitchell's saturated strokes powerfully invoke Monet's late renderings of his rose garden at Giverny, yet rather than striving to emulate a specific landscape, Bottom Yellow powerfully combines allusions to nature and memory within her entirely unique brand of abstraction. In its abstract summation of natural beauty, Bottom Yellow is a perfect invocation of Mitchell's own stat.mes nt: "I would rather leave nature to itself. It is quite beautiful enough as it is. I do not want to improve it…I certainly never mirror it. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with. (Joan Mitchell quoted in Marcia Tucker, Joan Mitchell, New York 1974, p. 8)
A breathtaking example of Mitchell's late work, Bottom Yellow endures as a beacon of lush chromatic vibrancy and visually arresting abstraction, serving as a triumphant test.mes nt to the unrivalled beauty, intimacy and profound emotion that define the very best of Mitchell's artistic production. Captivatingly atmospheric, the present work combines the visual languages of abstraction and landscape in a maelstrom of pigment. Anchored by Mitchell's masterful use of emphatic brushwork, the lush layers of yellow, blue, green and lilac impasto dramatically dance across the work with an exuberant dynamism, creating a composition which seems to bloom skyward before our very eyes. Deeply intimate yet defiantly abstract, Mitchell here captures the raw beauty of the landscape through a lens of color and movement.
