“My paintings are titled after they are finished. I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I would certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.”
E xecuted in the very year that Joan Mitchell permanently relocated to France, Goulphar II embodies her independent approach to painting, deeply entrenched in her surroundings, as she stepped away from the Abstract Expressionist scene in New York. The mid 1950s cemented Mitchell as a leading painter of her t.mes , and this move followed a year of high success for the artist; two of her paintings were acquired by esteemed museum collects ions—the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago—and she continued to gain acclaim in New York. Though she will visit and continue to show in New York with regularity after her move to Paris, Mitchell will not paint there again. Mitchell leases a studio with fellow artist Jean Paul Riopelle at 10 rue Frémicourt, and the artists’ twenty-five year relationship was characterized by passion and artistic exchange. Goulphar II presents the nuance characteristic of Mitchell’s paintings, which embody the visceral responses to and experiences of her surroundings. The present work, the second of her two paintings of Port-Goulphar, Belle-Île, demonstrates Mitchell’s in-depth response and visual exploration of the specific site; it is this emotive response to landscape that is at the very core of Mitchell’s ever-compelling oeuvre. Arrested by its beauty when she unexpectedly encountered it in a gallery, the present owner immediately acquired Goulphar II, a test.mes nt to its all encompassing beauty.
Right: Joan Mitchell and Jean Paul Riopelle, Paris, 1963. Photo by Heidi Meister.
Mitchell found inspiration in other French artists, and her all-over abstraction rooted in landscape was particularly informed by her exposure to Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet. Port-Goulphar was a source of inspiration for Monet as well—the Impressionist artist was so taken by the site that he stayed there for more than two months, and produced a group of paintings which depict the rock formations at the port. Mitchell, too, explored this site in more than one painting; rather than depicting the light and literal beauty of the place, however, Mitchell’s works capture the feeling of the specific site through gestural brushstrokes and nuanced washings of paint on the canvas. Writing of Mitchell's work in comparison with Jackson Pollock's, critic and curator Klaus Kertess remarked, "The downward drips and splashes and centralizing arching of her strokes have an in-and-out dynamic that is unlike Pollock's more lateral thrust of paint flung with the canvas on the floor. Pollock’s paintings are more all-engulfing; his ‘I am nature’ is very different than Mitchell’s being with nature in memory” (Klaus Kertess, “The Paintings of Joan Mitchell” in Joan Mitchell, New York 1997, p. 25). Similarly to Monet, however, Mitchell acknowledges light through her use of white as a highlight, which is a technique somewhat uncommon in her oeuvre. Alongside this masterful command of her palette, Mitchell employs an incredible range of gestures, from peaks of impasto, to saturated smears of pigment, to delicate passages of thin wash. Dynamic strokes of paint are offset by creamy white passages throughout the composition, which lends balance and opposition to this abstracted landscape.
Fully present in Goulphar II is Mitchell’s extraordinary mark-making, which is defined by a deep reverence and devotion to gesture. Brushstrokes take on qualities that are calligraphic, thin, blurred, scraped—through this, Mitchell conveys the power of memory, experience, and sensory engagement with nature, themes that are at the essential core of her painting. Goulphar II is wholly abstract yet undeniably reminiscent of landscape, and bears undeniable witness to the artist’s status as the foremost female painter of the Abstract Expressionist generation.
1959 Paintings by Joan Mitchell in Museum collects ions
