“Meaning and emotional intensity are produced structurally…by a whole series of oppositions: dense versus transparent strokes; gridded structure versus more chaotic, ad hoc construction; weight on the bottom of the canvas versus weight at the top; light versus dark; choppy versus continuous brushstrokes; harmonious and clashing juxtapositions of hue—all are potent signs of meaning and feeling.”
E xuberant ribbons of color leap and vault with unbridled energy across the surface of Joan Mitchell’s Untitled from 1974, a rare example of a tondo from the artist’s diverse oeuvre that reveals a veritable tour de force of painterly mark-making. Executed the same year as Mitchell’s major mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, the present work represents a pinnacle in Mitchell’s unique brand of Abstract Expressionism at an apex of her critical success. Captivatingly atmospheric, the present work brings together the visual languages of abstraction and landscape in a maelstrom of pigment framed within a circular canvas. Painted at an early market peak in Mitchell’s long and varied career, characterized by critically lauded and commercially successful gallery shows, the present work endures as a beacon of chromatic and textural expression, played out throughout the canvas with an entrancing sense of intimacy and urgency that is singular to the artist. Through this rhythmic and instinctual extension of the artist’s gesture, Untitled conveys the power of memory, experience, and sensory engagement with nature, themes that are at the essential core of Mitchell’s practice. Having remained in the collects ion of the same Chicago family since its initial acquisition the year it was executed, this rarefied treasure has never before appeared at auction. The work has been exhibited twice in Mitchell’s home town of Chicago, first at the Arts Club of Chicago in an exhibition of Recent Paintings in 1984, and then at the Art Institute of Chicago where she earned both her BFA and MFA.
Executed over a decade after Mitchell’s relocation in Paris, Untitled is a resounding example of her uninhibited creative confidence during the height of her career after spending the initial decade of her career in New York City, where she was one of the leading female voices in the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement. From her earliest days as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, Mitchell focused her energy on the long-established genre of landscape, finding great success with her abstract reinterpretation of its entirety as an artistic subject. In 1967, Mitchell relocated to a two-acre estate in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris overlooking the Seine. The countryside presented Mitchell with a proximity to nature that filled her with inspiration. The home at Vétheuil was surrounded by an expansive garden in which Mitchell planted sunflowers and other vibrant flora. Undoubtedly, Mitchell was never more in step with her predecessors – Monet, Van Gogh, and Cézanne principal among them – and her full immersion in her surroundings brought an inimitable sense of joy to the paintings she executed between late 1967 and the mid-1970s.
Right: Jean Paul Riopelle, Untitled (Sans titre), 1965, oil on canvas, 65.5 diameter. © Jean Paul Riopelle Estate / SOCAN (2019). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
The format of the tondo for Untitled serves to enliven the impastoed surface, bringing out new and dynamic tensions as the circular form compresses and encircles the dancing ribbons of color, lending a primeval weight to the composition. While tondos are rare within Mitchell’s practice, Untitled being only the second one she completed after the first in the mid-1960s, the artist returned to this format consistently over the decades. The format of the tondo has loft rotos and can be traced throughout much of western art history, from the painters and sculptors of the Italian, Flemish and Dutch Renaissance, to Goya and Delacroix, all the way to Mitchell’s contemporaries including Sam Francis and of course Jean Paul Riopelle with whom Mitchell had a tumultuous relationship that ended just a few years after the present work was made in 1979.
A performative arena, contained within the orbital confines of the canvas where light, color, movement, and texture are choreographed, Untitled showcases Mitchell’s ability to create consistently stimulating abstract compositions using a variety of methods of paint application. The present work underscores Mitchell’s masterful use of the brush through her combination of broad strokes with more intricate passages as well as translucent veils of dripping paint. Areas of profound blacks ground the composition in the lower half as heavily impastoed burnt orange, deep mauve and mustard are layered over pale icy periwinkle. It is in the mesmerizing coalescence of these diverse applications that Untitled derives its ultimate painterly presence. Brushstrokes take on qualities that are calligraphic, with discretely varying textures as a result of the artist’s treatment of pigment, as swathes of paint are liberally flicked, thinned and blurred across the impressive surface of the present work. As with the most quintessential examples of Mitchell’s celebrated corpus, Untitled possesses a visual authority that summons the viewer to imagine the physicality of Mitchell’s creative process while experiencing the intoxicating expressiveness of its outcome. As the artist herself expressed, “I don’t set out to achieve a specific thing, perhaps to catch a motion or to catch a feeling. Call it layer painting, gestural painting, easel painting or whatever you want. I paint oil on canvas – without an easel. …I try to eliminate clichés, extraneous material. I try to make it exact. My painting is not an allegory or a story. It is more of a poem.” (the artist cited in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, California, 1996, p. 33)
