SFMOMA, Floor 4 · Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.

The first room off the fourth-floor landing holds three paintings by Joan Mitchell. The earliest is about six feet square: a cream ground with loops of teal, olive, and brown knotted together near the center. The second is more than nine feet tall, a column of white broken by an orange-yellow burst at the top left and a dark, dripping mass of blue and maroon at the right. The third is a triptych about fifteen and a half feet wide. Its strokes swing across the seams between three panels.

The three were painted in 1956, 1987, and 1989. Between the first and the other two, Mitchell moved from New York to France and settled in a village on the Seine. She went through a cancer diagnosis and two hip operations, and she outlived her parents, her closest poet friend, and her dealer.

SFMOMA’s audio stop for Harm’s Way places her in the usual frame. Doris Fisher calls Mitchell “very under-appreciated.” The commentary notes that she lived near Giverny, where Monet worked, and that her color and brushwork recall his Impressionism. That account explains Mitchell through a place and a predecessor. Mitchell explained herself differently, and her own explanation starts in Chicago.

1925–1942 — Chicago: Poetry and the Ice

Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago on February 12, 1925, the second of two daughters. Her father, James Herbert Mitchell, was a dermatologist who became president of the American Dermatological Association and drew as an amateur. Her mother, Marion Strobel, was a poet and an editor of Poetry, the Chicago magazine that had published early work by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The family was wealthy. Her maternal grandfather, the engineer Charles Louis Strobel, left her a large share of his estate when he died in 1936.

Poetry came first. In 1935, at ten, Mitchell published a poem titled “Autumn” in Poetry. She took Saturday classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the Francis W. Parker School, where Edward Gorey was a classmate.

Her other early discipline was figure skating. In 1941 she and her partner Bobby Specht won the Midwest junior pairs title. In 1942 she placed fourth in the junior women’s division of the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, then quit after an injury. A gallery owner later said she approached painting almost like a competitive sport. The scale of her late canvases, painted standing with full-arm strokes, fits that description.

Two things from this period run through the rest of her work. One is Lake Michigan, the flat water she grew up beside. The other is the idea, absorbed from her mother’s world, that a poem could carry a feeling without telling a story.

1942–1950 — Training: Smith, the Art Institute, Mexico, Paris

In 1942 Mitchell entered Smith College in Massachusetts as an English major. After two years she transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a scholarship. She spent the summer of 1944 at Ox-Bow, the school’s summer colony in Saugatuck, Michigan, and painted in Guanajuato, Mexico, in the summers of 1945 and 1946.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, circa 1943. Oil on canvas, 27 x 35 3/4 inches (68.58 x 90.805 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, circa 1945. Oil on canvas, 43 3/4 x 36 inches (111.125 x 91.44 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, circa 1945. Oil on canvas, 25 7/8 x 17 3/4 inches (65.723 x 45.085 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

The Art Institute’s training was traditional: drawing from life, figure painting, landscape. Mitchell’s student work was figurative and influenced by Cézanne and Van Gogh. She graduated in 1947. Her lithograph Tired Children won the school’s print prize that year.

She moved to New York in 1947 and lived with Barney Rosset, a schoolmate from Chicago, in Brooklyn. She went to one class at Hans Hofmann’s school, the most important teacher of abstract painting in New York. She later said she couldn’t understand a word he said, so she left, terrified.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, circa 1945. Oil on canvas, 44 x 36 inches (111.76 x 91.44 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, circa 1946. Oil on canvas, 43 1/2 x 34 inches (110.49 x 86.36 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1948. Oil on canvas, 45 3/8 x 34 3/4 inches (115.253 x 88.265 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

In 1948 a $2,000 travel fellowship from the Art Institute took her to France. She rented a studio on the rue Galande in Paris and traveled in Provence, Spain, and Italy. Her work became steadily more abstract. In 1949 she lived at a villa in Le Lavandou on the Mediterranean coast and married Rosset there on September 10. They returned to New York that year. She received her MFA from the Art Institute in 1950.

1950–1955 — New York: The Ninth Street Show

In 1950 Mitchell set up a studio in Greenwich Village, first on Eleventh Street and then on Ninth. That year she saw her first Willem de Kooning, at the Whitney Annual, and painted Figure and the City, her last painting with a recognizable human figure. From then on she painted abstractly.

Joan Mitchell, Figure and the City, 1950. Oil on canvas, 40 1/4 x 49 inches (102.235 x 124.46 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

She entered the downtown world of the New York School. She went to the Cedar Tavern and to the Club, the artists’ discussion group on Eighth Street. Her circle included de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston, whose room is the next one on this floor. In 1951 the Ninth Street Show, an exhibition organized by the Club and the dealer Leo Castelli in an empty storefront, included a large abstract painting by Mitchell. Kline and de Kooning championed her inclusion. She was one of a small number of women in it. That year she also helped Rosset start Grove Press, which went on to publish Samuel Beckett in the United States.

Joan Mitchell, Backyards, 1950. Oil on canvas, 29 3/8 x 38 inches (74.613 x 96.52 cm). Collection of Joan Mitchell Foundation. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Her first New York solo show opened at the New Gallery in 1952. That year she and Rosset divorced, and she moved to 60 St. Marks Place. In April 1953 she had her first solo show at the Stable Gallery, which represented her through the decade.

Critics placed her in the “second generation” of Abstract Expressionism, the painters who arrived after Pollock and de Kooning had established the style. The label made her a follower. She resisted it, and she resisted the movement’s founding claim that a painting recorded the artist’s inner self.

Her Method: “What It Leaves with Me”

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1952. Oil on canvas, 72 x 67 3/4 inches (182.88 x 172.085 cm). Collection of Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, Geneva, Switzerland. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Gestural abstraction is painting in which the visible record of the brush’s movement carries the work, rather than a depicted object. Mitchell used it to a different end than the painters she was grouped with. They described their canvases as arenas for the self. She described hers as memories of places and of what she felt in them.

She stated this repeatedly. “I could certainly never mirror nature,” she said. “I would more like to paint what it leaves with me.” In 1967 she put it as a method: “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed.” In a film made late in her life she said her paintings “repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields,” and that a painting was “more like a poem.”

Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955. Oil on linen, 80 x 80 inches (203.2 x 203.2 cm). Collection of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

In 1974 she gave the curator Marcia Tucker a list of sources: “Music, poems, landscape, and dogs make me want to paint... And painting is what allows me to survive.”

The method had practical consequences. She did not paint outdoors or from sketches made on site. She often worked at night, under artificial light, after looking at the canvases during the day from a distance. Her paintings were built on white or pale grounds that she left visible, so the ground worked as light and air around the strokes. She used the triptych and diptych formats for her largest works from the 1950s on, which let her make paintings wider than one stretcher allowed and let the eye read them panel by panel or as one field.

Joan Mitchell, To the Harbormaster, 1957. Oil on canvas, 76 x 118 1/8 inches (193 x 300.1 cm). Private Collection. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

The poetry connection was direct. Frank O’Hara was a close friend. She titled To the Harbormaster (1957) after his poem, and in 1960 she collaborated with John Ashbery on a book of his poems.

1955–1956 — Two Cities: Marie Stadler Artichaud

In 1955 Mitchell went to Paris. There she met the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, and the two began a relationship that lasted until 1979. They kept separate studios and households but ate together almost every day. The same year she met Samuel Beckett, who remained a close friend. By 1956 she had a studio on the rue Daguerre in the 14th arrondissement, where a LIFE photographer, Loomis Dean, photographed her. She kept her New York studio and moved between the two cities until 1959.

Joan Mitchell, Hemlock, 1956. Oil on canvas, 91 x 80 inches (231.1 x 203.2 cm). Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

1956 was the year of Hemlock, now at the Whitney, often called her breakthrough painting: dark green and black strokes hanging on white like a snow-laden tree.

Joan Mitchell, Marie Stadler Artichaud, 1956

Marie Stadler Artichaud is from the same year. It is oil on canvas, 67½ by 72 inches. On a cream ground, lines of teal, turquoise, blue, olive, gray, and brown loop and cross. Some are thin and fast, like handwriting. Others are thick and opaque. They knot most densely in the upper half, and darker greens and blues gather near the lower center. Toward the edges the color thins to washes and the ground shows through. The signature “J. Mitchell” is at the lower right.

The painting is organized around a center. The strokes cluster in the middle and leave the edges open, so the knot of color seems suspended on the white instead of filling the canvas from edge to edge. This is the structure of her mid-1950s work. It differs from Pollock’s all-over drip paintings, which spread evenly to the edges. Mitchell kept a figure-and-ground relationship even after she gave up the figure.

The title pairs a name with a French word. Artichaut is French for artichoke, and Mitchell’s spelling ends in -aud. SFMOMA’s records do not identify Marie Stadler. A Paris gallery run by the dealer Rodolphe Stadler opened on the rue de Sèvres in 1955, the year Mitchell arrived, and promoted the gestural painting then called art autre. No source found for this post connects the title to that gallery or to anyone in it. Mitchell often took titles from people, places, and phrases in her life and did not explain them.

1959–1983 — France

In 1959 Mitchell settled in Paris, sharing a studio with Riopelle at 10 rue Frémicourt. She showed in Paris, Milan, and Bern, and the Museum of Modern Art bought her Ladybug (1957) in 1961.

Joan Mitchell, Ladybug, 1957. Oil on canvas, 77 7/8 x 108 inches (197.8 x 274.3 cm). Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Between 1963 and 1966 three losses came in quick succession. Her father died in 1963. Her mother died on March 14, 1966, and Frank O’Hara was killed in an accident on Fire Island on July 25 of the same year.

In 1967, with money from her mother’s estate, she bought La Tour, a two-acre property above the Seine at Vétheuil, northwest of Paris. Monet had lived in the village from 1878 to 1881, and a cottage on the estate is associated with his time there. She moved there permanently in 1968 and worked there for the rest of her life, in a studio large enough for the multi-panel paintings that became her main format.

This is the basis for the Monet comparison. Mitchell’s view over the Seine, with its fields, trees, and changing light, became a constant source. But her stated method was memory, not observation. The Vétheuil paintings carry the river and gardens the way her earlier work carried Lake Michigan, as feelings recalled in the studio.

Her reputation grew in the 1970s. The Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse gave her a first museum survey in 1972, and the Whitney showed her in 1974. Her relationship with Riopelle ended in 1979. In 1983 she began the Grande Vallée series, twenty-one large paintings based on a valley in Brittany that a friend, Gisèle Barreau, had described from her childhood. Mitchell had never seen the valley. The series is the clearest case of her method: landscapes painted entirely from someone else’s remembered feeling.

1984–1987 — Illness: Harm’s Way

In 1984 Mitchell was diagnosed with advanced oral cancer. Surgeons recommended removing her jaw. She sought a second opinion from the radiation oncologist Jean-Pierre Bataini and was treated with radiation instead. The treatment succeeded, but it left part of the jawbone dead. In November 1984 she began psychoanalysis with Christiane Rousseaux-Mosettig. Her biographers record anxiety and depression in this period.

In December 1985 she had a hip replacement at the Hôpital Cochin in Paris. It went badly. While recovering at a clinic in Louveciennes, she made watercolors at a small easel, a format she had rarely used.

Xavier Fourcade had been her dealer in New York since the 1970s. A photograph from 1987 shows the two talking in her Vétheuil studio, the windows covered with canvas. He died on April 28, 1987. Afterward she painted the group known as the Chord paintings.

Joan Mitchell, Harm's Way, 1987. Oil on canvas, 111 x 79 3/4 inches (281.9 x 202.6 cm). Private Collection. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Harm’s Way is from 1987. It is oil on canvas, 111 by 79¼ inches. The ground is white. A bright yellow-orange cloud with pale pink beneath it opens at the upper left. At the upper right is a heavy block of dark green with drips running down. A band of interlaced cobalt, ultramarine, teal, and green runs across the middle. To the right of center is the darkest passage in the painting, a mottled mass of deep blue, maroon, and reddish brown, with flashes of orange and paint left to drip and pool. Near the bottom the strokes thin into translucent green and yellow washes.

The title is an English idiom for danger. The painting’s date places it in the year of Fourcade’s death and three years after the diagnosis. The record does not show that it refers to either event, and Mitchell did not explain her titles.

Set beside Marie Stadler Artichaud, the change is in the structure. In 1956 the strokes gather in the center and the ground surrounds them. In 1987 the color is pushed into the corners: the yellow and green take the two upper corners, and the darkest mass presses toward the right edge. The white is no longer a field around the painting. It shows through gaps between strokes.

1988–1989 — Retrospective: Bracket

In 1988 the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell opened The Paintings of Joan Mitchell: Thirty-Six Years of Natural Expressionism, her first full retrospective. It traveled to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, and to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art through 1989. Its catalogue, edited by Judith Bernstock, was the first full monograph on her work. That year she became the first artist to receive the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, and France named her a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.

In 1989 she had a second hip operation. Afterward she leased a studio on the rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse and worked in pastel. She received France’s Grand Prix National de Peinture. In October she opened her first solo show at Robert Miller Gallery in New York

Joan Mitchell, Bracket, 1989. Oil on canvas, 102 1/2 x 181 7/8 inches (260.35 x 461.963 cm). Collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California. © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Bracket is from 1989. It is oil on canvas in three joined panels, about nine feet high and fifteen and a half feet wide. The center panel is the widest. The ground is largely white. Cobalt and ultramarine fill the upper half of the center panel and spill into the right one. Green arcs move through the blues. Orange and golden yellow burst near the upper left and upper right corners, nearly mirroring each other across the canvas. In the lower third the strokes turn angular, in browns and maroons. Drips run down from the blue. Several strokes cross the seams between panels, so the triptych reads as one field.

A bracket, in typography, is a mark that encloses text from both sides. The two orange bursts on the outer panels work this way, enclosing the blue between them. Whether Mitchell meant the title that literally is not recorded.

SFMOMA pairs Bracket with two of her statements. One is about her studio: “The solitude that I find in my studio is one of plenitude. I am enough for myself. I live fully there.” The other is a memory from 1986, of a view through a window: “I saw two fir trees in a park, and the grey sky, and the beautiful grey rain, and I was so happy.” The painting does not depict fir trees or rain. It is the kind of feeling she said she painted from.

October 1992

In October 1992 Mitchell flew to New York to see the Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She had once said that if she could paint like Matisse, she would be in heaven. A doctor in New York diagnosed advanced lung cancer. She flew back to Paris on October 22, went briefly to Vétheuil, and entered the American Hospital of Paris. She died there on the morning of October 30. She was sixty-six.

The Room

The three Mitchells share their room with two shaped canvases by Elizabeth Murray, painted in New York in 1987 and 1988, the same years as Harm’s Way and Bracket. Murray was fifteen years younger. Both painters had been trained in figurative traditions and turned them into something else. Mitchell turned them into abstraction drawn from memory. Murray, in the next post, kept domestic objects and broke the canvas around them.

In date order, Mitchell’s three paintings track where she placed the paint. In 1956 the strokes gather in the center of an open field. In 1987 they press into the corners. In 1989 they span three panels and cross the seams. The audio guide explains her through Monet’s village. Her own account, consistent from the 1950s to the end, was Lake Michigan, poems, dogs, and the feelings that places left with her. 🌁

Timeline — Joan Mitchell

• February 12, 1925 — Born in Chicago to James Herbert Mitchell and Marion Strobel.

• 1935 — Poem “Autumn” published in Poetry.

• 1941–1942 — Midwest junior pairs skating title; fourth in the U.S. junior women’s championship.

• 1942 — Enters Smith College as an English major.

• 1944 — Transfers to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; summer at Ox-Bow.

• 1945–1946 — Summers painting in Guanajuato, Mexico.

• 1947 — BFA, School of the Art Institute; moves to New York; one class with Hans Hofmann.

• 1948 — Travel fellowship to France; studio on the rue Galande, Paris.

• September 10, 1949 — Marries Barney Rosset at Le Lavandou.

• 1950 — MFA; studio in Greenwich Village; Figure and the City, her last figurative painting.

• 1951 — Ninth Street Show.

• 1952 — First New York solo show, New Gallery; divorces Rosset.

• April 1953 — First Stable Gallery show.

• 1955 — Meets Jean-Paul Riopelle and Samuel Beckett in Paris.

• 1956 — Studio on the rue Daguerre; paints Hemlock and Marie Stadler Artichaud.

• 1959 — Settles in Paris, rue Frémicourt.

• 1963 — Father dies.

• 1966 — Mother dies March 14; Frank O’Hara dies July 25.

• 1967 — Buys La Tour at Vétheuil.

• 1972 — First museum survey, Everson Museum of Art.

• 1974 — Whitney exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker.

• 1979 — Relationship with Riopelle ends.

• 1983 — Begins the Grande Vallée series.

• 1984 — Diagnosed with oral cancer; radiation treatment; begins psychoanalysis.

• December 1985 — Hip replacement.

• April 28, 1987 — Xavier Fourcade dies; paints Harm’s Way.

• 1988–1989 — Retrospective travels to five venues, including San Francisco.

• 1989 — Second hip operation; Grand Prix National de Peinture; first Robert Miller Gallery show; paints Bracket.

• October 30, 1992 — Dies in Paris.

• April 18, 2026 — The three paintings hang in Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.