Joan Mitchell's intimately scaled Untitled is filled with intimations to the lush French landscape in which it was created. Mitchell painted this work in 1975, having fully settled in Vétheuil, the river village about 35 miles northwest of Paris that had previously inspired Claude Monet, since moving there eight years prior.
"If I could paint like Matisse,
I'd be in heaven."
– Joan Mitchell
The works she created there are permeated with an unprecedented degree of lyricism and chromatic exuberance; is as if Untitled breathes that very light and air, lushness and bloom, giving rise to the sensation of seeing the sky through a thicket of greenery or perhaps the reflections of nature on a rippling body water. The present work beautifully demonstrates how Mitchell’s compositions are never concrete representations, but associative, painterly approximations.
"I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me – and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed…”
- Joan Mitchell
