Having established herself as a formidable talent in the New York Abstract Expressionist scene of the 1950s, Joan Mitchell moved permanently to France in 1959. Settling in the 15^th arrondissement of Paris, where she shared a studio with her partner, the painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, Mitchell set to the task of earning a European reputation as an excellent painter in her own right—one that was not qualified by backhanded descriptors, like “American painter,” or “lady painter,” or dependent on her relationship with Riopelle.ⁱ While she had some solo exhibitions in Paris in her first few years in France, it wasn’t until her exhibition, Joan Mitchell: Ausstellung von Ölbildern, at the Swiss gallery-cum-auction house, Klipstein und Kornfeld, Bern, in October of 1962, that Mitchell truly arrived at the height of her powers.

 

Blueberry, c. 1962, was a featured work in this career-defining exhibition, later praised as “some of the most chaotic and brilliant paintings of her entire oeuvre.”ⁱⁱ As Jill Weinberg Adams explained, the success of this exhibition was “very, very important,” to Mitchell, as it was “an opportunity to show a larger, interrelated, and extraordinarily dynamic body of work in Europe with the support of a really established, highly regarded, historic organization.”ⁱⁱⁱ After the exhibition, Klipstein und Kornfeld held the works in storage for over twenty years, until renowned gallerist Xavier Fourcade retrieved them for a groundbreaking exhibition of Mitchell’s early 1960s work in New York in 1985.^iv

 

Selected works from Joan Mitchell: Ausstellung von Ölbildern, 1962

Blueberry exemplifies Mitchell’s painting practice in the early 1960s, and the formal innovations and emotional ferocity that brought her the respect of her international peers. A brilliant expanse of electric blue dominates the composition. Mitchell’s application of paint in this area is forcefully thick; the paint dried in frozen swirls of pigment that build in matte ridges of impasto. While the body of this Blueberry is rendered in Mitchell’s signature, determined horizontal brushstrokes, the edges of the form whisk off into waves, which dance like lightning in the upper reaches of the canvas. Mitchell skillfully balances the heavy, forceful blue with a light salmon pink. These peachy striations shine with ropey impasto—a nod, perhaps, to the palette knife applications of Riopelle; they string across the canvas alongside accents of ochre, lightening the areas of deep blue, dark umber, and slate grey.

 

10 rue Frémicourt

 

After years spent visiting Paris in temporary studios and short-term leases across the city, Mitchell finally found a studio of her own in 1959. The large loft at 10 rue Frémicourt, near the Eiffel Tower in the 15^th arrondissement, provided the physical space and stability Mitchell needed to establish her career in France. As Sarah Roberts reports in her analysis of this period in Mitchell’s career, Mitchell’s innovations of the early 1960s are directly dependent on her procurement of the space on rue Frémicourt. For the first time, Roberts explains, Mitchell had a Parisian studio that she had chosen for herself and arranged to her painting needs: “no more scraping paint off floors. No more rolling canvas after canvas to move from one temporary studio to another.”^v The rue Frémicourt studio had an abundance of wall space for tacking up unstretched work, as well as a movable wall, and ample storage for stacks of stretched canvases.^vi In such a space, Mitchell could work on multiple canvases at once, in the serial style of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Claude Monet, some of her greatest artistic inspirations.

 

Having a stable studio granted Mitchell the time, space, and freedom she needed to establish herself as an artist, independent of her New York reputation. Within a year of moving to 10 rue Frémicourt, Roberts writes, Mitchell would have her first solo show in Paris, and “let loose a series of fervent experiments, testing herself and the physical properties of her medium.”^vii Blueberry stands as a record of this period of experimentation; the work is representative of Mitchell’s desire to create in an idiom independent of her New York and Paris circles.

 

As the home of “the couple” in Paris, Mitchell and Riopelle’s residence at 10 rue Frémicourt quickly became a social center of the Parisian art scene.^viii And while Mitchell enjoyed “drinking, talking, and fighting” with her friends and peers—including Sam Francis, Samuel Beckett, and Alberto Giacometti, among countless others—her self-determination to establish herself as an artist on her own terms was of paramount importance.^ix Mitchell expressed disinterest in tachisme, and similarly watery, contemporary trends in late 1950s French abstraction; the dismissal of American Abstract Expressionism as passé by French critics was similarly concerning.^x Mitchell felt stuck between the French and American avant-garde: “In France they’ve always said my work is violent gestural painting,” she later explained. “In New York, they’ve said it’s decoration. On both sides, they say it’s female.”^xi

 

“Blue and pink and très tormenté”

 

Mitchell found a way out of her stylistic double bind through the very materiality of her chosen medium: oil paint. Rather than focusing on a theme, poem, or internal landscape to guide her abstractions, as she had done in the past, from 1960 to 1962, Mitchell let her materials take the lead. Her work became about paint itself, Roberts explains, its viscousness and tactility; “its body, its color, the way it moves, reacts and obeys or does not obey the artist’s direction.”^xii Blueberry is a case in point: Mitchell’s application of paint ranges from the thick impasto of the dominant blue section, to the flat-brushed umber and grey below, to the strings of salmon pigment, and the wisping waves and splashes of blue and ochre at the edges of the composition.

 

Such experimentation required a degree of physicality and athleticism, which in turn was dependent on the artist having enough space to make such work. 10 rue Frémicourt was perfect. Looking at the ropes of salmon paint, for example, one can imagine “the full-body sidearm throw required to create such long strings of paint and the wiry wrist action necessary to press bristles onto the surface, and then snap them free to discharge a spidery skein.”^xiii Blueberry is a veritable riot of color, slapped and squeezed and squirted straight from the tube, which risks collapse into a “chaotic, unsightly sludge,” like a child who mixes all of her paints together, only to make a muddy brown.^xiv But by keeping each pigment pure and unmixed, and through a masterful awareness of placement, proportion, impasto, and transparency, Mitchell succeeds in holding Blueberry on the right side of chaos.

 

“There is nothing more delectable than the ‘very violent and angry’ paintings that Joan Mitchell made at the start of the 1960s.”
—Michael Waldberg

 

However, to reduce Mitchell’s achievements of 1960-1962, as realized in Blueberry, to a material display of athleticism is to miss the emotional ferocity inherent to such a physical painting practice. For it is the emotion, the raw feeling that bubbles beneath Blueberry, that gives its thick and dripping surface its power. Mitchell herself described her paintings of the early 1960s as “very violent and angry,” and historians like Roberts have pointed out parallels to the pains of Mitchell’s personal life; namely, her intense relationship with Riopelle, her parents’ sicknesses, and the violence in Paris during the Algerian War of Independence.^xv Linda Nochlin, however, offers a psychological reading that is simultaneously more personal and archetypical, arguing, instead, that Mitchell paints with rage: the rage of a woman artist in a sexist society.

 

“The fact that Mitchell, though a woman, could take possession of her rage and, like a man, transform it into a rage to paint, was an extraordinarily difficult concept for a male-dominated art world to accept.”
—Linda Nochlin

 

Though not always explicitly acknowledged as such, the mid-century art world was a man’s world, and in order for a woman like Mitchell to succeed, she had to do so on men’s terms. As Nochlin explained, “If she did not want to be categorized as a woman painter, it was because she wanted to be a real painter. And, at that time, a real abstract painter was someone with balls and guts.”^xvi Mitchell was determined to prove that, at least metaphorically, she fit the profile.

 

In a manner that was both vulnerable and exceedingly daring, Mitchell harnessed her anger and rage—two stereotypically “unladylike” emotions—and channeled them in aesthetic terms into her art. In Mitchell’s paintings, “meaning and emotional intensity are produced structurally, as it were, by a whole series of oppositions,” Nochlin wrote—in the frission of blue and salmon in Blueberry, for instance, or the tension between areas of thick, viscous paint, and sparsely brushed spaces.^xvii

 

To Nochlin, and indeed, to Mitchell herself, rage became an aesthetic choice in her work of the early 1960s; and rather than being (self-)destructive, Mitchell’s rage was generative, artistic, inspiring—“What a wholesome emotion rage is—or can be!” Nochlin wrote.^xviii Mitchell, too, seems to have seen rage as a useful tool, writing to Francis in 1961 of her newest paintings, which were “blue and pink and très tormenté”—a description that, coincidentally, suits Blueberry exceedingly well.^xix By listing the emotional key of her work alongside its colors, Mitchell revealed her understanding that both color and emotion could set the tone of a painting—and that both were important tenets in her art practice.

 

 

ⁱ Éric de Chassey, “A Country of Her Own: Joan Mitchell and France, 1948-1967,” in Sarah Roberts and Katy Seigel, eds., Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., The Baltimore Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2020, p. 94.

ⁱⁱ Ken Okiishi, “Painting Paintings,” in Yilmaz Dziewior, ed., Joan Mitchell, Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings, exh. cat., Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2015, p. 46.

ⁱⁱⁱ Jill Weinberg Adams, in conversation with Robert Manley, May 2020, online.

^iv Ibid.

^v Sarah Roberts, “Frémicourt,” ibid., p. 97.

^vi Ibid.

^vii Ibid.

^viii Ibid., p. 99.

^ix Ibid.

^x De Chassey, ibid., pp. 92, 94.

^xi Joan Mitchell (1989), quoted ibid., p. 94.

^xii Roberts, ibid., p. 100.

^xiii Ibid.

^xiv Ibid.

^xv Mitchell, quoted in Linda Nochlin (2002), “A Rage to Paint: Joan Mitchell and the Issue of Femininity,” in Maura Reilly, ed., Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, 2015, online; Roberts, ibid.

^xvi Nochlin, ibid.

^xvii Ibid.

^xviii Ibid.

^xix Mitchell (1961), quoted Roberts, ibid., p. 100.