Joan Mitchell: One of the Great Ones
"She was operating from a place that existed before risk-free art, brand image art. She could afford to
take risks."
by John Perreault
Normally I like to meet artists. Although I am no longer sure they are always the most fascinating people in the world, they certainly are more interesting than most dealers, collectors, critics or curators or your average shoe clerk.
I remember being at a Betty Parsons birthday party for the then recently retired-from-the-Times art critic, the once powerful John Canaday. He had liked to boast that he didn’t talk to artists. He supposed, in a trivial formalist sort of way, that this made him more objective. But there he was, now that he no longer had to risk being compromised by what an artist said, having a good time talking to, of all people, Richard Tuttle.
I came away thinking that even if talking to artists might not have made his art criticism better---he was the worst, and not only because he single-handedly tried to stop Abstract Expressionism---at least the old fool might have had a better time of it.
It certainly cannot be said of me that I have never met an artist I didn’t like. I have met quite a few. Then again it all sort of gets tangled up with whether you like their work or not. But, to take a page out of the Canaday book, won’t the poor helpless, gullible and blind art critic be unfairly influenced by what the artist says?
Look at it this way: sometimes the words match the art and sometimes they don’t. When they do, you can learn a lot; when they don’t, you can also learn a lot. We do not expect that all artists---not even some of the best ones---are their own best art critics and curators.
On the whole, I consider myself lucky to have met Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson and other luminaries.. After reading the catalogue for the Joan Mitchell retrospective at the Whitney, I may be lucky never to have met her.
According to stories now told by critic Michael Brenson (Letters to the Editor, New York Times) and both Linda Nochlin and Jane Livingston (in the Whitney catalogue) she seems to have been mean, nasty, self-centered and usually either drunk or hung-over. On the other hand, poet Frank O'Hara seemed to have liked her, so she could not have been all bad.
I doubt that she was as bad as de Kooning when de Kooning was really bad. And although she probably had the strength (she was a champion figure skater as a teenager), she never threw Franz Kline through a barroom window like Pollock did, but perhaps the occasion never showed itself. She also seemed to be loyal to her friends. Certainly one of her best paintings is the quadriptych called Salut Tom that she painted upon the sudden death of Thomas Hess, long-time editor of Art News
Mitchell suffered from a number of handicaps, yet each one can also be shown to have been an advantage.
1. She was born both rich and what we might call culturally connected. In hometown Chicago, her father was an "eminent physician"; her mother co-editor of the esteemed Poetry magazine. The rich part is the handicap part: the art world used to be suspicious of artists from wealthy backgrounds. Didn’t family money give them an unfair advantage? Nowadays, with prices of lofts what they are, everyone knows that you have to have a trust fund even to begin or a rich husband or wife. But even in the '40s and '50s money helped. If you play it right, money buys freedom and, some think integrity. Or is it arrogance?
2. She was a woman. During the heyday of The Club and the birth of Abstract Expressionism, believe it or not, women were not really accepted very much as serious artists. Mitchell became one of the exceptions. I think it helped that at first, unlike Elaine De Kooning and Lee Krasner she was not married to another artist but to Barney Rosset, the founder of the now famous Grove Press. Grove Press and its magazine The Evergreen Review were the American venues for Thomas Becket and then eventually the Beats and Robbe-Grillet. There's that cultural connection again. But wait. Those were different times. Literature and art were linked, unlike now when art seems to look down on literature because there is little money to be made.
Was there an advantage to being a woman in a virtually all-male club? Perhaps, at the price of having to be one of the boys and at the same time work a little bit harder than her comrades, the second generation males, a certain visibility became her due. More interesting is the following: if you did not know the gender of the artist---Joan Miro is a man---would you be able to tell the art was by a woman? Is there anything womanly about the work? If you think women are by nature timid, look again. Or maternal. Or prone to delicacy. There is a certain delicacy to the work but this is not what hits you in the face. Abstract Phillip Guston's are more delicate. There is also equivocation but of a kind that is straight out of Cézanne or de Kooning.
3. She was of the dreaded Second Generation, which generally means second best. Why is this so? Innovation gets high marks; synthesis does not. At her best, she synthesized the innovations of de Kooning and Pollock. She has a weak moment when, living in France, she seems to think Hans Hofman has to be thrown into the mix. There must still be Cubism in French air. I am trying to think of a Second Generation artist of any School that outdid the break-through predecessors. I am sure my learned art historian friends will come to the rescue, but none come immediately to mind, not even in music or dance.
Now, of course, there are no immediate second generations. Art moves by conflict and oppositions. The second generation comes a generation later and uses a new name. Post-Pop yields to Neo-Pop, but without the name. Mitchell painted her work in a different world and even then she was stubborn: resistant to de Kooning's incorporation of pre-Pop imagery and the figure in general, resistant to acrylic, sometimes calling herself the last Abstract Expressionist. Being last is an advantage.
4. At a certain point she ran off to live in France. Her second husband Mike Goldberg was history and the French Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle was in tow, at least for awhile. The disadvantages of living in France for an American artist should even now be obvious. You are cut off, no matter how many art magazines you read or trips you make to New York. But it is not so much a matter of being cut off from your friends--friends are more than glad to visit and new friends can be made--you are out of the game. The feedback you get is from housekeepers, studio assistants and beholden guests. Issues become French issues or historical issues; masters to be absorbed, scores to be settled. The advantage: if you are difficult, as Mitchell surely was, distance can keep the artist out of the way of the art. If pressed, I could come up with a list of artists I know who would be better off far, far away.
I was looking forward to the Mitchell exhibition and I was not disappointed. There are several truly great moments when about 1953 she breaks free. There is nothing wrong with "Cross Section of A Bridge" or "Untitled"(both 1951) but they are too Arshille Gorky, too Cubist. With "Rose Cottage' of 1953 we are in a different world. This and the related works, in spite of the denser, crypto-Cubist, early-Mondrian centers, are Mitchells that look like Mitchells. The paint is all over the place and in all different ways---dripped, scraped, scumbled. She, more than Pollock or de Kooning, managed to confound color and texture.
In the best Mitchells, early or late, color is texture and vice versa. This is new in the world.Along with the so-called Abstract Impressionist paintings we also like the period of "Blue Tree and Calvin" in which a single boulder-like mass is the motif. But, I repeat, if only she had stopped looking at Hans Hofman. The much praised "La Grande Vallée" paintings are over-praised; to my eye they are clotted and airless. But she never lost her nerve, as witness and untitled diptych of 1992 in which two squiggly blasts of paintings are compared.
A full-page newspaper ad uses the tag: Raw material. Raw emotion. This sounds like the results of a focus group. It is more important to question the feminist rage thesis proposed by art historian Linda Nochlin in her catalogue essay. I think she is wrong. Nochlin seems stuck in the ‘50s when every drips was supposed to mean deep anxiety about the atomic bomb. Clearly Mitchell was a bad drunk. Why not leave it at that.
Certainly there are oppositions at work in Mitchell's paintings—sometimes a little too much Hofmanesque push and pull—but these are well considered. The supposed emotional meaning of Abstract Expressionism has long been debunked, by artists as well as critics. What else did Robert Rauchenberg's unholy "Factum I" and "Factum II" mean, one precisely duplicating the "spontaneity" of the other?
Furthermore, although there are battles going on these are formal ones. Mitchell's paintings compared to de Kooning's women paintings are downright serene. One should also remember, of course, that de Kooning thought his women were hilarious.
I am sorry to disappoint those trying to turn Mitchell into the embodiment of feminist rage, but the meanings of Mitchell's paintings are located in the paint; the main meaning is how each painting was made. That there are so many failures even in a well-selected retrospective such as this—prepare for failures—is a sign the Mitchell was willing to take risks. She was operating from a place that existed before risk-free art, brand image art. She could afford to take risks.
Here are some other ways to look at the exhibition: walk from end to end noticing how Mitchell uses (or does not use black). Notice that in every painting, except one, drip directions will tell you that what is now the bottom edge was the bottom edge in her studio. She did not usually rotate.
Find the exception. Find the painting where some of the drips run up the wall, so to speak. Look at the pre-multipanel works in terms of the location of the most painterly density: center, left or right. See how she plays vertical top-to-bottom drips against horizontal slashes. When no one is looking or in your mind’s eye move your hands, your arms, your body as she moved hers.
Finally, are all these paintings right side up? "Hemlock" of 1956, for instance, although in a vertical format has so many horizontal slashes that it might look just as good if the paintings were presented horizontally (it's, too landscapy that way though). Next, here is where a catalogue comes in handy: rotate all the images. Compare the printed images to the actual paintings. Some of the paintings look better in print, alas. Others only sing when seen full-sized, full-textured on a wall. Mitchell brings back the full glory of painting qua painting, paint qua paint.
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"Now, of course, there are no immediate second generations. Art moves by conflict and oppositions. The second generation comes a generation later and uses a new name."
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