| Summary: | Between the mid-1950s and the early '60s, the paintings of Joan Mitchell (1925-92) grew exponentially in sophistication and strength. In the summer of 1953 she began to paint outdoors in the Hamptons, developing an engagement with nature, but with a crucial distinction from her male counterparts in the abstract expressionist movement. Exhibition: Cheim & Read, New York, USA (06.09.-03.11.2018).
Between the mid-1950s and the early '60s, the paintings of Joan Mitchell (1925-92) grew exponentially in sophistication and strength. In the summer of 1953 she began to paint outdoors in the Hamptons, developing an engagement with nature, but with a crucial distinction from her male counterparts in the abstract expressionist movement.
"Cheim & Read is pleased to announce its next exhibition, Joan Mitchell: Paintings from the Middle of the Last Century, 1953–1962, which explores a crucial decade in the artist’s early career. It is the ninth solo show that the gallery has devoted to Mitchell’s paintings and drawings, and the nineteenth to include her work overall. [...] 'By any reckoning, it was an extraordinary, self-assured start' is how David Anfam, the co-curator of the acclaimed 2016 exhibition, Abstract Expressionism, at the Royal Academy in London, characterizes this period in his essay for the exhibition’s full-color catalogue. In the spring of 1953, at the age of 28, Mitchell was given her first solo show at Eleanor Ward’s legendary Stable Gallery. Two years later, she decamped to Paris for the summer, and soon began to divide her time between Paris and New York. The paintings she made during this time attest that Mitchell, who was decades younger than such influential Abstract Expressionists as Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Clyfford Still, achieved a singular sensibility very early in her career. As Anfam writes, 'Like Athena sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus, this self-styled "lady painter" had come abreast with her erstwhile peers' to such an extent that 'it might be no great exaggeration to regard Mitchell in these years as the foremost female American abstractionist (Lee Krasner’s finest hours lay ahead)' " --Exhibition website.
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